How to Live: Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern ScienceFisher, Irving
Science
How to Live: Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science
Fisher, Irving
Hygiene
Almost all can allow enough time for meals to eat slowly. Coarse and raw
foods are always to be had and are usually cheaper than the
conventional soft, concentrated cooked foods. In fact, meat, eggs, and
like foods are among the most expensive and the least desirable. If we
compare the cost of flour and of the other cheapest food materials, with
the cost of oysters, one of the dearest, we find that the latter is
fifty times as expensive as the former for the same food value. This
takes no account, of course, of the expenses involved in cooking either
of them. It has been proved by actual experience that one can live in
the best of health on food costing as low as ten cents a day, exclusive
of the labor of preparing, cooking and serving. Mrs. Richards, in her
"Cost of Food," says that this is possible anywhere in America within
fifty miles of a railroad. The only real objection to living on this
minimum expense is the lack of variety. The following is a brief list of
foods in ascending order of cost per 100 calories of food value, the
cheapest being at the beginning and the dearest at the end: glucose,
corn-meal, wheat-flour, oatmeal, cane-sugar, salt pork, rice, wheat
bread, oleomargarine, beans, peas, potatoes, butter, milk, cheese,
beef-stew, ham, mutton-chops, beef, eggs, and oysters. If the foods in
this list be looked up in the table given in the SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES for
their protein, fat, and carbohydrate contents, it will be seen that a
well-balanced ration is possible without the use of expensive foods. In
fact, among the cheap foods are some consisting mostly of protein, some
consisting mostly of fat, and some consisting mostly of carbohydrate.
For instance, cheap sources of protein are skim milk, beans, cheese, and
peanuts. Cheap sources of fat are oleomargarine and cottonseed-oil.
Cheap sources of carbohydrate, i.e., starch and sugar, are bread,
bananas, potatoes, glucose, and even ordinary sugar. If a diet, selected
for cheapness, is not at first well balanced, a judicious admixture of
one or more of the foods just mentioned, will restore equilibrium. A
cheap bulky food is cabbage.
[Sidenote: Repaid Cost]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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