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A Talk on Food

IN the morning you work about the house, putting it in order, or you work in the garden with your flowers, or you go to market. Your husband attends to his work out-of-doors or in the office, and when mid-day is reached neither of you feel willing to do any more work, until you have eaten your mid-day meal. Your energy and motive power are gone. The movements you have made, not only those you have made of your own accord in working about the house, but also those made involuntarily by your heart in beating, your lungs in breathing, and your brain in thinking, have wasted your stock of energy and worn away tissues of flesh, blood and bones. This waste must be renewed at once, or you will remain faint and inactive; or, if the renewal be deferred for days, you will cease to live. More than this, if you have not attained your full normal growth, there must be a constant supply of material for this purpose. The material to renew energy and tissues and supply new growth comes from the food that is eaten. Not all the articles that we use as food contain elements for growth and repair of tissues; from this fact you can see that, if those whom you send from your tables each day have not been supplied with the proper articles of food, you can not expect them to retain health or have the energy and courage to do their work in the world. An old saying expresses this in concise form, which you can easily remember; it is: "The stomach is the seat of courage." EXPERIENCE THE FIRST TEACHER REGARDING FOOD We use for food substances that are found in the world around us. How the earliest men and women learned what substances would best satisfy hunger and build strong bodies we have no means of knowing. Experience is a dear teacher, but, doubtless, outside of natural instinct, she was the first teacher in the primitive world. Poisonous berries, though bright and attractive in color, are avoided by birds and four-footed animals by instinct. The instincts of early man, as far as everything that pertained to the preservation of life was concerned, must have been very acute. At the present time the discovery of a really new article of food is of such rare occurrence that we are justified in saying there are none such to be discovered. Of course there may be foods new to us, but some one else has already known and used them. WATER, AIR, CARBON AND COMBUSTION Water and air are vital necessities to us, but they are not accounted as food, as they cannot stay hunger, build tissues or supply heat or energy; still food is of no value to us without them, and, in composition with other compounds, they enter into all food. Carbon is another compound that occurs in food and in almost all matter in the world around us. When a crust of bread is toasted until it is charred throughout, we know it as carbon. So also is the smoke left upon the lamp chimney, when the wick of a lamp is turned too high. The charred remains of all substances are carbon.