Because it is easier, housewives sometimes fall into the way of dealing at just one or two shops. This is a good thing to do usually, a poor one to do invariably. To go occasionally to other shops gives one the chance to find better things and pleasanter conditions; it also makes your regular shopkeeper more anxious to please if he knows you go elsewhere when you are not pleased. An advantage in cities of going here and there, is that one can often take advantage of a difference in prices in different localities. This must be done, of course, with judgment; otherwise one makes oneself a fit subject for one of those jokes about women who save two cents on a head of lettuce and spend ten in carfare going to get it. Women who take the same sort of trouble about marketing as they do about buying their clothes usually succeed well with it. It is really not a difficult form of shopping and interest in it grows as one learns. XII COOKING OUR Brother the Sun gets up every morning to cook, cooks all day, and seems to enjoy cooking. The cooking processes which we engage in are many of them imitations of his. When we use water and heat to soften and break up starch cells, it is only a copy of the process by which the sun makes the dry starch laid up in a seed in the damp earth into food for the first little leaves of a plant. Long before we ever thought of cooking, the sun was changing starch into sugar by heating apples and pears and peaches through and through every day. One might even venture to say that he had warmed milk for all the mammal babies ever since the first one was born. Every once in a while, people appear who try to persuade us to "go back to nature" and eat our food uncooked, not realizing that they are asking us, not to go back to nature, but to our own first ignorance of what nature is doing. [Illustration: Photograph by Helen W. Cooke Cooking] The dictionary says that "to cook" is "to prepare food by subjecting it to heat"; a brief and simple definition including some thousands of processes ranging from the universal cooking done by the sun to that performed by an accomplished French chef. The object of cooking is to make food more digestible and more attractive. For changes occur in food when it is subjected to heat which make it more easily used by the body and which make it more agreeable in flavour--more "appetizing." An incidental but important benefit from cooking is that great heat kills the animal organisms which food sometimes contains. 1. THE PROCESSES The most usual processes of cooking are broiling, boiling, stewing, braising, frying, roasting and baking.