We often hear people remark, “Oh! we don’t want to be thinking of what does harm, and what does good. The best way is to eat what’s on the table.” I know a mother who gives her only child, a little girl three years old, hot biscuits, mince-pie, rich cake, and the like, believing, she says, that “a child’s stomach should get used to every thing.” For her part, she believes in living the natural way, not in picking and choosing. Why not, on the same principle, let the child get used to all kinds of reading, and all kinds of companions? It is curious, the way people assume, that, because the present system of cooking and serving meals is customary, it is, therefore, natural; as if the courses of a dinner, each with its central dish, and that with its revolving lesser dishes, were, equally with the solar system, an established order of nature. Meal-providers have sought out many inventions, and call these the “natural way.” They give us, at one sitting, fish, pork, flour, butter, salt, milk, eggs, raisins, spices, corn, potatoes, squash, coffee, sugar, saleratus, pickles, onions, lard, pepper, cooked fruits, tomatoes, essences, all variously combined, and say, “Here, eat, eat in the natural way.” Why natural? The men and women it helps to produce are, to some extent, its natural consequences; but are they natural men and women? Hear them. “Oh, my head!” “Oh, my back!” “Oh, my side!” “Oh, my liver!” “Oh, my stomach!” “Oh, my nerves!” On every side resounds the mournful chorus. Seldom do we hear break in even one jubilant voice, chanting in response, “I am in perfect health. I feel no ache, no pain.” Is this, then, the natural way? But the system speaks for itself, or, rather, the innumerable host of invalids speak for it. So does the grand army of doctors. So do proprietors of patent medicines, rolling in wealth. Why, people take ill health for granted. “No use telling your aches: everybody has ’em,” is a remark often heard. Occasionally an individual rebels, and insists on eating really simple and natural food. Such individual is straightway called odd. He is jeered at, ridiculed, accused of thinking about his stomach, and about what merely goes to sustain the body, as if such thinking were not worth while.