Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/186

182 What would the liberty-loving American think had he to subsist on the restricted fare of the Chinaman as described by Mr. Chester Holcombe in "The Real Chinaman."

Their daily food consists of rice steamed, cabbage boiled in an unnecessarily large amount of water, and, for a relish, a few bits of raw turnip, pickled in a strong brine. When disposed to be very extravagant and reckless of expense, they buy a cash worth of dried watermelon seeds, and munch them as dessert. . . . The description answers with entire accuracy for the food consumption of the great masses of the Chinese people—not for the beggars or the very poor, but for the common classes of industrious workingmen and their families, whether in the great cities or in the rural districts. . . . The only luxuries of which they dream are an ounce or two of meat at very rare intervals with their invariable food of rice and cabbage, and the necessary tea and tobacco.

Or would the fare of India please better? Colonel Sir Thomas H. Holditch tells us:

Probably three fourths of the entire population live on the grain of the millets, or various kinds of pulse. In lower Bengal, and in parts of Madras and Bombay, in Burma and Ceylon, rice is the staple food of the people,. . . elsewhere it is reserved for the consumption of the wealthy.

Even in Greece the food supply is much restricted, for we read in the Consular Report on Industrial Conditions by Horton, 1908:

At night the family dines on a few cents worth of rice, boiled together with wild greens and olive oil, and bread, or wild greens boiled in olive oil and eaten with bread or some similar inexpensive dish. Meat is eaten by the laboring classes as a general thing three times a year, Christmas, Easter and on the so-called "Birth of the Virgin." Such a family as I am describing, the average laboring man's family of Greece, rarely if ever see such things as butter, eggs and milk.

The corn crop alone of the United States in 1912 was sufficient to supply nourishment for two hundred and thirty million people living on the standard maintained by the working class in China, India and some other countries. The American, however, in general has never appeared to relish corn as a direct article of food. A prejudice has prevailed that corn was unfit for human food and useful only in the barn and stable for their less discriminating occupants. The reports of government experts to the effect that corn is as digestible and nutritious as wheat have apparently made few converts to the greater use of corn. But we shall learn to eat more corn, not because we are told of its nourishing qualities, but because it will be prepared in an attractive form and because it will be cheap.

Machinery has been perfected for the milling of wheat so that the digestible portions are separated from the indigestible and a superior human food prepared. Wheat flour stands supreme among the cereal flours and it is likely to maintain this position, still it is undoubtedly in the development of industrial processes that we shall find the solution