For ages the Japanese peasants have lived on rice, with a little dried fish. Quite recently there began to spread throughout Japan a mysterious disease known as beri-beri. It was especially prevalent in the army, and so the scientists of Japan set out to discover the cause, and it proved to be the modern practice of polishing rice, which takes off the outer coating of the grain. Rice is one of the most wholesome of foods, if it is eaten in the natural state; but in order to get it in that state in this country, you have to find a special food store of the health cranks, and have to pay a special price for it. You have to pay a higher price for whole wheat bread--because ninety-nine people out of a hundred are ignorant, and insist upon having their foodstuffs pretty to look at! Probably you have read sea stories, and know of the horrors of scurvy. Scurvy and beri-beri are similar diseases, with a similar cause. The men on the old sailing ships used to have to live on white biscuit and salt meat, and they always knew that to recover from their gnawing illness, they must get to port and get fresh vegetables and fruits, especially onions and lemons, which contain the vitamines as well as the salts. But you will see the modern housewife going into the grocery store, and surveying the shelves of "package" goods, and in her ignorance picking out the scurvy-making products, and frequently paying for them a much higher price than for the health-making ones! Then, when she has got her white flour, and her cane sugar, and her lard, she will take it home, and mix it up, and put it in the frying pan, and serve it hot to her husband and children. Nature has so constituted her husband and children that they digest starch before they digest fat; that is to say, the starch is digested mainly in the stomach, while the fat is digested mainly after the food has been passed on into the small intestine. But by frying the starch before it is eaten, the housewife carefully takes each grain of the starch and protects it with a little covering of fat. Thus the digestive juices of the stomach cannot get at the starch, and the starch goes down into the small intestine a good part undigested. If some evil spirit, wishing to make trouble for the human organism, had charge of the laying out of our diet, he could hardly devise anything worse than that. And yet it would be no exaggeration to say that the average American, especially the average farmer, eats out of a frying-pan. If his potatoes have to be warmed over, they go into the frying-pan; his precious batter-cakes and doughnuts are cooked in a frying-pan, and all his precious hot breads are mixed with lard. If it were not for the fact that you cannot broil a beefsteak over a modern gas range, I would tell you that the first step toward health for the average American would be to throw the frying-pan out of the window, and to throw the cook-book after it.