Remarks

The first principle of diet is that the stomach should not be asked to receive more than it can digest ; and the second, that the food should be suitable to each person's digestion. We are very tyrannical to our stomachs, and they, in their turn, generally retaliate upon us sooner or later. If a certain form of diet agrees with one individual, it is no absolute rule that it should suit our neighbour; but we too often insist on feeding others according to what we imagine agrees with ourselves. Especially is this the case with children's diet, and few grown-up people make allowance for the healthy appetite of girls or boys who are still growing, or understand how much food-material the rapidly-expanding frame requires.

My own firm conviction is that no schoolboy ever gets as much nourishing food as he requires, and that that is the secret why boys of fourteen or fifteen years old scarcely ever look anything but thin and pinched. The general remark is, "Oh, they are growing so fast!" So they are, and that is the exact reason why their food should be particularly nourishing, more so than at any other time of their lives. Instead of that, an English schoolboy gets two slops and only one nourishing meal a day, during the years of his life when he requires the greatest amount of nutritive food. Think of the actual force-producers contained in a schoolboy's breakfast and tea (or supper), and think of the amount of exercise his restless young limbs will take or have taken in the course of the day. After a game of football or cricket, or a paper-chase, a boy sits down generally - I might almost say invariably - to a meal of weak tea, skim milk, bread, and perhaps cheese or a little butter. I am not, of course, speaking of cheap schools. When a person undertakes to feed and teach and board a boy for a sum between 20 l. and 50 l ., or even more, it is well-nigh impossible, at the present scale of prices, to give him better, 01 even as good food as what I have described; but it does appear to me a shame that at the more expensive schools to which boys are sent by parents of fairly good means, the scale of diet should be kept so low, and the proportion of really nutritive food so small. Perhaps the only exceptions to this rule are to be found in the liberal tables of some of our best public schools, but even there the boys, without being absolutely starved, do not get enough to eat, and two meals out of the three will probably contain insufficient nourishment. In girls' schools,. I fancy, this evil is still more decided, and a poor diet whilst a child is growing rapidly is the root of delicate constitutions, feeble frames, and general "breaking down" at the outset of life.

There should also be the greatest imaginable difference in diet between different classes of workers; for although a certain section of the community monopolizes to itself the honourable title of the "Working Class," the term embraces many more thousands than the labouring man imagines. The popular idea, for instance, among the poor and ignorant masses who work for their daily bread, is that the Lady who rules over this country leads a blissful life of idleness, seated on her throne all day, orb and sceptre in hand, and gazing placidly before her into space. Now, I believe it to be a fact that few people in all Her wide dominions work really harder, in every sense of the word, than our dear and good Queen. At the head of the workers her Majesty may well claim to take her place, and then will come a crowd of men and women who wear good clothes and live in fine, or at all events decent, houses, and yet work absolutely harder, all the year round, than any day labourer in the Midland Counties.

The diet for work of this nature must necessarily be very different to that required by the man who exercises his muscles in the open air, and whose appetite and digestion possess far larger capacities of receiving and assimilating food than those of the poor brain worker who uses up his life-power at a much quicker rate. The absence of fresh air, and the want therefore of constantly renewed supplies of oxygen to the blood through the lungs, prevent the man who works indoors with his head or his hands from feeling so hungry, yet the exhaustion of his nervous system demands as urgently that it should be renewed by means of food. At the same time the digestion of such a one is weaker, and cannot manage gross substances. For these workers, then, a diet where the cooking is so perfect, however simple it may be, that there shall be as little strain as possible thrown upon the gastric juices, is of the first importance. To brain-workers albumen is even more necessary than fibrine, and raw eggs afford this in its purest form. There is a popular fallacy that eggs beaten up in milk are rendered doubly nourishing, but if the egg be fresh and good the combination is rather more fitted to hinder than to promote digestion. It would be better to beat the egg up in a little brandy or wine, and wine is the best. Fibrine, in the form of meat, should be sparingly used by those who live by their brains, and the meat should be of the best quality, and always very well and delicately cooked. Fish supplies most easily the phosphorus which is needed by such a system, and good pure milk and cream are also very essential articles of diet.

But to the man who exercises his muscles in the open air a very different regimen must be prescribed. The labourer instinctively stops the gaps between his scanty meals with cheese, which is the best thing for him, and he enriches his poor diet of potatoes with bacon. Some day, when his wife has learned how to make the most of every scrap of meat, he ought to be able to vary his food with a good drop of warm nourishing broth. If only he could be persuaded to diminish his beer and increase his allowance of meat, he would find himself in a far better condition for work.

The diet of our soldiers, and even of our sailors, appears to me - in spite of tables showing the proportions of flesh-formers and starch, of gluten, and heaven knows what, swallowed daily by every soldier - to be really insufficient for a healthy man with a good appetite. They may be supplied with food enough to prevent anything like actual starvation, and even to keep them in some sort of condition, but I question whether a British soldier ever knows what it is to feel thoroughly satisfied after his meals for one whole day. It is just possible, is it not, that the men would be easier kept away from the canteen if they had as much as they could eat ? Tables of food-proportions are very well in their way, but I know that I have seen working men in New Zealand, and growing boys of eighteen and twenty years old in colonies where meat was cheap, consume fibrine - or, in other words, eat plain roast meat - in quantities which would soon leave the most liberal military dietary several pounds behind.

It is not at all certain that, in spite of danger and discomforts, our soldiers do not really fare better abroad, or in time of war, than at home in peace. In the face of a national excitement we are not so very particular as to the number of ounces of meat to be dealt out to the men who have to stand between us and ruin, so the soldier has then a better chance of occasionally getting as much as he can eat. If he could cook his own food, he would be still better off; and anyone who saw those good-looking German soldiers cooking their rations in the little tent behind the School of Cookery last summer, must remember how deftly they set about their preparations, and how savoury was the result of a pea-sausage and a bone or two. No doubt every year brings its improvements in these matters, and if a soldier who fought under Marlborough could see the rations and barrack accommodation of his modern brethren-in-arms, he would indeed think they had nothing to complain of in the way of food and shelter. But still there is ample room for improvement, and I would endorse the suggestion often made before, that the British soldier be taught to cook, and to make the most of his rations by such cooking. Each man might take it in turn to try his hand over the fire, and there might be some regimental emulation in the form of small prizes for clever contrivances to vary the food, and so forth. I am aware that the food is not nearly so monotonous as it used to be a short time since, when all the meat eaten by soldiers was invariably boiled; but still I question whether the mess dinner of the rank and file is anything like so savoury and palatable as the dinner to be had a few years ago in Paris, at one Madame Roland's, near the Marche des Innocents. For twopence she gave you cabbage soup with a slice of bouilli (beef) in it, a large piece of excellent bread, and a glass of wine, which it must be admitted, however, was rather thin. Some 600 workmen used to throng daily round her table in a shed, and yet she calculated that she gained a farthing by each guest. In Glasgow, Manchester, and elsewhere, similar public dining places have been established on the cheapest possible scale, and found to answer very well; but although a workman may be able to get a fairly good and nutritive dinner at such an institution, it is not the less necessary that his wife should know how to cook his food decently for him at home.