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                            FOOD AND FLAVOR

                            FOOD AND FLAVOR

                          A GASTRONOMIC GUIDE
                       TO HEALTH AND GOOD LIVING

                                  BY

                            HENRY T. FINCK

    "_The destiny of nations depends upon what and
    how they eat._"

    _Brillat-Savarin._

  [Illustration: Illustrated by Charles S. Chapman]

                       NEW YORK--THE CENTURY CO.
                                 1913

                          Copyright, 1913, by
                            THE CENTURY CO.

                       _Published, April, 1913_

                                  TO
                            LUTHER BURBANK
                                  AND
                            HARVEY W. WILEY
                              THE TWO MEN
                          WHO HAVE DONE MOST
                        TO MAKE OUR DAILY FOOD
                         PALATABLE AND HONEST

                               CONTENTS

                                                                 PAGE

    I UNGASTRONOMIC AMERICA                                         3

    Mark Twain's Patriotic Palate--Food Missionaries in the Far
    West--Are Women to Blame?--The Danger in our Food--Why the
    Candy was not Eaten--Dr. Wiley's Poison Squad--Condiments
    versus Chemical Preservatives--Scotched, not Killed.

    II VITAL IMPORTANCE OF FLAVOR                                  40

    Sensual indulgence as a duty--Gladstone and Fletcher--The
    harm done by soft Foods--Epicurean delights from plain
    Food--How flavor helps the Stomach--An Amazing Blunder--A
    new Psychology of Eating.

    III OUR DENATURED FOODS                                        65

    Foul Fowl--The French way versus the American--Why do we
    Eat Poultry?--Is cold storage a Blessing?--Spoiling the
    American Oyster--"Smoked" ham, bacon and fish--Flavor in
    Butter--Sweet Butter versus Salt.

    IV THE SCIENCE OF SAVORY COOKING                              117

    Desirable raw foods--Flavor as the guiding principle--The
    Philosophy of soup-making and eating--Wherein lies the
    value of vegetables?--Broiling, roasting, baking,
    frying--Combining the flavors of meats and vegetables--Savory
    food for everybody--Meat-eating of the future--The folly
    of vegetarianism--When to use condiments and sauces--Cook
    books.

    V A NOBLE ART                                                 152

    The social caste of cooks--Royalty in the kitchen--Rossini,
    Carême and Paderewski--Looking down on others--Does cooking
    Pay?

    VI THE FUTURE OF COOKING                                      171

    School girls like it--Boys and soldiers as cooks--Traveling
    cooking schools--English school dinners--Progress in
    America--Teaching the art of eating--Real epicurism is
    economical--Fireless cookers--Private versus community
    kitchens--Scientific electric cooking--Importance of
    variety in foods.

    VII FRENCH SUPREMACY                                          210

    Kitchen alchemy--Seven hundred soups--Savory
    sauces--Profitable poules de Brese--Digestive value of
    sour salads--Escarole, tomatoes, artichokes, alligator
    pears--Vegetables as a separate course--Paris
    restaurants--Russian and American influences--Provincial
    local flavors--The world's greatest market places--Model
    market gardens--Mushrooms and truffles--Training trees for
    fancy fruits--Bread crust versus crumb--How the best butter
    is made--Cheese as an appetizer.

    VIII EPICUREAN ITALY                                          309

    The cradle of modern cookery--Olive oil and Sardines--Fried
    fish and fritto misto--Macaroni, the real staff of
    life--Cooked cheese in place of meat--Birds, tomato paste
    and garlic.

    IX GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN DELICACIES                             339

    A cosmopolitan cuisine--Delicatessen stores--Sausages and
    smoked ham--Live fish brought to the kitchen--Game and
    Geese--In a Berlin market--Vienna bread and Hungarian
    flour--German menus on sea and land--German, Swiss and
    Dutch cheeses.

    X BRITISH SPECIALTIES                                         394

    Thackeray's little sermon--Dr. Johnson and Samuel Pepys--The
    Roast beef of old England--Southdown mutton--Wiltshire
    bacon--Fair play for pigs--Grouse and grilled sole--Covent
    Garden market scenes--Marmalades, jams and
    breakfasts--Restaurants, cakes, and plum pudding.

    XI GASTRONOMIC AMERICA                                        452

    Sweet corn and corn bread--Griddle cakes and maple
    syrup--Apple pie and cranberries--Turkeys, guinea fowl and
    game--Lobsters, scallops, crabs, and fishes--Vegetables
    steadily gaining ground--The fruit-eaters' paradise
    Governmental gastronomy--Burbank's new fruits and
    vegetables.

    XII COMMERCIAL VALUE OF FLAVOR                                522

    Palatability decides permanence--Eating with the
    eyes--School girls as pure food experts--Pennywise dealers
    and pineapples--Successful peach-growers--Fortunes from
    bananas and oranges--Melons, honey and flavoring
    extracts--Opportunities for women--Feeding flavor into
    food--Farmers, middlemen, and parcel post.

    XIII GASTRONOMIC VALUE OF ODORS                               559

    Sweet, sour, salt and bitter--A comedy of errors--How
    flavor differs from fragrance--Important functions of
    the nose--Educating the sense of smell--Coffee, tea and
    temperance.

    INDEX                                                         583

                         LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

                                                           PAGE
    Fred Harvey                                               6

    A Matter for the Health Department                       20

    Harvey W. Wiley                                          26

    The Old-fashioned Way                                    29

    Horace Fletcher                                          46

    A French Chef's Culinary Alchemy                         54

    An American Quick-Lunch                                  57

    How they do it in France                                 75

    Where Smoked Hams were Suspended from the Rafters        98

    Before Breakfast in the Garden                          119

    Chafing Dish Cooking                                    149

    A fifteenth-century Kitchen in France                   162

    Cooking Class at the Wadleigh High School               172

    Fireless Cooking in Hawaii                              193

    The Tour d'Argent and Frederic Delair                   217

    Carême                                                  218

    Boeuf à la Mode                                         246

    Coming to Market, Brittany                              263

    The World's Greatest Market Place                       268

    Paris Market Porters                                    271

    Halles Centrales                                        273

    A bit of the great Paris market                         276

    Macaroni Drying                                         322

    Deer in German Forest                                   369

    Menus on a German Steamer                           382-384

    The Boar                                                420

    "Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese"                               446

    London Bill of Fare                                 448-449

    The Sugar Bush                                          465

    Brillat-Savarin                                         474

    New York down town Lunch Menu                       484-485

    Luther Burbank                                          510

    Burbank's Spineless Cactus                              518

    Chinese Canal                                           556

    Javanese Tea-Picker and Porter                          578

                     PREFACE: A BOOK FOR EVERYBODY

It is not often that an author is so fortunate as to have a subject
which is of vital importance to everybody, without exception. Everybody
eats, and everybody wants to enjoy his meals; yet few know how to get
the most benefit and pleasure out of them. The French are far ahead of
us in this respect; they are a nation of gastronomers, understanding
fully the importance to health and happiness of raising only the
best foodstuffs, cooking them in savory ways and eating them with
intelligence and pleasure. One of the main objects of the present
volume is to show that we have the material for the making of an even
more gastronomic nation than the French are, and that Americans,
especially if caught young, can be taught to eat in a leisurely way and
to refuse to accept anything that lacks appetizing flavor.

Flavor! In that word lies the key to the whole food problem.
Undoubtedly the nourishing property of food is also of importance;
without it we could not live. Yet, as Luther Burbank has keenly
remarked, if we eliminate palatability (that is, flavor) from food, it
is no more than a medicine, "to be taken because it produces certain
necessary results." Moreover, a little of this medicine goes a great
way. Horace Fletcher lived for years on eleven cents a day; and two
university professors--Dr. J. L. Henderson of Harvard and Dr. Graham
Lusk of Cornell--have demonstrated, independently, that a dime a day,
intelligently expended, is enough to keep body and soul together.
What more we spend on food--and we probably average five times that
amount--goes chiefly for flavor. It is the flavor that makes us willing
to pay more for good butter than for good oleomargarine, for fresh
chicken than for cold storage fowl, for Virginia ham than for ordinary
ham, and so on throughout the list of foods; for there is no difference
in nutritive value in any of these cases.

This being so, it seems passing strange that while so many good books
have been written on the nutritive aspects of foods, mine is the first
volume in any language treating specially of this same flavor, on
which we spend so much of our income, and which is so important to
our health. The explanation lies in the fact that flavor is generally
looked upon as something merely agreeable--like the fragrance of
strawberries, or the vanilla extract we put into ice cream--but of no
vital importance. It was this misunderstanding that prevented me from
keeping the title "Flavor in Food" which I had intended to use. At a
conference with the publishers we decided that (since, after all, the
book also discusses many other aspects of the food question), it would
be wiser to use the title "Food and Flavor." Nevertheless, Flavor
(with a big "F" to emphasize its importance) is the principal theme,
and the most important chapters are the second and the last in which
I discuss its superlative value, not only as the source of countless
wholesome pleasures of the table, but as a guide to health. The gist
of the book lies in the sections "An Amazing Blunder" and "A New
Psychology of Eating," in which I have shown that we need flavor as
much as we need food if we wish to be well; for food without flavor is
not appetizing; and when food is not appetizing it lies in the stomach
like lead and causes dyspepsia, the national American plague. The
final chapter considers the important difference between appetizing
flavor and mere fragrance, the neglect of which has created no end of
confusion and done so much harm.

In the pages concerned with "Ungastronomic America" and "Our Denatured
Foods," I have dwelt on some of the evils which have resulted from the
giving up of the old-fashioned condiments (especially woodsmoke)
in favor of the much cheaper chemical preservatives which denature
our food, that is, destroy its appetizing flavor, and give rise
to countless adulterations and deceptions. It was not with any
"muck-raking" intentions that these pages were written, but merely
to increase the present wholesome discontent and pave the way for
better things by making it clear to all what those better things are,
and indicating ways of thwarting the unscrupulous adulterators and
dealers. There is need of a good deal of hard fighting, for there are
in many towns health officers who thrive on "graft" as well as wealthy
manufacturers of undesirable preservatives who prevent the passage or
enforcement of pure food laws; yet I believe the time is not very far
distant when these two chapters will have little more than a historic
interest. Pending that time, _caveat emptor_--let the buyer beware.

The rest of the book is mainly constructive, and under the head of
"Gastronomic America" I have tried to paint a glowing picture not
only of present pleasures of the palate but of keener ones to come,
thanks to Luther Burbank and other educators of fruits and vegetables.
Among these educators are the specialists of the Department of
Agriculture. The Government of the United States has done more than
that of any other country to give useful advice to the growers of food
products--and to cooks, too! Throughout this volume I have missed no
chance to call attention to its many helpful publications, besides
summing up the matter under the head of "Governmental Gastronomy." It
is a topic of tremendous importance to farmers, vegetable gardeners,
dairymen, and all who are concerned with the growing or distributing
of food stuffs. Farming is defined as "cultivating the ground in order
to raise food"; and why farmers, quite as much as epicures, should be
interested in the _best foods_, I have explained in the section headed
"Commercial Value of Flavor," with illustrations showing how a tiller
of the soil can double or quintuple his income or even make a big
fortune by taking the demand for appetizing flavor as a guide.

Knowing that they do many of these things much better in Europe, I made
a special gastronomic trip in 1912 to gather first hand information in
the market places, gardens and restaurants of France, Italy, Germany
and England. I have dwelt on the good things raised and prepared in
those countries, such as the salads, the poultry, the bread, the
butter, the cheeses, the wonderful cuisine of France; the olive oil,
the economical substitutes for meat, and the macaroni (the _real_ staff
of life) of Italy; the diverse delicatessen of Germany (including live
fish brought to the kitchen and genuinely smoked meats and fish);
the Wiltshire bacon, the Southdown mutton, the cakes and marmalades
of Great Britain. Information on many things like those, concerning
which there is a widespread curiosity, has not before been brought
conveniently between two covers, and I am sure I need not apologize
for having followed the example of the gossiping Brillat-Savarin, in
presenting this information largely in the form of a narrative of
personal experiences, and with pertinent anecdotes.

To the chapters on the "Science of Savory Cooking" and "A Noble Art" I
wish to call special attention because in them lies, I am convinced,
the ultimate solution of the urgent problem of domestic help, as well
as the problem of improving the average American cuisine, which is a
still larger one, because in eleven out of every twelve families the
women have to do their own cooking. Too many women, not to speak of
men, do not know that cooking really _is_ a science, (which electricity
will soon make an exact science), and the practice of it a fine art,
experts in which may well look down proudly on the mere factory and
shop girls who foolishly think they are above them. Schools, women's
societies, and society women have taken up the matter in England as
well as in America, and great changes are impending--changes which, it
is hoped, this volume, coming at the "psychological moment," will help
to accelerate.

