"It is ill-chosen," is one charge against home-cooking. What governs our choice? Why does a German eat decaying cabbage and mite-infested cheese, an American revel in fat-soaked steak and griddle-cakes, a Frenchman disguise questionable meats with subtly-blended spices, and so on, through the tastes of all the nations and localities? It is environment and heredity that governs us--that's all. It is not knowledge, not culture and experience, not an enlightened taste, or the real choice of a trained mind capable of choosing. A child is fed by his mother, who transmits remote ancestral customs, unchanged by time. Children are hungry and like to eat. The young stomach is adapted to its food supply; it grows accustomed to it and "likes" it,--and the man continues to demand the doughnuts, the sauerkraut, the saleratus biscuit, which he "likes." One ghastly exception should be taken to this smooth statement. I have said that "the young stomach is adapted to its food supply." Alas, alas! This is true of those who survive; but think of the buried babies,--of the dear, dead children, of the "diseases incidental to childhood,"--and question if some part of that awful death-list is not due to our criminal ignorance of what is proper food! There is no knowledge, save the filtering down of ancient customs and what the private cook can pick up from house to house; no experience, save that gained by practising on one's own family or the family of one's employer--and I never heard of either wife or servant gathering statistics as to who lived and who died under her cooking--no special training; and no room or time or means to learn! It would be a miracle if all should survive. The ignorance which keeps us so ill-fed _is an essential condition of home-cooking_. If we had only home-shoe-making, or home-doctoring, or home-tailoring--barbering--what you please--we should show the same wide-spread ignorance and lack of taste. What we have learned in cooking comes from the advance of that great branch of human industry in its free social field, and that advance has reacted to some degree on the immovable home. Next consider self-control, the lack of which is so large a factor in our food diseases. We have attained some refinement of feeling in painting, music, and other arts; why are we still so frankly barbaric in our attitude toward food? Why does modern man, civilised, educated, cultured, still keep his body in a loathsome condition, still suffer, weaken, and die, from foul food habits? It is not alone the huge evil of intemperance in drink, or simple gluttony; but the common habits of our young girls, serenely indulging in unlimited candy, with its attendant internal consequences; or of our cultured women, providing at their entertainments a gross accumulation of unwholesome delicacies, with scarcely more discrimination than was shown by Heliogabalus. We eat what we like, and our liking is most crude and low.