Science in the Kitchen: A Scientific Treatise On Food Substances and Their Dietetic Properties, Together with a Practical Explanation of the Principles of Healthful Cookery, and a Large Number of Original, Palatable, and Wholesome RecipesKellogg, E. E. (Ella Ervilla)
Science
Science in the Kitchen: A Scientific Treatise On Food Substances and Their Dietetic Properties, Together with a Practical Explanation of the Principles of Healthful Cookery, and a Large Number of Original, Palatable, and Wholesome Recipes
Kellogg, E. E. (Ella Ervilla)
Cooking, American; Diet; Vegetarianism
A more serious reason why high seasonings leads to intemperance, is in
the perversion of the use of the sense of taste. Certain senses are
given us to add to our pleasure as well as for the practical, almost
indispensable, use they are to us. For instance, the sense of sight is
not only useful, but enables us to drink in beauty, if among beautiful
surroundings, without doing us any harm. The same of music and other
harmonics which may come to us through the sense of hearing. But the
sense of taste and was given us to distinguish between wholesome and
unwholesome foods, and cannot be used for merely sensuous gratification,
without debasing and making of it a gross thing. An education which
demands special enjoyment or pleasure through the sense of taste, is
wholly artificial; it is coming down to the animal plane, or below it
rather; for the instinct of the brute creation teaches it merely to eat
to live.
Yet how wide-spread is this habit of sensuous gratification through the
sense of taste! If one calls upon a neighbor, he is at once offered
refreshments of some kind, as though the greatest blessing of life came
from indulging the appetite. This evil is largely due to wrong
education, which begins with childhood. When Johnnie sits down to the
table, the mother says, "Johnnie, what would you like?" instead of
putting plain, wholesome food before the child, and taking it as a
matter of course that he will eat it and be satisfied. The child grows
to think that he must have what he likes, whether it is good for him or
not. It is not strange that an appetite thus pampered in childhood
becomes uncontrollable at maturity; for the step from gormandizing to
intoxication is much shorter than most people imagine. The natural,
unperverted taste of a child will lead him to eat that which is good for
him. But how can we expect the children to reform when the parents
continually set them bad examples in the matter of eating and drinking?
The cultivation of a taste for spices is a degradation of the sense of
taste. Nature never designed that pleasure should be divorced from use.
The effects of gratifying the sense of taste differ materially from
those of gratifying the higher senses of sight and hearing. What we see
is gone; nothing remains but the memory, and the same is true of the
sweetest sounds which may reach us through the ears. But what we taste
is taken into the stomach and what has thus given us brief pleasure
through the gratification of the palate, must make work in the
alimentary canal for fourteen hours before it is disposed of.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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