Corn bread and corn-meal mush were important foods with the early settlers, partly because they are nutritious and partly because the corn meal was easily prepared at the mill and was cheap. The germ of the corn is larger in proportion than the germs of other grains, and it contains much fat; therefore it is heating. For this reason, it is strange that corn bread is so largely used by inhabitants of the southern states. It is a more appropriate food for winter in cold climates. Because of the fat in the germ, corn meal readily turns rancid, and, on this account, the germ is separated and omitted from many corn-meal preparations. _Hulled corn_, sometimes called lye hominy, is one of the old-fashioned ways of using corn. In its preparation, the skin is loosened by steeping the corn in a weak solution of lye, which gives it a peculiar flavor, pleasing to many. _Corn-meal mush_ is a valuable breakfast food if eaten with milk. If fried it should be covered with flour or dry corn meal and fried in deep fat, so that it does not soak up the fat. _Popcorn._ The bursting of the shell in popping corn is due to the expansion of the moisture in the starch, occasioned by the heat. _Green sweet corn_ does not contain the same proportion of starch as corn meal, it being, in its tender state, mostly water. It is laxative, because it is eaten with the coarse hull, which causes more rapid peristalsis of the intestines. It should be well masticated to break the covering of the husk; the digestive juices cannot penetrate the hard covering. * * * * * [Sidenote: Breakfast Foods] The claims made for various advertised breakfast foods would be amusing if they were not intended to mislead. Nearly all of them have sufficient merit to sell them if the advertiser confines himself strictly to the truth, but the ever pertinent desire to excel, which is one great incentive to progress, leads to exaggeration. For example: the claim is sometimes made that they contain more nutriment than the same quantity of beef. Reference to Table V does not bear out such a statement. They contain more starch but less protein. It is also claimed by some advertisers that breakfast foods are brain and nerve foods. The idea that certain foods are brain and nerve foods is erroneous, except that any tissue-building food (protein) builds nerve and brain tissue as it builds any other tissue, and the foods which produce heat and energy for other tissues produce the same for brain and nerve. The grains commonly used for breakfast foods are corn, oats, rice, and wheat. Barley, and wild rice, millet and buckwheat are used in some sections, but not enough to warrant discussion here. Barley is used chiefly for making malt and in the form of pearled barley is used in soups. Table VI, from one of the bulletins published by the United States Department of Agriculture, is interesting from an economical standpoint. TABLE VI