Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/694

678 altered. The man who makes sweets does not just make them and do nothing to induce the public to buy. No; first he puts them up in all sorts of tempting boxes or packages, then he pushes the sale in various ways. The men who make beers, brandies, etc., not only do this, but they go further, they provide all kinds of places where they shall be taken, they provide the gin palace with all its attractions of club rooms, billiards, daily papers, besides plenty of pretty girls to wait on their customers. Why should we not have fruit palaces where, at reasonable prices, people could get the choicest fruit at any hour of the day?

Eve is said to have seen that fruit was good for food. Every generation since has indorsed her opinion, and now perhaps more than ever before the world is waking up to see how good a food it really is. Good ripe fruits contain a large amount of sugar in a very easily digestible form. This sugar forms a light nourishment, which, in conjunction with bread, rice, etc., form a food especially suitable for these warm colonies; and when eaten with, say, milk or milk and eggs, the whole forms the most perfect and easily digestible food imaginable. For stomachs capable of digesting it fruit eaten with pastry forms a very perfect nourishment, but I prefer my cooked fruit covered with rice and milk or custard. I received a book lately written by a medical man advising people to live entirely on fruits and nuts. I am not prepared to go so far—by the way, he allowed some meat to be taken with it—for, although I look upon fruit as an excellent food, yet I look upon it more as a necessary adjunct than as a perfect food of itself. Why for ages have people eaten apple sauce with their roast goose and sucking pig? Simply because the acids and pectones in the fruit assist in digesting the fats so abundant in this kind of food. For the same reason at the end of a heavy dinner we eat our cooked fruits, and when we want their digestive action even more developed we take them after dinner in their natural, uncooked state as dessert. In the past ages instinct has taught men to do this; to-day science tells them why they did it, and this same science tell us that fruit should be eaten as an aid to digestion of other foods much more than it is now. Cultivated fruits such as apples, pears, cherries, strawberries, grapes, etc., contain on analysis very similar proportions of the same ingredients, which are about eight per cent of grape sugar, three per cent of pectones, one per cent of malic and other acids, and one per cent of flesh-forming albuminoids, with over eighty per cent of water. Digestion depends upon the action of pepsin in the stomach upon the food, which is greatly aided by the acids of the stomach. Fats are digested by these acids and the bile from