  [Illustration][Drawing of a busy scene in a restaurant]

                            FOOD AND FLAVOR

                         UNGASTRONOMIC AMERICA

                     MARK TWAIN'S PATRIOTIC PALATE

Mark Twain swore by American food as he did by the American flag. When
he got as far as Italy, on the trip which resulted in "A Tramp Abroad,"
he became discouraged, wrote a homesick panegyric on the good things he
could not get in Europe, and made a list of viands to be ordered by the
steamer preceding his, to await him on his return. Among these dishes
were fried chicken Southern style, Saratoga potatoes, baked apples and
cream, hot biscuits, buckwheat cakes with maple syrup, toast, oysters
in various styles, softshell crabs, terrapin soup, wild turkey,
cranberry sauce, canvasback duck, prairie hens, bacon and greens,
catsup, green corn, hot corn-pone, stewed tomatoes and pumpkin pie. As
he lived for years thereafter, it is not likely that he carried out his
program.

These gastronomic specialties certainly are not to be sneered at;
European epicures envy us most of them. It must be admitted, also, that
American cookery has made considerable progress in the last decades,
and that there has been an improvement in eating habits since Dickens,
in "Martin Chuzzlewit" (1843), described the "violent bell ringing";
the "mad rush for the dining-room"; the "great heaps of indigestible
matter" which "melted away as ice before the sun"; the "dyspeptic
individuals" who "bolted their food in wedges, feeding not themselves,
but broods of nightmares."

Such scenes still occur, but they are no longer typical. Nor, perhaps,
would Emily Faithful have occasion to-day, as she had in 1884, to
comment on the "joyless American face," due to chronic dyspepsia. We
are still made unhappy, however, by the "indigestible hot bread" and
"tough beefsteaks hardly warmed through" to which she referred, and by
other gastronomic atrocities.

We must not overlook the fine cooking done in many American private
families, hotels, clubs, and restaurants, and we have some good old
Maryland, Virginia, New England, and San Franciscan traditions to
boast of. Moreover, there are not a few who have reason to think that
the culinary low-water mark is to be found on English steamships and in
English inns. On the whole, however, what Pierre Blot wrote forty years
ago is still true: "American cookery is worse than that of any other
civilized nation." Our great national food expert and reformer, Dr.
Harvey W. Wiley, put the matter in a nutshell when he said in a lecture
before the General Federation of Women's Clubs, that "there is no
country in the world where food is so plentiful, and no country in the
world where it is so badly cooked, as right here in the United States."

                  FOOD MISSIONARIES IN THE FAR WEST.

One need not go to France or Austria for a humiliating contrast. In
one of his books of travel Charles Dudley Warner declared that after
leaving Philadelphia the tourist "will not find one good meal decently
served" until he reaches Mexico. In a southwestern railway restaurant
a miner once said to me he had not eaten such an abominable meal in
all the years he had spent in the wilderness. To tell the unvarnished
truth, he used a stronger word than abominable. One of the details I
remember was that the tough steak had apparently been fried in the
drippings from a tallow candle.

In the same part of the country a great change has been brought about
by the culinary and executive genius of one man--Fred Harvey. He came
to this country from England--score one for England!--when he was a boy
of fourteen, with two pounds in his pocket. He got a job on a railway.
There were no dining cars in those days and although in England he had
not lived the life of a gourmet he was amazed by the wretchedness of
the eating houses with their canned meats and vegetables, rancid bacon,
oilclothed tables without napkins and incompetent service. Convinced
that good eating-houses would advertise the railway and attract
travel, he ventured to say so to the manager of the Santa Fé Railway,
who, fortunately, not only approved the suggestion but gave him the
opportunity to show what he could do. One historian relates that the
manager "threw his arms around the youthful promoter and wept with
joy." He had just dined at a railway station!

It was in the year 1876 that Harvey opened his first eating-house in
Topeka. It made a sensation. Others soon were built along the line of
the road from the Middle West to the Pacific Coast until, in 1912,
there were a dozen large hotels, sixty-five railway restaurants and
sixty dining-cars under the same management.

  [Illustration: FRED HARVEY]

That Harvey was a born epicure is evident from the fact that when he
opened the Montezuma Hotel in 1882, he would not allow, as the Kansas
City "Star" tells us, any canned goods to go on the table. He sent
a man to Guaymas and Hermosillo in Old Mexico to get fruit, green
vegetables, shell fish and other kinds of food. A contract was made
with the chief of a tribe of Yaqui Indians to supply the hostelry
with green turtles and sea celery. These turtles, which were secured
for $1.50 each, weighed two hundred pounds and were full of eggs. Mr.
Harvey selected a little pool near the hotel where he fattened the
turtles. A feature of the bill of fare every day was genuine green
turtle soup and turtle steak. The sea celery used is a spicy weed which
makes a fine salad.

Naturally, such delicacies could not be served at the ordinary railway
restaurants; yet these, too, had their pleasant surprises, and were
unspeakably superior to what the travelers had been obliged to put
up with in pre-Harvey days. On ordering tea, for example, you would
get a separate little Japanese pot with the steaming infusion freshly
made for you. This was as far as Harvey could go in these places in
carrying out the perfect host's maxim that every diner should feel as
if the meal he eats had been specially prepared for him. But there were
other details that betrayed special intelligence and thought. Thus, in
stopping one day for supper in one of the Harvey restaurants in the
sizzling Arizona desert, I was delighted to find the table loaded down
with the sour things that one craves on hot days--diverse vegetable and
meat salads.

One of the amusing details in connection with the Harvey organization
was that it became known as a marriage agency, because the neat and
well-trained waitresses got married one after another, some of them to
wealthy ranchmen.

Of greater importance was the fact that the Harvey eating-houses served
as schools to all the Southwest, bringing about a general reform.
The rival railway systems, naturally, could not persevere in their
barbarian ways.

Fred Harvey is no more, but his influence survives and his name is one
to conjure with throughout the Pacific slope.

In the East, also, one comes across a good meal now and then in a
dining-car or a railroad station. There is one, says Edward Hungerford,
up in the northern part of New York State that has never yielded its
supremacy to any circuit-riding café on wheels. When a certain high
officer of the busy road that spreads itself apart at that junction
goes up there, he orders the cook of his private car to shut up the
kitchen. "Do you suppose that I would pass by that town," he says, "and
the best square meal in the whole State?"

Those things, alas, are exceptional. Taken the country through, railway
restaurants and diners are to this day even worse than the average
hotels and boarding houses. Flavorless, unappetizing meats, insipid
vegetables, doughy pies and soggy cakes are the rule at our eating
places everywhere.

The most astonishing thing about this is that the average American
enjoys a good meal, if he can get it, not a bit less than the average
European, as I have observed hundreds of times in our own best eating
houses and in foreign hotels and restaurants during ten trips to
Europe. And that the capacity to enjoy a civilized meal is inherent
not only in those who can cross the ocean and pay for Parisian
dainties, but in the humblest tiller of the soil or railway employee,
was amusingly made manifest to me many years ago in the wild and
woolly West. I was brought up in the village of Aurora, Oregon, which
was inhabited chiefly by members of a German colony, who differed
in no-wise from millions of poor but honest men and women in the
Fatherland. One of the most precious things they had brought from the
old country was the skill to cook a savory meal--a meal that one could
enjoy to the full without feeling the pangs of dyspeptic remorse for
hours afterwards.

The Aurora hotel soon became far-famed; and when the first railway
was built from San Francisco to Portland, the astute makers of the
time-table somehow managed it so that most of the trains stopped at
Aurora, though it is but twenty-eight miles from the terminal, Portland.

Nor was that all. The popularity of the Aurora cookery suggested the
idea that it might be profitable to erect a restaurant tent in Salem
during the annual State Fair. The result was astonishing. All the
other eating-places were soon completely deserted; the Aurora tent had
to be enlarged, and there was such a mad rush for seats at the tables
that in a few days nearly every man and woman and boy and girl in the
village had been drafted to serve as cooks or waiters.

It was plain German _bourgeois_ cooking; but the sausages were made
of honest pork and the hams had the appetizing flavor which the
old-fashioned smokehouse gives them; the bread was soft yet baked
thoroughly, the butter was fresh and fragrant and the pancakes melted
in the mouth. As for the supreme effort of Aurora cookery--noodle soup
made with the boiled chicken (_not_ cold-storage chicken) served in the
plate--the mere memory of it makes my mouth water, four decades after
eating it.

In justice to Portland, which in those days was in a benighted
condition fully warranting the action of the railway men in making
Aurora their culinary terminus, let me hasten to add that at present,
with its Chinook salmon and Columbia River smelt, its hard-shell crabs
and razor clams, its delicious Willamette crawfish--rivaling the best
French _écrevisses_--its fragrant mammoth strawberries, its juicy
cherries, and its world-famed Hood River apples, it is hardly second to
San Francisco as a gastronomic center. In Oregon, as in Washington and
California, the epicure fares particularly well because the luxuries of
life are as cheap as the staples and quite as abundant, if not more so.

                          ARE WOMEN TO BLAME?

Inasmuch as an American is quite as capable of enjoying a good meal as
any one else, why is it that we are so conspicuously ungastronomic as a
nation?

It is obvious that the cooks are largely to blame. It is so difficult
to procure a good cook that most of us give up the search in despair
and resignedly eat what is placed before us.

In Europe it is still comparatively easy to find a young woman or a man
who, by domestic training, has learned to prepare a savory meal and
is willing to take the trouble necessary to get satisfactory results.
In the United States few of the helpers available have any domestic
traditions to fall back on. As a rule, they frankly admit, on applying
for a place, that they know only "plain cooking." As a matter of fact,
few of them can even boil an egg or a potato without spoiling it.
They are not interested in their work, _as they would be if they were
experts_, and their main object is to get as much money as they can for
as little work as possible. To be sure, a cook's hours are long, but
many of them are spent in dawdling.

It is unfortunate that most of our hired cooks are Irish. There are and
have been excellent cooks of this nation, but as a rule the Irish are
not so interested in this art as the French, Germans, Italians and
Swedes, and the results are deplorable, especially when, as is usually
the case, the mistress is herself so ignorant that she cannot tell the
cook why the food is wrong and how it could be improved.

The worst of it is that if the mistress of the house does know enough
herself to teach the new cook some tricks, the latter is likely to
leave because, on account of this newly acquired knowledge, she can get
higher wages elsewhere! Which reminds me of what happened to my wife's
grandmother. She once had a cook who was absolutely green, but who
wanted the highest wages. When asked how she could demand so much when
she admitted her ignorance, she retorted:

"Ah, Mrs. Black, the larnin' is the sevarest part of it."

It will not do, however, to put all the blame on the domestic helpers.
Only one family in twelve, even in our wealthy country, can afford
to hire a cook. In the other eleven families the women of the house
are personally responsible for the meals. Why are these generally so
unsatisfactory?

Visitors from abroad who have asked themselves this question, usually
answer it by saying that Americans have idolized and spoiled their
women and are now paying the penalty.

"The European," says one of them, "takes it as a matter of course that
the woman he marries will be his home-maker and housekeeper, able and
willing, if necessary, to do the careful cooking on which his health
and his enjoyment of life depend so largely. In America the main object
of the women seems to be to throw off all the responsibilities of
housekeeping so that they may either gad about socially or engage in
outside employment. The necessary meals are hastily cooked, marketing
is done by telephone, the grocer and butcher are foolishly trusted as
to the quality of the raw material, and the results are such as we
see--monotonous, unwholesome, insipid meals, followed by indigestion."

There is no doubt some truth in this foreigner's observations, though
he takes no account of the many thousands of American wives who work
as hard to make their homes abodes of comfort, health and happiness as
their husbands do to supply the necessary cash.

On the American men falls a large share of the blame for existing
conditions. Completely absorbed in their private and particular
business they labored too long under the delusion that their whole
duty consisted in supplying the cash needed for housekeeping. Their
indifference to the sources and the quality of the raw material of
the food they ate, brought into existence a horde of adulterators and
poisoners on a scale never before witnessed anywhere--and that is
another important reason why we are not a gastronomic nation. With such
sophisticated material the best cooks in the world could not prepare
appetizing, wholesome meals; and when meals are not appetizing, men
lose interest in them, bolting their food, and passing on to things
that seem more important and agreeable.

Adulterators and spoilers of food have existed since the days of the
ancient Greeks and Romans and probably they flourished long before
them; but never before had the far-famed "Yankee ingenuity" been
brought to bear on the ignoble task of deceiving people as to what they
were eating and drinking.

Of this ingenuity a striking illustration was given at Washington
when the pure food agitators, headed by Dr. Wiley of the Department
of Agriculture, gave an exhibit before Congress. On a table had been
placed--along with other similarly fraudulent articles--a bottle of
"honey." On the surface of it floated a bee. Now, the man who put that
bee in the bottle had said to himself: "Nine persons out of ten will,
on seeing it, conclude instantly that it got in accidentally and that
it proves the honey to be genuine." But that bottle never contained any
honey; it was filled with a sticky, sweet substance resembling honey in
appearance, but instead of being made up of the products of the bee's
beneficent floral industry, it contained ingredients some of which were
injurious to health.

                        THE DANGER IN OUR FOOD.

That bottle was a sample of thousands of adulterated or entirely
spurious "foods" for which American men and women had been for a long
time spending good money in the belief that they were getting what they
paid for.

