Uncooked Foods & How to Use Them - Soil and Health Library

ECONOMY—SIMPLICITY.
IF there were nothing else to recommend the use of uncooked
foods except simplicity and economy, it would be quite
enough. There is nothing more complicated—more laborious
and more nerve-destroying, than the preparation of the
alleged good dinner. There is nothing simpler, easier and
more entertaining than the preparation of an uncooked dinner.
The largest eating place in New York could be operated from
an ice box and a pantry, were they to abolish the cooking
habit. This in all probability will be done a thousand or more
years from now, when people learn the true relations between
food, energy and health.
In order to gain some conception of the number of
articles used in the preparation of a Thanksgiving dinner, the
authors took a very careful inventory during its preparation,
from the kitchen of a New York hotel to which they had
entrée. The total was 192, while dozens of articles counted as
one, such as catsups, sauces, mayonnaise dressings, chowchows.
Such things were composed of from two to half a
dozen different ingredients, which, if they could have been
ascertained, would have run the grand total up, in all
probability, to 250 different articles.
Is this not a hint from which any one at all gifted with the
power of analysis might draw a few deductions that would
explain why it is that nearly all diseases common to civilized
man have their origin in the stomach and intestinal organs?
All these food items must be carried in stock by
somebody. They are first collected from the place of their
growth, and brought to storehouses, factories, packing
houses, mills, and cookeries, and put into casks, hogsheads,
barrels, kegs, jugs, bottles, tin cans, bags, intestines of
animals, and every conceivable thing that will hold liquid,
powder, grain and piece matter, and are carted to some place
of storage, sold by commission men, resold to jobbers, again
carried in stock for a time, sold to dealers, where they are
again held up and finally sold to the consumer, who has no
conception of their age or where they are from, and but little
knowledge of their value as food.
All this is extremely complicated and expensive. It costs
money every time this vast number of things are stopped and
stored, and more every time they are moved. Every day added
to their age renders them more valueless as food and more
expensive as commodities. Not content with this aged,
unnatural pickled and preserved condition, the housewife lays
hold of them and proceeds to give them their finishing touch
by fire.
On the checkered highway of man's curious doings, there
is indeed nothing stranger than this. We have in this country
hundreds of different articles of food which can be most
advantageously used without cooking; yet the cook intrudes
his art, bakes, boils, stews, broils and heats these things, until