“Arrowroot, cornflour, and most of those prepared foods are more deceitful than the washed flesh of the French academicians. Stewed fruits, as made by some cooks, are also guilty of the wash. Even porridge, haricot beans, pease, etc., are by some cooks soaked when raw (this water being thrown away), and thus much depleted.” After simple washing, all vegetables, including beans and pease, if soaked at all, should be boiled in the water in which they are soaked; and, finally, the water from which the cooked vegetables are withdrawn, should be used as “soup stock” thickened with bread, rice, or sliced vegetables, and seasoned with meat, if meat is used at all. Containing as it does a large percentage of the salts from the vegetables, this water supplies the necessary “seasoning” far better than artificial salt. Turnips, instead of being sliced before boiling, should be boiled whole. Onions are every way better boiled before peeling. At first, the taste, accustomed to the flavor (!) of depleted vegetables,——or rather to the condiments with which they are prepared, has to be educated to the real flavor of _whole_ food. And, again, such food being more nutritious, less in amount must be eaten, upon pain of indigestion. “No wonder if this generation finds itself degenerating. Like a ship built of rotten timber, a man fed on depleted food goes all very well in good weather and with a light load; but when one can neither bear an average load, nor undergo unusual fatigue, let him cross-question his cook.”[62] [Footnote 62: Charles D. Hunter, M.D., F.C.S., in _Herald of Health_.] The truth is that, to a very great degree, we build our bodies out of blood made from impure materials: (1) in part from food depleted by cooking or improper cooking, (2) in part from substances which, as all are agreed, can be “indulged in” only to a limited extent (who can define the limit?), (3) in great measure, from fermented, instead of well-digested food;——and having thus built up “fossil” bodies (still more fossilized by the use of unnatural drinks which “prevent the waste of tissue”), there must be sickness. There is no escape from it, except by a “right about face.” The zymotic, and the various acute diseases, so called, are in point of fact acute _remedies_ for chronic _disease_. CHAPTER XII. WHEAT-MEAL VS. “ENTIRE FLOUR.”