A quarter of a century ago the food poisoners and adulterators spread a
net of fraud across the United States, the like of which the world had
never seen; and for a long time the American public, with the meekness
(up to a certain point!) for which it has become notorious, submitted
to this abuse, eating the drugged food and suffering the daily pangs
of indigestion, wondering vaguely what was the matter--why Europeans
found us a nation of dyspeptics--and paying fortunes to doctors, and
to vendors of patent medicines, without being able to avert the final
general breakdown.

Then something occurred which made the worm turn on its tormentors--the
"embalmed beef" incident.

Major-General Miles, backed up by other officers, declared positively
that most of the canned beef supplied to our soldiers during the war
with Spain was unfit for human food, and that he was convinced that
the refrigerated beef supplied was highly deleterious because of the
introduction of chemicals for preservative purposes. The court which
investigated these charges, while admitting some of the alleged evils,
indulged, many people thought, in whitewashing; so the public at last
made up its mind that "something was rotten in the state of Denmark."

Particularly was it impressed by the statement that the food supplied
to the army was "not different from that generally sold to the public."
That admission made people ask themselves: "What, then, are _we_
eating?"

The result was a general awakening and investigation, a countrywide
search which revealed the shocking fact that the community was
harboring thousands of seemingly respectable citizens who were piling
up fortunes by plying the deadly trade of modern Borgias, slaughtering
infants and invalids and making even the robust feel uncomfortable most
of the time.

The chemicals used were formalin, boric and salicylic acid,
fluo-sylicate of ammonium, aniline dyes, and a number of secret
compounds that were sold to packers and dealers, enabling them to
doctor spoiled meats and other foods in such a way as to deceive the
purchaser and consumer into thinking them fresh and wholesome.

To realize the full extent of this nefarious traffic one has to go
back to the newspaper reports of the investigations and food tests,
especially in the year 1899, after the "embalmed beef" inquiry. I have
before me clippings that would fill fifty pages with gruesome details;
but a mere peep into this culinary chamber of horrors must suffice.

"The use of antiseptics as preservatives is becoming alarmingly great,"
declared Prof. A. S. Mitchell, analytical chemist of the Wisconsin
Dairy and Food Commission, before the Senatorial Committee on Pure
Food Investigation. Among the preservatives he named was a liquid
called "freezene," which he said, was almost pure formic-aldehyde, the
substance that several chemists at the military inquiry had claimed
to have found in the beef furnished the army. It acts disastrously
upon the tissues of the stomach, but was often put into the milk and
butter supplied to families. Butchers employed freely, especially
in "Hamburger steaks," sulphite of soda, which not merely arrests
digestion, but is, as another Government expert remarked, practically
the same he had used as a medical student to preserve corpses, and
later to disinfect houses where smallpox patients had lived.

The New York "Herald" of June 4, 1899, contained a page and a half of
exposures, with these headlines:

POISON AND ADULTERATION FOUND IN ALL FOOD PURCHASED BY THE "HERALD."
FORTY SAMPLES ANALYZED AND NOT ONE OF THEM WHAT IT PURPORTED TO BE. TEA
THAT CONTAINED ALMOST EVERYTHING BUT TEA LEAVES. SOME FACTS THAT EVERY
HOUSE-KEEPER SHOULD KNOW. THE CITY AUTHORITIES DO LITTLE.

One of the samples of what was sold as "tea" was "composed of refuse of
many kinds--hair, mouldy leaves from everything that grows but the tea
plant." Another sample contained "dust, seed-pods, foreign woody stems,
and unidentified refuse."

To cite one more of the two-score analyses made by the "Herald's"
expert (James C. Duff, consulting chemist to the New York Produce
Exchange): "The sample of American macaroni contains artificial yellow
coloring matter, egg-yolk color, composed of flour and the coloring
matter. This coloring matter has as its base chrome colors--substances
very poisonous. The genuine Italian macaroni contains nothing injurious
to health."

"Reports from analysts in other cities show that 92 per cent. of
the allspice examined is adulterated, 50 per cent. of cinnamon, 60
per cent. of ginger, 100 per cent. of mustard, and 70 per cent. of
pepper.... It is a matter of record that the demand for the materials
for adulteration has called into existence a branch of manufacturing
industry having for its sole object the production of articles
known as 'spice mixtures' or 'pepper dust.' They are sold by the
barrel as 'P. D. ginger,' 'P. D. pepper,' or 'P. D. cloves.' These
manufacturers openly advertise themselves as 'assorters and renovators
of merchandise....'"

The New York "Tribune" printed a report of an address made by a
representative of the Benchmen's Association of Retail Butchers who
said, regarding the upper West Side: "Decayed meats are chemically
treated to counteract odor and outer discoloration and are hawked on
the street corners on Saturday nights. The shoppers of that locality
are after something cheap, and here they get it. Resulting illness is
ascribed to a mysterious Providence or anything rather than the 'nice
tender broilers, two for a quarter,' that they had for Sunday's dinner.
The police say the matter is one for the Health Department, and the
Health Department refers your complaints to its inspectors. These are
paid from $1,200 to $1,400 a year, and to my positive knowledge not one
of them has entered our shops for the last seven years. For all the
Health Department knows, we might have been selling spoiled meat all
that time."

A Philadelphian investigator of adulterated food, H. Wharton Amberling,
wrote: "There has been adulteration for ages. It is born of the same
parentage as robbery, perjury, arson and murder. It has grown in
enormity because the law has not dealt with it as it has with other
crimes. The rapid progress of chemistry has attained most grateful
accomplishments, but the leprous hand of adulteration is using it to
fill our blood with the poison of disease and death."

"It is estimated," said the New York "Evening Post," "that the people
of the United States spend no less than five billion dollars a year
for food and that nine-tenths of this money is paid for articles of
food which are more or less adulterated. All food adulterations are
not injurious, though a great majority of them, probably nine-tenths,
are so, in greater or less degree.... The art of adulterating food
has been carried to a very fine point by American ingenuity and has
proved immensely profitable to those who practise it, while it has
undoubtedly worked great damage to the general health.... It is a wise
man who knows what he is eating nowadays."

  [Illustration: A matter for the Health Department]

A report of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station called
attention to the fact that eighty-nine samples of tea were all found
pure as a result of the federal law of 1897, which established a board
of seven experts to enforce the statute and forbade importation of the
adulterated article.

The American products were on the other hand in a woeful condition.
Sixty-three samples of fruit jelly examined showed adulteration in
two-thirds of the cases by starch, glucose, aniline dyes, and salicylic
acid. Pure jellies cost 25 cents a pound while these artificial
jellies cost but five cents. Out of 40 samples of marmalades and jams
only three were pure. Examination of nineteen samples of sausages and
oysters showed "embalming" by boric acid.

                     WHY THE CANDY WAS NOT EATEN.

Miss Alice Lakey, chairman of the food investigating committee of
the Food Consumers' League, made a collection, as the New York "Sun"
reported, of squares of flannel, a dozen of them, in brilliant hues of
green, red, pink, and other colors--all colored with the coal tar dyes
that came out of eatables and drinkables, she explained, adding: "It's
a wonder that our insides are not dyed all the colors of the rainbow.

"One of the meanest forms of adulteration I know," she further
remarked, "is the blackberry brandy, because that is bought for
invalids, aged and delicate persons, who hope to get a little strength
and appetite from it. Out of 600 samples examined, 460 contained no
trace of blackberries. They were made of crude spirits colored with
coal tar dyes.

"Did you ever hear the story," she continued, "of the kind-hearted New
York woman who invited a company of Italian girls who worked in a candy
factory to a Christmas party? She had an entertainment and Christmas
tree for them, and among other things was a box of fine chocolate
creams for each one. When they went away every child left her box of
candy on the chair behind her.

"'Why, aren't you going to take your chocolates?' said the surprised
hostess.

"'Oh, no,' they said in chorus; 'we make those!'"

That tells the whole story. The slaughter of the innocents and the
ruining of health of children by means of adulterated and poisoned
candies was for decades a national crime that would have justified
thousands of lynchings, if anything ever does justify such summary
meting out of punishment.

Dr. Shepard, State chemist of South Dakota, framed a series of menus,
on the plan of those published by the women's magazines, to assist
housewives in catering for families. Here are three, which show how any
family in the United States might have reasonably taken _forty doses of
chemical preservatives and coal tar dyes in one day_:

                               BREAKFAST

            Sausages containing coal tar dye and borax
        Baker's Bread containing alum
                               Butter containing coal tar dye
      Canned Cherries containing coal tar dye and salicylic acid
        Pancakes containing alum
                          Syrup containing sodium sulphate

                                DINNER

          Tomato Soup with coal tar dye and benzoic acid
    Cabbage and Corned Beef with saltpeter
           Corn Scallops with sulphurous acid and formaldehyde
                Canned Peas with salicylic acid
    Catsup with coal tar dye and benzoic acid
                                       Vinegar with coal tar dye
                    Mince Pie with boracic acid
      Pickles with copperas, sodium sulphate and salicylic acid
               Lemon Ice Cream with methyl alcohol

                                SUPPER

         Bread and Butter with alum and coal tar dye
                   Canned Beef with borax
    Canned Peaches with sodium sulphite, coal tar dye and salicylic
                               acid
      Pickles with copperas, sodium sulphate and formaldehyde
             Catsup with coal tar dye and benzoic acid
                                   Lemon Cake with alum
             Baked Pork and Beans with formaldehyde
                      Vinegar, coal tar dye
      Currant Jelly, coal tar dye and salicylic acid
                                             Cheese, coal tar dye

Physicians sometimes prescribe such chemicals, when they are indicated,
in very small doses. The Food Commissioner of North Dakota, Dr. Ladd,
reported in a bulletin that he found from five to fifteen grains of
boric acid to every pound of ham, dried beef, etc., examined; while
in hamburger steaks, sausages, etc., the amount ranged from twenty to
fifty grains a pound. The maximum dose of boric acid prescribed by a
physician is said not to exceed ten grains daily.

                       DR. WILEY'S POISON SQUAD.

Napoleon Bonaparte said that "soldiers march and fight on their
stomachs." If our soldiers, fed on "embalmed" beef and other chemically
treated food, had had much marching and fighting to do, Spain might
have won. As it was, the American soldiers who were killed or
invalided during that war, were martyrs to a nobler cause than that
of humiliating poor Spain. It was their sufferings that, as already
intimated, led to the national revolt against the wholesale poisoners
and adulterators for commercial profit.

As a matter of course, the parties accused showed fight. One of the
earliest battles was fought over borax, and it was in this battle that
Dr. Wiley first came before the general public prominently. During
the months from December, 1902, to July 1, 1903, he made a series of
experiments on twelve young men in Washington as to the influence
on the health of food containing boric acid or borax. Some of the
conclusions reached were thus summed up briefly:

   When boric acid or its equivalent in borax is taken in food
   in quantities not exceeding a half gram daily, no immediate
   effects are observed; after a time there occur occasional
   loss of appetite, a feeling of fullness in the head, gastric
   discomfort, and general ill-feeling. Only the more sensitive
   persons develop symptoms from the amounts named. When the
   drug is given in larger and increasing doses, these symptoms
   in accentuated form develop more rapidly; most common is
   persistent headache with slight clouding of the mental
   processes. The quantity of boric acid required to produce
   definite symptoms varies greatly with different individuals.
   In some, one to two grams daily produce decided distress;
   in others, three grams cause little if any discomfort.
   Conclusions regarding the use of less than half a gram daily
   were not reached, but from the effect of the larger quantities
   taken for a short time, it is reasonable to infer that smaller
   doses during an extended period would also prove injurious.
   The results in general indicate that it is not advisable
   to use borax in articles of food intended for common and
   continuous use. When placed in foods used only occasionally
   and in small amounts, the quantity of the contained
   preservative should be stated plainly, that the consumer may
   know what he is eating.

One of the most interesting facts, and one known to few, in connection
with these experiments, is that Dr. Wiley actually began them with a
bias in favor of borax. He did not believe, he said, that borax was
a harmful preservative, but he was going to find out. This statement
aroused my suspicion. Knowing how much "graft" and "politics" there are
apt to be in such investigations, I made up my mind that Dr. Wiley was
a fraud and that he would undoubtedly give a verdict in favor of borax.
While in this frame of mind I wrote the following editorial for the New
York "Evening Post" (April 8, 1903):

   Dr. Wiley, of the Department of Agriculture, seems to require
   a long time to decide whether his "brigade of poison eaters,"
   as the Washington wits have dubbed his free boarders, are
   really eating poison or only harmless food preservatives
   unjustly suspected of being injurious. It needed no elaborate
   experiments to prove that drugged food may be eaten without
   serious harm. Many of us are probably eating more or less
   of drugged food all the time without actually having to be
   taken to the hospital; but many others do suffer in health,
   vitality and capacity for work from eating it. In regard to
   salicylic acid and formaldehyde, Dr. Wiley himself wrote in
   "Leslie's Weekly" two years ago that there is no doubt of the
   pernicious influence of these preservatives in some cases.
   He also said, truly, that "the public supervision should
   look after the weak and diseased digestive systems rather
   than the strong and vigorous." Why, nevertheless, he chose
   to make his Washington experiments on the strongest young
   men he could find is a mystery he has not explained. In the
   "Lancet" of Nov. 30, 1901, an account was given of a series
   of experiments with boric acid made by Dr. Rinehart, in which
   the symptoms of poisoning disappeared as soon as the use of
   the drug was given up. Further evidence is furnished in the
   "Münchener Medicinische Wochenschrift" of Jan. 26. Dr. G.
   Merkel, of Nuremberg, experimented with boric acid on eleven
   patients, seven of whom promptly showed disturbance of the
   gastro-intestinal tract. The inevitable inference from such
   facts is either that the use of boric acid as a preservative
   of food should be prohibited by law, or, at least, that the
   law should require mention of its use on the label of
   canned goods, and in butter, cream, milk and meat, in order
   that those whose digestion is not as robust as that of Dr.
   Wiley's select boarders may take warning.

