No Animal Food; and Nutrition and Diet; with Vegetable RecipesWheldon, Rupert H.
Science
No Animal Food; and Nutrition and Diet; with Vegetable Recipes
Wheldon, Rupert H.
Diet; Vegetarian cooking; Vegetarianism
Of nuts there are twelve varieties, sold either shelled, ground, or in
shell. Many of these nuts are also mechanically prepared, and in some
cases combined, and made into butters, nut-meats, lard, suet, oil, etc.
The varieties of nut-butters are many, and the various combinations of
nuts and vegetables making potted savouries, add to a long list of
highly nutritious and palatable nut-foods. There are the pulses dried
and entire, or ground into flour, such as pea-, bean-, and lentil-flour.
There are the cereals, barley, corn, oats, rice, rye, wheat, etc., from
which the number of preparations made such as breakfast foods, bread,
biscuits, cakes, pastries, etc., is legion. (One firm advertises
twenty-three varieties of prepared breakfast foods made from cereals.)
Then there are the fruits, fresh, canned, and preserved, about
twenty-five varieties; green vegetables, fresh and canned, about
twenty-one varieties; and roots, about eleven varieties.
The difficulty is not that there is insufficient variety, but that the
variety is so large that there is danger of being tempted beyond the
limits dictated by the needs of the body. When, having had sufficient
to eat, there yet remain many highly palatable dishes untasted, one is
sometimes apt to gratify sense at the expense of health and
good-breeding, to say nothing of economy. Simplicity and purity in food
are essential to physical health as simplicity and purity in art are
essential to moral and intellectual progress. 'I may say,' says Dr.
Haig, 'that simple food of not more than two or three kinds at one meal
is another secret of health; and if this seems harsh to those whose day
is at present divided between anticipating their food and eating, I must
ask them to consider whether such a life is not the acme of selfish
shortsightedness. In case they should ever be at a loss what to do with
the time and money thus saved from feasting, I would point on the one
hand to the mass of unrelieved ignorance, sorrow, and suffering, and on
the other to the doors of literature and art, which stand open to those
fortunate enough to have time to enter them; and from none of these need
any turn aside for want of new Kingdoms to conquer.'
This question of feeding may, by superficial thinkers, be looked upon as
unimportant; yet it should not be forgotten that diet has much more to
do with health than is commonly realized, and health is intimately
connected with mental attitude, and oftentimes is at the foundation of
religious and moral development. 'Hypochondriacal crotchets' are often
the product of dyspepsia, and valetudinarianism and pessimism are not
unrarely found together. 'Alas,' says Carlyle, 'what is the loftiest
flight of genius, the finest frenzy that ever for moments united Heaven
with Earth, to the perennial never-failing joys of a digestive apparatus
thoroughly eupeptic?'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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