With all this time, labour, and expense given to the feeding of humanity, what are the results? How are we educated in knowledge and taste as to right eating? What are our general food habits? To these questions it may be promptly answered that no other animal is so depraved in its feeding habits as man; no other animal has so many diseases of the alimentary system. The dog ranks next to us in diseases, and shares our home-cooking. The hog, which we most highly recommend, is "corn-fed," not reared on our remnants of the table. The long and arduous labours of public-spirited men have lifted our standards of living in many ways. Public sanitation, beginning outside and slowly driven in on the reluctant home, has lowered our death rate in the great filth-diseases which used to decimate the world. But the food diseases are not lessened. Wrong eating and wrong drinking are responsible for an enormous proportion of our diseases and our crimes, to say nothing of the still larger average of unhealthiness and unhappiness in which we live. Can we get at the causes of this department of human trouble? and, when found, do they bear any relation to our beloved custom of home-cooking and home-eating? We can--and they do. The trouble springs from two main features: bad food--insufficient, oversufficient, ill-chosen, or ill-prepared; and our own ignorance and lack of self-control. Consider the bad food first. Food is produced all over the earth, passes through many hands, and is finally selected by the housewife. She is not a trained expert, and can never be while she confines herself to serving one house. She does not handle quantities sufficient or cater for consumers enough to gain large knowledge of her business. She is, in nine cases out of ten, limited financially in her buying power. These conditions make the food market particularly open to adulteration, and to the offering of inferior materials. The individual housewife cannot herself discriminate in all the subtleties of adulterated food, nor has she the time or the means to secure expert tests of her supplies. Moreover, her separate purchasing power is so small that it cannot intimidate the seller; he has ignorance and a small purse to deal with, and he deals with them accordingly.