  [Illustration: HARVEY W. WILEY]

The fact that these remarks were widely copied showed that many other
editors shared my suspicions. Then came Dr. Wiley's verdict, which
proclaimed him the honest, bold, incorruptible champion of truth who
was soon to become respected, admired, and idolized by the whole
American public, with the exception of those who had commercial reasons
for disliking him.

Perhaps I may be pardoned for inserting here a reference to an amusing
incident that occurred during this controversy. Another article of
mine, in which I had spoken disrespectfully of borax, resulted the
following day in a visit to the office of the "Evening Post" by a
man who wanted to see the "borax editor." He was shown to my room,
and promptly proceeded to inform me that I was entirely mistaken in
thinking borax harmful. I replied that I considered borax one of the
most useful things in the world, the greatest of "dirt-chasers,"
indispensable on the wash stand and in the wash house; but as for
internal use, I had had days of discomfort which made me look on it
with feelings of genuine alarm.

"I'll tell you what I'll do!" retorted the man, who represented one of
the large borax companies. "I am willing to take a glass of water, put
in a tablespoonful of borax and drink it right before you." "That's
nothing," I replied; "I wouldn't hesitate to do the same thing. Borax
is not a deadly drug like arsenic or strychnine, it is a chemical
which, taken into the stomach in small doses day after day, week after
week, and month after month, acts as a cumulative poison, gradually
weakening even the strongest stomach; and, inasmuch as the stomach
is the source of most diseases, thus paving the way for all sorts of
troubles."[1]

               CONDIMENTS VERSUS CHEMICAL PRESERVATIVES.

Until about three decades ago it was customary the world over to cure
meats with condimental substances, particularly salt, vinegar, sugar,
and wood smoke. These not only preserved the meats but developed their
inherent flavors, while adding others that were equally relished by
consumers, thus enabling them to enjoy their meals without disagreeable
and depressing after-effects.

  [Illustration: The old-fashioned way]

All at once, like a devastating avalanche, the wholesale use of
non-condimental chemicals tumbled upon the country. Why the avalanche
grew so fast may be gathered from a few lines on page 37 of the second
edition of Dr. Wiley's admirable book, just referred to in a footnote;
lines which deserve to be printed in italics, and which every reader
should engrave on his memory:

_The chemicals employed are those known as germicides. In the
quantities used they neither impart a taste nor odor to a preserved
meat, but by their germicidal properties prevent the development
of organic ferments and thus make the preservation of meat far more
certain and very much less expensive. By the use of some chemicals the
salting, sugaring, and smoking of preserved meat may be done with very
much less care, in a very much shorter time, and at a very greatly
reduced expense. For this reason the practice has gained a great vogue,
not as a means of benefiting the consumers, but rather as a means
of enriching the packer and dealer. Chemical preservatives are also
highly objectionable because they keep meats apparently fresh, while in
reality changes of the most dangerous character may be going on. They
thus prevent the display of the red light danger signal._

Concerning this last point the London "Lancet" has used another and
equally forcible simile:

   It is by no means certain that preservatives in small
   quantities can prevent decomposition. They do stop
   putrefaction and thus destroy the signs by which decomposition
   is made evident to the senses. Their effect _resembles that of
   tying down the safety valve of a steam engine_. The advocates
   of food preservatives seem always to ignore, or to be ignorant
   of, the opportunity afforded and advantage taken of their use
   for dirty and fraudulent practices.

These remarks are of the utmost importance, for they call attention to
the fact that even if the chemical, non-condimental preservatives were
not slow poisons, it would be necessary to forbid their use because
they enable unscrupulous persons to make foods of the most nauseating
substances. Let me quote another expert, who states the case vividly:

   Milk, eggs and fish are three foods especially which become
   extremely dangerous when decomposition sets in. The chemicals
   placed in them by dealers destroy the offensive taste and
   odor, thus robbing nature of her means of protecting us from
   danger. Many little children killed from eating ice cream and
   bakery products never would have tasted them if the smell and
   taste of the rotten eggs and putrid milk had not been hidden
   by the chemicals. The vilest, most malodorous factory refuse
   may be made pleasant to the sight, taste and smell through the
   magical effects of benzoate of soda, saccharin and coal tar
   dye. The coal tar dye gives a clear, translucent appearance to
   the product; the saccharin sweetens it and benzoate of soda
   embalms it so it will keep for a decade without spoiling.
   These disguised putrid foods are additionally dangerous in hot
   weather.

                         SCOTCHED, NOT KILLED.

The great outcry raised by all these startling revelations concerning
the unscrupulous methods of the food poisoners resulted in the passage,
in 1906, of the epoch-making Food and Drugs Act, which gave the United
States a most elaborate and minute set of laws for the protection of
the public and the punishment of offenders. The result was an immediate
and decided improvement in many departments, especially that of canned
fruits, concerning which Dr. Wiley wrote in 1911 that "the time is now
rapidly approaching when all such goods will be free of any imitation
or adulteration, and this will add greatly to their value in the
markets of the country."

In many other directions, however, the drugging of foods with slow
poisons continued. The snake was only scotched, not killed.

"If you took all the food in New York City to-day and put it in a big
tent down in Texas, I would throw away 40 per cent. of it," said Gaston
G. Netter of the Geneva White Cross Society (which is the International
Pure Food Association), in October, 1911. "The people here in New
York City are being hourly poisoned by food labeled as absolutely
pure. I buy it and test it every day and I know. I saw some sardines
marked 'pure sardines in olive oil.' They were a disintegrated mass of
decayed, poisonous fish, and the oil had never known an olive. A large
percentage of the vinegar used for preserving such things as prunes is
an acidulated preparation fatal to the lining of the stomach."

The vinegar sold by many grocers in defiance of the law is made with
acetic acid, which is prepared by the destructive distillation of wood.
So little of this is needed that the adulterator can make a gallon of
"vinegar" at a cost of two cents, or a barrel for a dollar. This, sold
in bottles, yields a profit of over $20 a barrel. Sometimes a trace
of malic acid or concentrated apple juice is added to give a reaction
which may _fool the analyst_. It is this poisonous stuff that is used
in American homes to dress salads and is put into bottles of chow chow,
chili sauce, and the pickles so dear to school children.

Concerning the cheap candies that are still dearer to the children,
Harry P. Cassidy in an address before the wholesale candy dealers
(reported in the New York "Sun" of March 10, 1912), said:

"We have found burnt umber in candy which is sold and guaranteed as
pure to the small shopkeepers. We have found stearin in it which
melts only at a temperature of 135 degrees Fahrenheit, whereas the
temperature of the human body is only 98.6 degrees. We have found
furniture glue and dangerous ether flavoring matter and paraffin and
shellac and many other injurious substances which the members of this
association handle."

Another speaker at this meeting, Prof. Charles La Wall, spoke of
lampblack as being used to color so-called licorice and of marshmallows
that had been blued with ultramarine, just as bluing is used in washing
clothes. Poisonous sulphuric acid may be contained in molasses,
glucose, shredded cocoanut and many other things. "As candies are often
composed chiefly of these four products, a child in buying a penny's
worth of candy may get four doses in one of the deadly sulphites such
as the cleaner uses in whitening our straw hats."

America is specially noted, as Rutledge Rutherford remarks in the
"National Food Magazine" (1912), for two things--its chemicalized food
and its infantile mortality. According to the estimate of the New York
food expert, Alfred W. McCann, three million persons in the United
States were made ill by adulterated foods in 1911.

That was five years after the passing of the Pure Food Law. The trouble
with that law is that it is not interstate. A dishonest man in one
State can do all the food "doping" he pleases as long as he does not
sell any of it in another State. Most of the States now have laws of
their own on this matter, but often they leave much to be desired.

What is worse, these laws are not enforced; or, if the criminals are
brought to bay, the punishment is so mild that it does not prevent a
repetition of the offense. "If a grocer knew that a can of tomatoes or
a can of sardines sold by him could be taken to the corner and analyzed
and if found bad that he would be prosecuted, the pure food law would
be a real thing," says Gaston G. Netter, who asserts that if New York
City would bring about such a reform--at a cost of perhaps $150,000 a
year--it would "do away with half the medical clinics."

Fines alone will not suffice to bring about a reform. We can hardly
follow the example of the Turks who, if a baker gives false weight or
adulterates his bread, cut off one of his ears and nail it to the door
post. But we could follow the example of the wise municipal officials
who compelled the Munich brewers to make honest beer, out of malt and
hops alone. At first, fines were imposed for using other materials, and
these fines were made larger and larger; but the brewers found they
could pay the highest fines and still save money by using chemicals.
Then the lawmakers changed their tactics; the "man highest up" was
threatened with imprisonment. The millionaire brewers had a pardonable
aversion to jail--and from that time on Munich beer became the best in
the world. Ere long, whole trainloads of it began to be sent daily in
all directions--to North Germany and Russia, to Paris and London, to
Vienna, and to the cities of Italy. The brewers had been compelled, at
pistol's point, to acknowledge the truth that, after all, in the long
run, honesty is the best policy.

Some of the largest American manufacturing firms have followed this
policy voluntarily, though the prices they have to pay for good fresh
material places them at a great disadvantage to the adulterators who
buy any rotten old thing and "renovate" it, or else make the article
entirely of chemicals.

"In four years," said Alfred W. McCann (in March, 1912), "the
Government has caught nearly fifty wholesale adulterators in the act of
shipping bogus vinegar from one State into another. In every instance
the Government won its case, but in every instance petty fines were
inflicted by the courts and the same offenders were caught again and
again.... Small fines have no deterrent effect on food frauds. The game
is too profitable to suffer extinction under any other influence than
jail sentences, and jail sentences have not been imposed in a single
case brought by the Government against food or drug adulterators."

Food and drug adulterators are wealthy men, but they are not stingy.
They gladly share their sordid earnings with the politicians who
protect them. "Why do the States delay in enacting uniform laws
patterned after the excellent national laws?" asks Mr. McCann; and his
answer tells the plain truth: "Each State has some powerful pet food
industry to protect and some weak legislators willing to do the bidding
of the fakers."

Every reader of this book perused in the newspapers the story of the
disgraceful conspiracy in Washington against Dr. Wiley, and remembers
vividly the nationwide outburst of indignation which came to the rescue
of the courageous chemist and made him a national hero. He remained
for the time being, but his enemies were not punished, although the
President promised to reform the Department of Agriculture. His failure
to do so is one of the principal reasons why he was not re-elected. Dr.
Wiley, seeing that his efforts to secure the enforcement of the Pure
Food Laws were useless, at last resigned, and in "Good Housekeeping"
for October, 1912, he gave some of the reasons for this step.

The Remsen Board was created for the express purpose of reviewing
his decisions against food manipulators. It never missed a chance to
reverse them, to the huge delight of certain manufacturers and dealers.
Although the Moss investigating committee unanimously pronounced the
Remsen Board as wholly without authority, its decisions were followed
by officials of the Government; important matters referred to it were
held in abeyance. For instance, an exhaustive report of the experiments
made in the Bureau of Chemistry, which showed, in Dr. Wiley's opinion,
"the injuriousness of copper sulphate when added to foods, has been
hibernating in the Department of Archives for the past four years and
its use permitted in the interim."

The opposition to Dr. Wiley's decisions brought about "practical
paralysis in all matters pertaining to the addition of benzoic acid,
sulphurous acid, saccharine, sulphate of copper, and alum to food
products. As it was the addition of these bodies which constituted 95
per cent. of the total adulteration practised, it is easy to see that,
so far as adulteration was concerned, the food law became practically a
dead letter."

The physicians of the country, who, better than others, know the danger
of using drugs indiscriminately, sided with Dr. Wiley. At a meeting in
Pittsburg of the American Medical Association, representing 25,000
physicians and surgeons, that body "in spite of the decision of the
referee board, pledged itself uncompromisingly against benzoate of soda
and all other chemical forms of food preservatives."

How bitterly the war against Dr. Wiley and pure-food legislation was
carried on, not only at Washington but in various States with aid from
Washington, is illustrated by the following extract from a letter
written to Dr. Wiley by the Health Commissioner of Indiana:

   It is not necessary to recall to you the tremendous
   difficulties under which the State labored when it endeavored
   to prevent the overthrow of its pure food law because of the
   activities of the Department of Agriculture in behalf of the
   firms who were seeking that end; how we were refused the
   assistance of yourself and your chemists; how we had to compel
   the getting of testimony by an order of the court of the
   District of Columbia, and how, on the other hand, employees of
   the Government known to be in sympathy with the firms bringing
   suit against us were sent to Indianapolis to testify against
   the State at the expense of the Department of Agriculture.

Another illustration of the war on the Pure Food Laws was given in the
New York "Globe" of Oct. 24, 1912, by Alfred W. McCann. After pointing
out that "there has been no let-up in attempts to deceive," and that
"food ideals depend absolutely on the integrity and zeal of a few
so-called fanatics like Dr. Wiley, who are thus far responsible for all
the advance we have made," he goes on to say:

   In the State of Pennsylvania one of the most active pure food
   workers, who has contributed energy and zeal to the cause of
   the people, H. P. Cassidy, special agent of the Pennsylvania
   Dairy and Food Department, after ten years of remarkable
   service has been removed from office by the same kind of
   pressure which finally disposed of Dr. Wiley.

   Charges were made a few days ago against Mr. Cassidy, whose
   activity had resulted in more than 8,000 arrests for food
   adulterations in the City of Philadelphia alone. He demanded
   a hearing before the governor. The hearing was granted. The
   charges fell to pieces and Mr. Cassidy, like Dr. Wiley, was
   vindicated. Two days later the Pennsylvania authorities
   notified him that, although he was found guiltless, harmonious
   relations between him and his chiefs had been strained, and
   therefore for the good of the service it was decided that he
   should be dismissed.

   If the pure food movement were making the kind of progress
   which it is thought to be making, such backward steps would
   not be tolerated by the people, for the dismissal from office
   of such a man as Cassidy will serve as a warning to other pure
   food officials not to be too zealous in the discharge of their
   duties.

   The direct result of Cassidy's dismissal will show itself
   in the State of Pennsylvania by a long line of cowardice in
   applying the law. I make this prophecy and guarantee its
   fulfilment.

It is needless to dwell further on these disgraceful efforts to thwart
the Pure Food Laws. Dr. Wiley did not exaggerate when in summing up the
situation he printed the following, in italics:

_No further blot upon the administration of law can, in my opinion,
be found in the history of the United States than this effort of the
United States Government to paralyze, belittle, and destroy a law
passed in the interests of the people of the country._

  [Illustration][A table full of food]

                                  II

                      VITAL IMPORTANCE OF FLAVOR

Startling as are the facts in the foregoing chapter, they do not
tell the whole story. We have seen that the non-condimental chemical
preservatives used by the food poisoners are highly objectionable on
two grounds: (1) because they are usually injurious and often deadly;
and (2) because they enable unscrupulous persons to use the filthiest,
rottenest material and so doctor it as to deceive the consumer into
believing it to be wholesome food, whereas it may, and often does,
result in ptomaine poisoning.

But there is a third indictment against the food sophisticators. The
chemicals they use, not only make the food they manipulate dangerous
to eat, but they also _diminish and often completely destroy its
Flavor_.

This destruction of the food Flavors may seem to those who have given
no special attention to this matter a thing to be regretted, indeed,
but not an actual crime. That it is a real crime, because it helps to
undermine the consumers' health, I shall demonstrate in this chapter.
It is necessary to know the facts now to be set forth in order to
realize the full significance of the deplorable state of affairs to
be revealed in the next chapter, entitled Our Denatured Foods. That
chapter will continue the subject of Ungastronomic America, wherefore
Chapter II may be regarded as an Intermezzo--but a most important one,
for it contains truths that are of vital importance to everybody.
Indeed, it is chiefly for the sake of impressing these truths on as
many intelligent persons as possible that I am writing this book.

                     SENSUAL INDULGENCE AS A DUTY.

Too long we have been allowing covetous manufacturers and dealers and
incompetent or indolent cooks to spoil our naturally good food. We
have done this because we have not as a nation understood that there
is nothing in the world on which our health and hourly comfort, our
happiness and our capacity for hard work, depend so much as on the
Flavor of food--those savory qualities which make it appetizing and
enjoyable and therefore digestible and helpful.

It is not too much to say that _the most important problem now before
the American public is to learn to enjoy the pleasures of the table and
to insist on having savory food at every meal_.

There was a time when it would have been considered rank heresy to
express such an opinion, and even to-day there are millions of honest
folk who hold that the enjoyment of a good meal is merely a form of
sybaritic indulgence.

When Ruskin wrote his "Modern Painters" he referred to the indulgence
of taste as an "ignoble source of pleasure." He lived to realize the
foolishness of this sneer; in one of those amusing footnotes which
he contributed to the final edition of that great work, and in which
he often assails his own former opinions with merciless severity,
he denounces the "cruelty and absurdity" of his failing to learn to
appreciate the dainties provided by his father. But his earlier opinion
reflected the general attitude of the time toward the pleasures of the
table.

Fortunately, in our efforts to fight the great American
plague--dyspepsia--we are no longer seriously hampered by that Puritan
severity which caused the father of Walter Scott, when young Walter one
day expressed his enjoyment of the soup, to promptly mix with it a pint
of water to take the devil out of it.

America's leading educator, Ex-President Eliot of Harvard, has
expressed the more rational view of our time in these words: "Sensuous
pleasures, like eating and drinking, are sometimes described as animal,
and therefore unworthy, but men are animals and have a right to enjoy
without reproach those pleasures of animal existence which maintain
health, strength, and life itself."

We may go farther than that, asserting that not only have we a right to
enjoy the pleasures of the table, but it is our moral duty to do so.
_The highest laws of health demand of us that we get as much pleasure
out of our meals as possible._ To prove this statement is the main
object of the present volume, nearly every page of which bears witness
to its truth, directly or indirectly.

                        GLADSTONE AND FLETCHER.

There is an old German proverb to the effect that if food is properly
chewed it is half digested: _Gut gekaut ist halb verdaut_.

This is literally true, but in England and America, although physicians
and others have long known it to be so, it was not impressed on the
general public's attention until the newspapers began to comment--some
seriously, others facetiously--on the statement that Gladstone, in
1848, adopted certain rules for chewing food to which he ever after
adhered and to which some observers attributed his remarkable physical
vigor. "Previous to that," said the "Pall Mall Gazette," "he had always
paid great attention to the requirements of nature, but at that date he
laid down as a rule for his children that thirty-two bites should be
given to each mouthful of meat and a somewhat lesser number to bread,
fish, etc."

Now Gladstone was wrong in suggesting that meat needed more munching
than bread. The stomach takes care of meat if it is not swallowed in
_too_ large chunks; whereas bread, as well as potatoes, together with
oatmeal and other cereals, no matter how soft, should be kept in the
mouth some time to enable the saliva to partly digest them and prepare
them for the lower viscera.

This error, however, did not detract seriously from the value of
Gladstone's directions. The main thing was that his "home rule" called
the attention of two nations to the unwisdom of bolting food and the
advantage to health resulting from keeping it for some time in the
mouth. In its far-reaching effect on millions in two worlds it was
perhaps of greater and more lasting value than any of his acts as a
statesman.

This assertion gains strength from the fact that it was Gladstone's
example that started Horace Fletcher on his road as a reformer of
the foolish eating habits of Americans, and others, but Americans in
particular.

He has himself related (in the "Ladies' Home Journal" for September,
1909) how it was that his thoughts were first directed into this
channel through an epicurean friend who had a snipe estate among
the marshlands of Louisiana and a truffle preserve in France, and
who faithfully followed Gladstone's rules in regard to the thorough
chewing of food. In 1898 Mr. Fletcher began to work out the problem for
himself, to the great advantage of his health.

At the age of forty he was an old man, on the way to a rapid decline.
His hair was white, he weighed 217 pounds, he was harrowed by
indigestion, and had "that tired feeling." At the age of sixty, after
eleven years of experiment, he had reduced his weight to 170 pounds,
felt strong and well, and had forgotten what it was to have the tired
feeling.

His experience thus was similar to that of the Italian nobleman, Luigi
Cornaro (1467-1566), who was a dissipated wreck at the age of forty,
but who by reforming his way of eating, regained his health and lived
to be nearly a hundred. After his eighty-third year he wrote four
treatises on diet and longevity; his autobiography has passed through
more than forty English editions. His wisdom might be summed up in
these words: "As you grow older eat less."

Horace Fletcher is the Cornaro of the nineteenth century. Everybody who
ever "knows he has a stomach" should read one or both the books he has
written on this subject: "The A B-Z of Our Own Nutrition," and "The
New Glutton or Epicure." The first named owes its value largely to the
fact that it includes reprints of valuable papers by eminent men of
science and physicians, the investigations of most of whom were in part
prompted, or inspired, by Mr. Fletcher's writings. The most important
of these are Dr. Harvey Campbell's Observations on Mastication, and
Prof. Pawlow's articles on Psychic Influence in Digestion.

Most persons labor--or act as if they labored--under the delusion
that the mouth was made chiefly for the _ingestion_ of food and that
the sole use of saliva is to lubricate it so that it can be easily
and quickly swallowed. Mr. Fletcher did not discover the fact that
the mouth is also a most important organ of _digestion_, with the
aid of saliva; but he emphasized this important fact in his writings
as no other writer had ever done, proclaiming it from the housetops
till thousands began to listen and heed and learn and benefit by his
preaching; and therein lies the importance of his name in the history
of dietetic reform.

The gist of his doctrine may be given in a few words: keep all food
(soft as well as hard, liquid as well as solid, moist as well as dry)
in the mouth and chew it till it has become thoroughly mingled with
the saliva, has lost all its flavor, and is ready to disappear down
the throat without an effort at swallowing. Gladstone's directions
in regard to thirty-two masticatory movements are all right for
some foods, but others require no more than twenty, while for some
(onions) seven hundred hardly suffice to remove the odor and make them
digestible. _Unless the mouth thus does its work, the lower digestive
tract has to do it at ten times the expenditure of vital force, and the
result is dyspepsia._

  [Illustration: HORACE FLETCHER]

Never, surely, was preaching more needed than these sermons of Horace
Fletcher to the victims of America's national scourge of chronic
indigestion.

It cannot be denied that there is a considerable amount of questionable
faddism and exaggeration in his doctrines. He, himself, frankly
apologizes for such details in them as "may suggest the scrappiness and
extravagance of an intemperate screed," on the ground that "so-called
screeds sometimes attract attention where sober statement fails to be
heard"; which is unfortunately true.

Many of Fletcher's followers accept his exaggerations along with the
sound parts of his doctrines. They endorse the statements that he,
"in inaugurating the chewing reform has done more to help suffering
humanity than any other man of the present generation"; or, as another
writer, a physician, put it in a letter to him: "What you have done to
unfold physiologic mastication means more for human weal than all the
mere medical prescribes have given the world from Adam to the present
day."

It cannot be denied that medical and other scientific writers were
culpable in not enlightening the public on these important matters, and
it serves them right, therefore, if Fletcher has got the credit and the
fame for doing this. It is estimated that there are already more than
200,000 "Fletcherites" in the United States. In the hope of increasing
their number, in the rational sense of the word, let me dwell on a
few of the things in which, in my opinion, Mr. Fletcher is right, and
some of those beside which readers of his books will do well to place
question marks. In particular, I wish to call further attention to his
valuable remarks on the necessity of doing more "mouth work" than most
of us do, and on the importance of agreeable Flavor in food as an aid
to digestion.

Many thousands of otherwise healthy persons bewail the fact that they
have to avoid some of their favorite dishes because they find them
indigestible. To these individuals Fletcherism, as endorsed by Dr.
Campbell, brings the cheering message that they can eat anything they
please provided they give it the proper mouth treatment.

Inasmuch as individuals differ in regard to the supply of saliva, no
general rules can be laid down as to how many bites any particular
mouthful requires. One person may dispose of a morsel of bread in
thirty mastications while another may need fifty before it has
disappeared down the throat without an effort at swallowing. Mr.
Fletcher once had a tussle with a challot, or young onion, which
"required 722 mastications before disappearing through involuntary
swallowing." But when it was down it left no odor upon the breath and
created no disturbance whatever.

Could anything more triumphantly proclaim the wonders of Fletcherism?

Here is another miracle: "Abundant experiment has been made by those
to whom 'Boston brown bread' was formerly little less than a poison,
to prove the assertion that, sufficiently mixed with saliva, it is
perfectly digestible and that the delicious taste of the bread after
forty or fifty bites--about one-half minute--gets sweeter and sweeter,
and attains its greatest sweetness and most delicate taste at the very
last, when it has dissolved into liquid form and most of it has escaped
into the stomach."

                     THE HARM DONE BY SOFT FOODS.

Dr. Campbell, whose admirable articles on The Importance of Mastication
cannot be too urgently brought to the reader's attention,[2] has
pointed out a very important reason why at present, more than at any
other time in the history of man, there is need of mouth digestion.

The art of cooking has had a beautifying effect on the human face. The
jaws and teeth have become smaller because they are no longer called
upon to bite off and chew raw, tough, and fibrous foods, as they were
in primitive days. One of the results of agricultural progress has
been to diminish the fibrous, cellulosic food and make it more easy to
masticate. The food of to-day is for the most part soft and pappy, of
a kind which does not compel thorough mastication; so much so that Dr.
Campbell thinks we may speak of this as "the age of pap."

Beginning with the babes, we pour into their stomachs all kinds of
artificial saccharine foods in liquid or semi-liquid form, following
this up, later on, with such viands as mashed potatoes and gravy, rusks
soaked in milk, milk puddings, bread dipped in bacon fat, pounded
mutton, thin bread and butter, and the like. Food of this kind does
not invite mastication (nor have mothers been taught to teach their
children to keep it in the mouth, the doctor might have added). "Hence
the instinct to masticate has little opportunity of exercise and not
being properly exercised, tends to die out. Small wonder that the
child nourished on such pappy food acquires the habit of bolting it,
and learns to reject hard, coarse foods in favor of the softer kinds;
everything, nowadays, must be tender, pultaceous, or 'short.'"

The evils resulting from the bolting of this soft food by children and
adults alike are of the gravest and most alarming kind. Overeating
and habitual indigestion are two of them. Morbid craving for food not
needed is another. It is not improbable that the habitual bolting
of food, by the prolonged irritation to which it gives rise, may
predispose to cancer of the stomach. Napoleon was a notoriously fast
eater and it is well known that he died from this disease.

Dr. Campbell also agrees with Sir Frederick Treves that the neglect of
the mastication of food is a potent cause of appendicitis. Solid lumps,
especially in the case of such articles as pineapple, preserved ginger,
nuts, tough meat and lobster, are apt to pass beyond the pylorus and,
escaping intestinal digestion, to lodge in the cœcum and precipitate
an attack of that dreaded disease, the most common predisposing cause
of which is a loaded cœcum, often preceded by constipation.

Summing up his extremely valuable paper on the Evils of Insufficient
Mastication, Dr. Campbell comes to the conclusion that "an appalling
amount of misery and suffering may be saved by the simple expedient of
inculcating the habit of efficient mastication."

It is difficult to teach an old dog new tricks. I have noticed again
and again how hard it is to teach adults to "Fletcherize." They begin
it, find it irksome at first, and drop it. For thorough reform we
must begin with infants; but adults cannot be urged too strongly to
persevere till the habit--like that of breathing--becomes automatic.
The rewards in increased health and enjoyment of life and work are
glorious.

                  EPICUREAN DELIGHTS FROM PLAIN FOOD.

To return to Fletcher's own contributions to this subject. Next to his
dwelling on the importance of "mouth-work" he deserves most praise for
his remarks on the epicurean delights resulting from slow and rational
eating. Herein again, it must be premised, he was far from being the
original discoverer; but he probably did more to call the general
public's attention to the matter than any one else had done, thanks
largely to his habit of introducing vivid illustrations and details of
personal experiences.

"My, but I never realized that potato is so good," exclaimed the young
lady; and "Gracious! isn't this corn bully!" echoed the father.

These exclamations express the outcome of one of Mr. Fletcher's
experiments in teaching others how to get delicious pleasure from the
simplest and commonest foods if munched according to his directions.

If you bolt your food, he says, you get "none of the exquisite taste
that Nature's way offers as an allurement for obeying her beneficent
demands. The way of Nature is the epicurean way; the other way is
nothing but piggish gluttony." It is the way of animals; and Fletcher
named his book "The New Glutton or Epicure" to call attention to the
two ways of taking food.

"An epicurean cannot be a glutton. There may be gluttons who are less
gluttonous than other gluttons, but epicurism is like politeness and
cleanliness, and is the certain mark of gentility." A remark worthy of
the French epigrammatists!

Thackeray called attention to the exquisite enjoyment an epicure
can derive from a slice of buttered brown bread. In the same spirit
Fletcher writes: "For illustration, try a ship's biscuit--commonly
called hardtack--and keep it in the mouth, tasting it as you would
a piece of sugar, till it has disappeared entirely, and note what a
treasure of delight there is in it."

Again: "The most nutritious food does not require sauces. It may seem
dry and tasteless to the first impression, but, as the juices of the
mouth get possession of it, warm it up, solve its life-giving qualities
out of it and coax it into usefulness, the delight of a newfound
delicacy will greet the discoverer."

                     HOW FLAVOR HELPS THE STOMACH.

In all cases, be the food simple or the outcome of a French chef's
culinary alchemy, it is its Flavor that makes it agreeable and by so
doing stimulates the flow of the juices necessary for proper digestion.

In the case of the mouth and its salivary glands this is obvious to
all. Everybody knows that the fragrance of good food "makes the mouth
water."

In the case of the stomach, the connection is much less obvious.
Until a few years ago even the medical men were in the dark on this
extremely important aspect of the question, although French and German
physiologists had made important discoveries.

  [Illustration: A French chef's culinary alchemy]

It remained for Professor Pawlow of St. Petersburg to throw the bright
light of scientific experiment on this subject.

He demonstrated in his St. Petersburg laboratory that the mere presence
of food in a dog's stomach--which is like a man's in that respect--does
not suffice to cause a flow of gastric juice, but that the psychic
factor we call appetite--a keen desire for food--causes an abundant
flow of that fluid, without which the digestion cannot proceed.

Now it might be said that there was really no need of laboratory
experiments to tell us that food eaten without enjoyment lies like lead
in the stomach and does more harm than good.

It is nevertheless a great advantage to have a scientific demonstration
of the fact and an explanation of it, because it encourages us in the
right way of eating.

Instinct showed that way long ago; it did its best to intimate that
food should be eaten with interest and enjoyment.

Too often, unfortunately, no attention has been paid to this instinct.
Among the Russians (who do not, in this respect, differ from other
peoples) "an absolutely unphysiological indifference towards
eating often exists," Professor Pawlow says. "In wider circles of
the community a due conception of the importance of eating should
be disseminated. How often do the people who have charge of the
commissariat pay attention solely to the nutritive value of the food,
or place a higher value on everything else than taste!"

Yet it is the "taste" (Flavor) of food that arouses the appetite. As
the French say, "the appetite comes while we are eating." Medical
men of various countries in former times paid special attention to
the restoration of a patient's appetite. In more recent text books
less attention is paid to appetite as a symptom; but Prof. Pawlow's
experiments have again, and for all time, demonstrated its importance.

Those young ladies who think it is "nice" and "feminine" to pretend
to have no appetite should read the Pawlow papers, and have all that
nonsense knocked out of their heads. A poor appetite is a danger
signal--a thing to arouse pity and to be cured, just like a headache or
a fever.

"Appetite juice" is one of the suggestive names Professor Pawlow gives
to the fluid which digests food in the stomach. There is little or
none of it for the man who eats without noticing his food, unable to
distract his thoughts from his work, as so often happens to those
who live in the midst of the incessant turmoil of large cities. This
inattention to the act of eating (to the Flavor of the food) prepares
the way for digestive disturbances with all the various diseases
following them. No medical treatment can help such a patient--unless he
reforms and eats rationally.

Thus, the studies of Dr. Pawlow fully bear out my contention as to the
Vital Importance of Flavor in Food.

  [Illustration: An American quick-lunch]

There is one more of his observations to which superlative importance
attaches. One of his experiments on dogs showed that if food was given
gradually in small quantities, it led to the secretion of much stronger
gastric juice than when the animal was allowed to eat the whole ration
at once.

This was a laboratory demonstration of the wisdom of the best medical
treatment of a weak stomach; "and such a regulation of diet,"
continues the professor, "is all the more necessary, since, in the
commonest disorders of the stomach, only the surface layers of the
mucous membrane are affected. It may, consequently, happen that the
sensory surface of the stomach, which should take up the stimulus of
the chemical excitant, is not able to fulfil its duty, and the period
of chemical secretion, which ordinarily lasts for a long time, is
for the most part disturbed, or even wholly absent. A strong psychic
excitation, a keen feeling of appetite, may evoke the secretory impulse
in the central nervous system and send it unhindered to the glands
which lie in the deeper as yet unaffected layers of mucous membrane."

Doubtless the very interesting physiological detail here pointed out
by the eminent Russian professor, explains the dietetic as well as
gastronomic wisdom of the old fashioned table d'hôte of the European
hotels. Half a dozen or more courses follow one another leisurely in
course of an hour or more during which the pleasant Flavor of one dish
after another keeps the appetite on edge and gives plenty of time for
the deeper as well as the surface layers of the glands to secrete their
beneficent and comforting digestive juices.

From such a leisurely dinner, with courses skilfully made up of
contrasting flavors to prevent the appetite from flagging, we rise
cheerful and at peace with all the world, whereas an American
quick-lunch, or a railroad dinner gulped down in ten minutes makes us
feel like swearing off eating for all time.

                          AN AMAZING BLUNDER.

How far we have traveled away from that foolish, nay, criminal Puritan
notion that enjoyment of the pleasures of the table is a reprehensible
form of sensual indulgence--the notion which made Walter Scott's father
pour hot water into the soup because the boy liked it!

That attitude was a blunder, a huge blunder, as the preceding pages
prove.

A still bigger blunder, and one equally deplorable and mischievous, now
claims our attention--a blunder so amazing, so incomprehensible that it
seems almost incredible: _the universal belief, among men of science as
well as the laity, that the pleasures of the table come to us through
the sense of taste_.

How I happened to discover that this notion is a blunder, I now beg the
reader's permission to relate briefly.

In 1878 Harvard University rewarded me for my hard work in the
philosophical department (under Professors Bowen and Palmer) by giving
me the Harris Fellowship, which enabled me to continue my study of
physiological and comparative psychology for three years at the
universities of Germany.

I recall vividly my boyish delight in the pleasures of the senses of
sight, hearing, and smell. During my college course and afterwards I
diligently studied the phenomena of these senses in man and animals
in all the books and scientific papers I could find; and thus it came
about that my first magazine articles were on the Æsthetic Value of
Odors, and The Development of the Color Sense. The first of these was
accepted by W. D. Howells, for the "Atlantic Monthly" (December, 1880);
the second, by Alfred Russell Wallace, for "Macmillan's Magazine"
(London, December, 1879). I mention these things to show that the
senses of man and animals have been a subject of special interest with
me for more than four decades, and that when I went to Germany, I took
up the study of them not as an amateur but as one prepared (as well as
eager) to make original researches.

My most ardent desire was to work in the laboratories of the University
of Berlin under Professor Helmholtz, whose monumental books on the
sensations of tone and on the phenomena of sight had revealed so many
secrets to the world of science. Unfortunately he was not lecturing on
those subjects at that time. Moreover, reperusal of his books made me
feel as if he had covered all the most interesting ground. I therefore
looked about for a region in which I could do some exploring on my own
account, and soon found it in the functions of the senses of smell and
taste.

Concerning these two senses, the most absurdly incorrect notions were
current at that time even among leaders in science. Grant Allen, known
as "the St. Paul of Darwinism," voiced the current biological opinion
when he wrote that with man "smell survives with difficulty as an
almost functionless relic"; and Darwin himself wrote that this sense is
"of extremely slight service" to man.

The king of German philosophers, Kant, who was an epicure, maintained
that smell is the least important of our senses, and that it
is not worth while to cultivate it. Nay, the king of epicures,
Brillat-Savarin, wrote a famous book the very title of which,
"Physiology of Taste," is a scientific blunder. Like everybody else, he
believed in the existence of an infinite variety of tastes, and never
suspected that, _with the exception of sweet, sour, salt and bitter,
all our countless gastronomic delights come to us through the sense of
smell_.

                      A NEW PSYCHOLOGY OF EATING.

The French physiologist Longet and the German anatomist Henle were,
so far as I could find, the only experts who had an inkling of the
gastronomic importance of the sense of smell; but they did not go so
far as to formulate the theory I have just expressed in italics. My
experiments showed me that not only is it impossible, with the nose
clasped (or closed by a cold), to tell the difference between various
kinds of meats, or cheeses, or cakes, or vegetables, but also--which
no one had ever pointed out--that even in the case of sweet and sour
substances which do gratify the palate, _the sense of smell is much
more important than the sense of taste_.

Vinegar, for example, is absolutely uninteresting unless it has a
"bouquet"--the aroma of the cider, wine, or malt of which it is made.
And why is it that we are willing to pay from five to twenty times
as much for candy as for plain sugar? Because the sugar appeals only
to the taste, whereas the candy is usually perfumed with the aroma
of sarsparilla, wintergreen, vanilla, chocolate, and a hundred other
flavoring ingredients the fragrance of which we enjoy by _exhaling
through the nose while eating it_.

The emphasis lies on the word _exhaling_. It is considered a breach of
etiquette to smell of things at the table in the ordinary way, because
it implies a doubt as to the freshness of the food. But there is a
second way of smelling of which most persons are unconscious, although
they practise it daily. Anatomy shows that only a small portion of the
mucous membrane which lines the nostrils is the seat of the endings of
the nerves of smell. In ordinary expiration the air does not touch this
olfactory region. But when we eat in the right way we unconsciously
guide the air impregnated with the Flavors of the food we are munching,
into that region, and that is the way we enjoy our food. We do this
unconsciously, I say; but now try and do it consciously, guiding the
expired air _very slowly_ through the nose, and your enjoyment of a
meal will be quintupled.

Obviously Kant made the mistake of his life when he said the sense
of smell was not worth cultivating. It not only provides us with
additional table pleasures, the hygienic and tonic value of which
has been sufficiently dwelt upon, but it is a fact of unspeakable
importance that the more we educate the nose, the more discriminating
we make it, and the more stubbornly therefore we insist on having
wholesome food only.

This new psychology of eating I set forth for the first time in the
"Contemporary Review" (London, November, 1888), under the title of "The
Gastronomic Value of Odors." It was commented on as a psychological
curiosity, but otherwise attracted little attention. At that time
there was not the same general interest that there is now in the food
question. Even Gladstone's directions regarding eating were more
frequently smiled at than followed.

Since his day many things have happened to give the food question
an aspect of superlative importance, particularly the wholesale
adulterations described in the preceding pages. That among those who
have helped to awaken the public to a realizing sense of the importance
of this subject no one deserves more credit than Mr. Fletcher--who has
been immortalized in the dictionaries by the inclusion of the verb "to
Fletcherize"--has been stated before. So beneficent, on the whole, has
been his influence that I hesitate to point out any of his mistakes;
but as some of them obscure the truth, I will do so.

He first made public his views, in a crude form, eleven years after
the appearance of my article on the gastronomic value of odors. That
article anticipates some important details of his doctrines, but he
evidently never saw it, because in his books he makes only one brief
reference to the sense of smell and perpetuates all the old errors
regarding that insolent pretender, the sense of taste. This is to be
regretted, for it left his followers groping in the dark as to the best
way of getting the most pleasure and benefit out of their food, at home
and at their "munching parties."

There is one detail of Fletcherism which every epicure will fight with
his last drop of ink. If we all followed his example, living on griddle
cakes, butter, and syrup (at a cost of eleven cents a day), or some
other equally simple menu, as he advises, what would become of that
delectable variety which is the spice of gastronomy, and what of the
farmers, and the hundreds of industries which supply this variety?

True gastronomic progress, I maintain, lies in the direction of
multiplying the pleasures of the table--an important phase of our
subject which will be discussed in a later chapter.

We must now turn the limelight once more on Ungastronomic America.

                          OUR DENATURED FOODS

Bearing in mind the superlative importance to our well-being of Flavor
in the food we eat, the reader is now in a position to appreciate the
full force of a third indictment to be brought against those who spoil
our food. The first indictment was that they use chemical preservatives
which arrest digestion and often act as cumulative poisons; the second,
that they use chemicals which enable unscrupulous persons to sell foods
made of nauseating and dangerous raw material, so disguised as to fool
the buyer.

The culprits now to be arraigned are those who, from ignorance,
indolence, or greed to get rich quick, adopt devices which spoil the
Flavor of our food and thus destroy our appetite and undermine the
health of the community.

Denatured is the word used for alcohol that has been made unfit to
drink by the addition of chemicals, and denatured is hardly too
strong a word to apply to many if not most of the foods offered in the
American markets and stores, the offense being aggravated by the fact
that the prices usually asked for these are quite as high as those
asked for foods preserved by the wholesome old condimental methods,
although the cost to the maker is only a fraction of what it would be
if those methods were followed.

Palatable, appetizing smoked bacon and hams are still to be found in
our markets by those who know a thing or two, and sternly insist on
getting what they ask for; but for the vast majority of consumers
smoked meats have disappeared. Meats lose weight--up to 20 per
cent.--during the process of smoking, and therefore bring the dealer
less profit. What he offers is usually denatured--unappetizing and
indigestible. The same holds true of smoked fish, which used to
make an epicure's mouth water. Why it does so no longer is shown by
the following paragraphs from Philadelphia, printed in the New York
"Evening Post":

                      _Fish Was Dyed, not Smoked_

   The dairy and food bureau of the State Agricultural Department
   has discovered that a large number of delicatessen and other
   stores of this city have been for a long time selling "dyed"
   fish as a substitute for smoked fish. When Harry P. Cassidy,
   the agent of the bureau told the retail store proprietors what
   they were doing, they were surprised, as they had purchased
   the stuff as genuine smoked fish.

   Cassidy's attention to the food article was attracted by its
   rich red color. Purchasing some, he had it examined, and the
   expert reported that he could dye wool with the coloring
   matter extracted from it. In smoking fish there is a loss of
   fifteen pounds to every hundred, it is said, but in dyeing
   there is no loss at all. This permitted the violators of the
   law to undersell their competitors in the smoked fish industry.

Nor is our fresh fish usually more palatable. New York, for instance,
ought to be a paradise of fish eaters, yet how seldom is it served in
prime condition, even in leading restaurants! In Germany they have
various ways of bringing fish to market alive, even in interior towns;
over here they are kept in cold storage for weeks, months--indeed
years, although fish deteriorates by this process much more rapidly
than even poultry--of which more anon; and everybody knows that the
poorest kind of fish just out of the water is better than the best kind
after it has been out a day or two.

Were we a gastronomic nation we would rise in revolt against the
wholesale denaturing of our food to be presently described in more
detail. We should insist on always having real French or German-style
bread, with crisp, tasty crust, refusing the soggy loaves made of
bleached, bolted flour robbed of its nutritious phosphates and sources
of Flavor; refusing also the machine-polished rice deprived of its
nutritious outer parts, in which lies the delicate Flavor of this
cereal, leaving it pretty to look at, but, as one of the Government's
agricultural experts, David Fairchild, has forcibly expressed it, "as
tasteless as the paste that a paper-hanger brushes on his rolls of
wallpaper."

We should exclude the chemically greened teas dumped into our groceries
because they are not wanted in any other country. We should protest
against the peaches and pears and other fruits formerly brought into
our markets soft, sun-ripened, luscious, but now offered to us hard,
unripe, flavorless.

The melancholy list of gastronomic misdeeds might be prolonged
indefinitely.

In all these cases, let me emphasize this fact once more, that what is
eliminated from the food is its very soul, its precious Flavor, which
makes it appetizing and enjoyable and therefore digestible. We allow
covetous or ignorant manufacturers as well as incompetent or indolent
cooks to spoil our naturally good food because we do not as a nation,
realize that on its pleasurableness depend our health and comfort, our
happiness and capacity for hard work, more than perhaps on anything
else--a point which cannot be emphasized too often.

Now for a few details, beginning with the treatment to which our
poultry is subjected, which has long been a national calamity and a
scandal of the first order.

                              FOUL FOWL.

Perhaps more than anything else, what makes us stand before the world
as a deplorably ungastronomic nation is our tolerance of the tainted,
unpalatable, cold-storage poultry served in public eating places as
well as in private houses in nine cases out of ten.

We spent the months of May to September, 1912, in Europe, traveling in
France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and England. Nearly every day we
ate chicken, or some other kind of poultry and not once did we have
any that was in the least like our cold-storage fowls; everything was
fresh, sweet, juicy, and appetizing. Again and again I said to my wife,
or she to me: "I wish we could get such chicken in New York!"

An American lady of wealth said to me a few years ago that one of the
reasons why she went to Europe every summer was that she liked good
things to eat and could get them so much more easily and regularly
abroad--particularly butter, and her favorite dish, chicken. She knew
of the poulet de Bresse--that explained it all. I shall never forget,
though I live another half-century, my first taste of that particular
brand of fowl. I had arrived at one of the leading Paris hotels too
late for the table d'hôte, and thinking I was not hungry, ordered
nothing but a portion of chicken and a bowl of salad. The waiter
brought an enormous portion, and I had hardly tasted it when I found I
was ravenously hungry. Not a shred of it was left.

The delicious taste of that sort of fancy poultry is due in part to the
particular breed, but more still to the use of special kinds of food
which give a rich and delicate flavor to the flesh, as the so-called
wild celery of the Chesapeake Bay does in the case of our best ducks
and turtles.

Nature provides our canvasback and redhead ducks and terrapin--not too
bountifully, it is true--but when it comes to mortal man's treatment,
in this country, of the poultry that has to take the place of the
formerly abundant game, what do we see? A state of affairs that would
not be tolerated one week on the European continent.

It is officially estimated that from 75 to 90 per cent. of all the
poultry produced in the United States is preserved in cold storage
for months, often for years. What is worse still, "only a very small
percentage of the fowls which are placed in cold storage are drawn,"
the result being that by a physiological process known as osmosis the
meat becomes tainted in a most offensive manner. The warehouse men
and dealers have for years been fighting furiously against the health
boards of various cities and states for the privilege of perpetuating
this state of affairs, which greatly simplifies the poultry business
and enables them to sell the entrails of a fowl at the same price
per pound as the meat; but the long-suffering public has at last
become thoroughly aroused, convinced that many obscure disorders of
the digestive tract are due to the consumption of undrawn and other
cold-storage poultry, not to speak of the horror of eating such stuff.

A young woman informs me that one day she went into a butcher's shop
(in a part of town where prosperous families live) and ordered a
chicken. The butcher took one down, but when he cut it open such a
stench came from it that she stepped back in horror. Yet the man tried
to persuade her to take it, remarking: "That's all right! Just wash
it in a solution of borax, or in vinegar and water and the odor will
disappear."

This happened in New York City in the year 1912; it was not an
exceptional case; thousands of such offensive carcasses are sold
in American cities daily. Nor is it necessary to cut them open to
know that they are unfit for food. Their greenish, mummified, rigid
appearance reveals their unpalatable condition. Daily, for years, as
I have walked along the streets of New York and seen these hideous
bird corpses brazenly exposed for sale, I have wondered at a community
which will tolerate such a thing. As the authors of Bulletin No. 115 of
the Bureau of Chemistry[3] say, a careful inspection of cold-storage
fowls before cooking "would do much to destroy any appetite which might
otherwise have been manifested for these birds when cooked."

On pages 100-101 of his monumental work on foods and their adulteration
which should be read by all consumers as well as dealers because of its
impartial statement of the case, Dr. Wiley remarks pertinently that
"the keeping of chickens with the intestinal contents undisturbed does
not appeal to the imagination of the consumer any more than would the
freezing of the carcass of a beef or hog with the viscera remaining in
it."

Elsewhere the great reformer put his finger on the most vulnerable and
undeniable aspect of the storage business: "Palatability is one of the
elements of wholesomeness, and we find in cold storage _a tremendous
decrease in palatability_."

From this kind of tainted, unappetizing, unpalatable chicken to the
poulet de Bresse, what a long road we have to travel. Under present
conditions, as a matter of course, it makes no difference what we
feed our fowls; all are foul alike, and will remain so as long as the
American public remains content to fall so far below the European
gastronomic level.

The packers and dealers, of course, laugh at Dr. Wiley's statement
that, under the present scientific methods of production, poultry can
be furnished in a fresh state all the year round (as it is in Europe).
They do not want it fresh; they want it in their refrigerators so they
can regulate and artificially raise prices. The worst offenders are the
men who speculate in storage fowls, making, say, $10,000 or $20,000
in one day. That enables them to cross the Atlantic and eat _edible_
chicken in Paris.

The simplest way for the consumer to thwart the conspirators against
his appetite and stomach is to buy of genuinely Kosher butchers, who by
their tenets are not allowed to handle cold-storage fowls; or direct of
the farmer, with whom an arrangement can be made to send the freshly
killed and promptly cleaned poultry to one's home. In this way the
total cost does not exceed regular city prices, and oh! the difference
in the effect on our well-being, not to speak of getting even with the
"icemen."

The introduction of parcel's post greatly reduced the cost of this
method of securing fresh poultry. In European countries, particularly
France and Germany, the parcel's post has done much to eliminate
middlemen, and many thousands of consumers make use of this chance to
get provisions fresh and direct from the producer.

There are reasons to believe that the present high prices of beef and
mutton will never come down again, but will climb higher still because
the former vast grazing-grounds of the West are being cut up into
farms. But to the raising of chickens there is no limit. By applying
the methods of intensive farming the supply can be steadily increased
and prices lowered. Chicken day is destined to become more and more
frequent, and it is for the consumer to decide whether his chicken
dinner shall be appetizing, enjoyable, and beneficial, or remain what
it is now in most cases, a gastronomic calamity.

From the point of view of Flavor, which is the main theme of the
present volume, this subject is of such importance that a few more
pages must be devoted to it.

                  THE FRENCH WAY VERSUS THE AMERICAN.

In Paris one eats the best chicken in the world; in New York, as a
rule, the worst. How do they do it in France? The answer will be given
in the chapter on French Gastronomic Supremacy; here let us anticipate
only a few details as supplied to the Government of the United States
by Newton B. Ashby, special agent of the Bureau of Animal Industry and
published in its Sixteenth Annual Report (1899).

The French, he notes, "are economic people, and the system of sending
young and immature chickens to market is not practised. The fowls sent
to market are from 4 to 8 months old. They are carefully fed and grown
for market instead of being allowed to scavenge. For instance, the
chickens are given clean water instead of being allowed the run of
filthy pools and puddles."

The method of slaughter, he goes on to say, "seems to be chiefly by
cutting the jugular vein. The fowl is then dry plucked very carefully
to prevent tearing the flesh, and is drawn through the vent."

  [Illustration: How they do it in France?]

Note those last six words. They show that _the French do not allow
chickens to remain undrawn even one day_; for, as Mr. Ashby continues,
"the fowls are packed the afternoon or evening of the day of slaughter,
and despatched to Paris by special express train that night. They are
due in Paris before five o'clock in the morning. They are delivered
at once to the market, and are sold on the day of arrival, so that
French fowls are generally disposed of in the market within twenty to
twenty-four hours after being killed.... In July and August many French
fowls come to the market alive."

"The Paris markets, and French markets generally," we are further told,
"do not take kindly to foreign poultry or meat." Such poultry would of
course have to be brought in cold storage, and what the nation which
knows most about eating wants is fresh chicken. "Foreign poultry is
not in demand in Paris," because the French know and have known for
generations that to freeze meat is to spoil it. On this subject I shall
have some further remarks in a later section on the Roast Beef of Old
England.

   Now look at the way much of the poultry consumed in American
   cities is gathered. Dr. Cavana of Oneida, N. Y., who found no
   fewer than eleven distinct groups of bacteria in the flesh
   of a single undrawn fowl, remarked, in a lecture delivered
   in 1906, at the Annual Convention of Railway Surgeons, that
   poultry stocks are collected for eastern cities from all parts
   of the country. He goes on to say that after slaughter the
   feathers are removed and the carcasses packed in barrels,
   generally without further dressing. The head, feet, and legs,
   as well as the craw of partially digested food, therefore, is
   left in the sealed cavities of the fowls, forming conditions
   which force the general infection of the tissues by the
   flagellated, or rapidly swimming intestinal bacteria, which
   double their quantity and numbers every forty minutes, a
   single bacillus being capable of developing over forty-two
   billion germs in twenty-four hours. Their shipments are made
   by rail and steamship, and cover transit periods of several
   days before reaching the cold atmospheres of the storage
   warehouses.

   "To determine the activity of these germs and the period
   required for their permeation of the tissues in the
   slaughtered undrawn fowl, we caused to be made a series of
   experiments, the results of which justify the belief that a
   great percentage of the infected poultry and game stock in
   storage became so infected before reaching the low temperature
   of the storage warehouses."

Nor does ordinary cold storage destroy the noisome bacteria. They are
merely scotched, to revive and multiply at the first opportunity.

One of the principal objections to cold-storage poultry is that after
being taken from the storehouse they decompose much more quickly than
fresh birds.

Some dealers aggravate the evil by soaking the poultry when taken out
of storage in cold water for the purpose of thawing. This adds to its
weight, to the profit of the dealer, but it "causes heavy bacterial
infection," as Dr. Charles Harrington, secretary of the Massachusetts
Board of Health, has pointed out. Dr. Pennington, in an article on
Changes in Chickens in Cold Storage, to which we shall recur, refers
to a case in which a frozen fowl, after being immersed in water, had
increased in weight eleven per cent. (to the dealer's profit).

In Bulletin 144 of the United States Department of Agriculture we read:

   "Under precisely the same conditions of temperature and
   humidity, drawn fowls will keep from twenty to thirty days
   longer than those not drawn. The presence of undigested food
   and of excrementitious substances in animals which have been
   killed most certainly favors the tainting of the flesh and
   general decomposition. The viscera are the first parts to show
   putrescence, and allowing these to remain within the body
   cannot do otherwise than favor infection of the flesh with
   bacteria and ptomaines, even if osmosis does not actually
   carry putrid juices to contiguous tissues. Hunters know the
   value of drawing birds as soon as possible after they have
   been shot, in order to keep them fresh and sweet and to
   prevent their having a strong intestinal flavor."

Read also the following weighty remarks reprinted from Senate Report
No. 1991, March 22, 1906:

   The process of decomposition and putrefaction begins at once
   after the death of the animal. Cold storage and freezing may
   limit the rotting process, but do not entirely stop it. When
   poultry or animals are taken from cold storage and are thawed
   out for exhibition and sale, the decomposition continues with
   marked energy, impregnating the flesh with poisons--and this
   decomposition is exceedingly rapid even when the poultry is
   kept in the market or grocery refrigerator, the temperature of
   which is much higher than that of the cold-storage warehouse.
   Flesh in which the blood has been permitted to remain is
   particularly susceptible to such decomposition, and this
   susceptibility is increased by the long period of freezing and
   thawing.

   Even with poultry which is "freshly killed" there is
   frequently a period of several days between the time of
   slaughtering and sale. Not only is it dangerous, but it is
   repugnant to our sense of decency, that the flesh we are
   to eat shall lie for several days in close contact with
   putrefying animal matter.

   Undoubtedly undrawn poultry, fish, and game have caused many
   cases of poisoning which have been wrongfully attributed
   to other sources. The poisoning resulting often resembles
   that caused by other poisons administered by persons or
   taken with suicidal intent. Many sufferers from digestive
   troubles--headache, nausea, colic, and diarrhea after eating,
   owe their ailments to tainted foods.

   We are advised that the reason for slaughtering poultry
   without thorough bleeding is the saving in the weight of the
   fowl, and this reason is doubtless also one for the storing
   of poultry and offering it for sale without removing the
   viscera. There is, however, no reason why the consumer should
   be compelled to purchase a large percentage of excreta,
   offal, and refuse with his poultry. We would not tolerate the
   addition of a certain percentage of weight in the form of
   entrails of the steer with each beefsteak we buy. The consumer
   purposes to buy edible food and not the disgusting waste
   which should be eliminated in the process of slaughtering and
   dressing. It is just as reasonable to ask the consumer to buy
   hogs, calves, and lambs without the intestines removed as to
   solicit his purchase of undrawn turkeys and chickens.

                        WHY DO WE EAT POULTRY?

After the appearance, in "The Century Magazine" of November, 1911, of
my article on Ungastronomic America, in which I denounced the practice
of offering the public undrawn, cold-storage poultry, I was bombarded
with abusive letters from packers and others, and a periodical,
called "The Steward," fancied that it had completely demolished
me by quoting the results obtained by Dr. Mary E. Pennington, in
collaboration with Evelyn Witmer and H. C. Pierce, during a series of
observations described in a circular entitled "The Comparative Rate of
Decomposition in Drawn and Undrawn Market Poultry" published in 1911 by
the Department of Agriculture. This result of these observations was
that "undrawn poultry decomposes more slowly than does poultry which
has been either wholly or partially eviscerated."

This statement does not agree with the conclusion reached and printed
in the Bulletin No. 144 to which I have already referred, that "under
precisely the same conditions of temperature and humidity, drawn fowls
will keep from twenty to thirty days longer than those not drawn."

This statement is doubtless correct--provided the fowls have been
eviscerated in such a way as to keep the cavity absolutely free from
contamination. If this is _not_ done, the drawn fowl will, for obvious
reasons, spoil even sooner than the undrawn. It is _not_ usually done
by the American packers; and the moral is, _not_ that undrawn fowl is
preferable to drawn fowl for packing, but that these packers should
send their men to France or Germany to learn how properly to draw fowls.

The consumer, anyway, is not interested in "keeping qualities." What
he wants is chicken that is good to eat, and the shorter a time it has
been kept, the better for him, in every way.

Dr. Wiley refers to experiments which have "shown the advisability of
packing drawn poultry in tin cartons, carefully closed"; adding that
"fowls thus treated preserve to a remarkable degree their freshness and
palatability."

If that degree of freshness and palatibilty is sufficient to satisfy
the consumer, then cold storage has a future. If not, cold storage is
doomed, for undrawn, frozen poultry will, I feel sure, _not_ be eaten
much longer by the American public.

Why do we eat poultry, anyway? Surely not merely because we want food.
If that were the case, why waste money on expensive chicken or turkey,
when we could get the same amount of nourishment from many other foods
at a mere fraction of the cost? _The reason why we eat chicken in
preference to those other foods is that we want to enjoy its flavor._
And we do _not_ want frozen, undrawn poultry, not only because the
freezing spoils the flavor but because the leaving of the entrails in
the animal makes it unwholesome.

One of the main arguments of the packers in favor of leaving fowls
undrawn is that they dry out sooner when drawn. A more deadly boomerang
it would be difficult to throw. There is only one way in which the
drying carcass of a fowl can get its moisture: from the contents of
the entrails. That is what is meant by osmosis. Thus out of their own
mouths the packers stand convicted of offering the public fowl which is
disgustingly tainted.

The best part of the fowl--the second joint--gets the taint soonest,
because it lies nearest the intestines. The wings and drumsticks get it
last. It is important to know this, because it explains why experts may
differ as to the time it takes to spoil the flavor of a stored bird.
Usually the process is quite rapid.

The whole question of the tainting of meat by osmosis deserves much
more attention than it has received. A wild boar has to be eviscerated
at once after being killed. If this is not done, none of the meat is
fit to eat except the head--which explains why "wild boar's head," and
the head alone--often figures on bills of fare in France and Germany.
My wife, who was brought up in Southern France knew a wealthy silk
merchant, a great hunter in his own domains, who always promptly
removed the entrails of the boars he killed, before the carcass grew
cold, the consequence being that all the meat was good to eat, as his
friends were given many a chance to find out.

For several years some of the New York butchers have indulged in the
custom of exhibiting in their windows the carcasses of lambs with their
pelts still on. If a Paris butcher did that, the first of his customers
coming along would ask him if he didn't know that unless the pelt is
taken off at once after killing a _mouton_, the meat gets from it a
disagreeable "sheepy" flavor--which is a very different thing from the
unique and delicious flavor properly dressed mutton has.

Perhaps the most striking illustration of the rapid action of osmosis
is provided by venison, which is unfit to eat if the deer has been
tortured by a cruel chase. Its terror affects the digestive juices, and
the whole body becomes tainted.

                      IS COLD STORAGE A BLESSING?

In an editorial entitled "Cold Storage Hardly a Blessing" the New York
"Times" called attention during the holiday season of 1911 to the fact
that the price of cold-storage turkeys was six cents a pound less than
that of the fresh-killed birds. "This difference of almost 25 per
cent. is an admission by the cold-storage people, forced from them by
unalterable public opinion, that their much-wanted wares are to just
about that extent inferior to those which they vociferously declare to
be no better."

Quoting the happy expression that cold-storage fowls taste "as if they
had been buried and dug up again," the same writer remarks: "None of
us really knows how fowls do taste after they have gone through that
process. We can imagine the flavor, however, and do, noses helping
tongues."

Were it not for the storage people, chickens and eggs would come into
our markets fresh, cheap, and in abundance at the time when they are
at their best. But it is precisely when they are at their best and
cheapest that the storage men corner the market and hold the goods
till they are good no more; whereupon they sell them at their own
prices, largely increased through gambling. In view of such facts the
"Times" refers to cold storage as "a baleful invention."

A baleful invention it certainly is--and a needless one, too. To quote
Dr. Wiley again: "Poultry is a food product which under the present
scientific methods of production can be furnished in a fresh state all
the year. The necessity for cold storage, therefore, is not so apparent
in this case as in that of fruit and other perishable foods."

The American public, surely, will not much longer tolerate the present
condition of affairs. There are packers and packers. Some are more
careful and cleanly in their methods than others; but cold-storage fowl
at its best is more or less denatured, and at its worst it is worse
than denatured, putting us almost on a level with the African Bushmen
who, when they kill a sheep, eat the entrails with their contents.
I would no more eat such undrawn storage poultry as is placed daily
before thousands of my countrymen than I would the flesh of a hyena or
a vulture.

It was estimated that, in 1912, $75,000,000 worth of poultry was
consumed in New York City. Of this, only $1,500,000 represented the
business done in live chickens, and nearly all of this went to the
Kosher butchers of the East Side. Surely Christians cannot afford to be
less cleanly than Hebrews in regard to what they put in their stomachs.

The time has come for Christians to gird up their loins and fight for
untainted food on their tables, too. There is encouragement in the
information that in one season 1,100 more cars of live poultry were
shipped to New York City than the season before (1910), and that plants
were being established near the city for providing poultry freshly
slaughtered and dressed. The consumer must, however, make sure that
the fowls are not only freshly killed but drawn within a few days;
the second joint is sometimes tainted on the second day. Butchers
and poultry dealers would make friends if they gave up the habit of
charging for fowl at so much a pound including the intestines. Let them
charge more per pound for the meat alone, refusing under any conditions
to have an undrawn bird in their shops, and the poultry business will
soon be doubled, nay, quintupled.

The fact that fresh fowl costs more than frozen is due to artificial
conditions which can be remedied and _must_ be remedied. For the
present, if you cannot afford a six-pound fowl, try one weighing three