228. Elaborate Meals Burdensome

All housewives recognize that cooking and serving three meals a day, with the accompanying dish washing, is a heavy household burden. In the homes of the wealthy where elaborate menus of several courses are served, for luncheon and dinner at least, additional service is a necessity, and the attendant expense is large, to say nothing of the increase of troubles and perplexities that surround the servant problem. In the homes of working people, where the limited income will not permit hired help, the wife and mother often regards it as necessary to spend many weary hours in cooking and serving a great variety of dishes, especially cakes, pies, and puddings.

229. A Simple Diet Abundantly Nutritious

It is not claimed, and it is not true, that the nutritive value of a given amount of food materials is increased by serving them in a great variety of forms. This is done merely to offer to the sense of taste preparations that are delectable. It cannot reasonably be claimed, either, that beyond a certain limit the purchase of many kinds of raw food materials promotes nutritive efficiency. A simple diet involving a minimum of time and expense for preparation and serving may be just as nutritious as a complex one, and is likely to be more healthful (see pp. 231-236). A noon lunch of a rich vegetable soup containing milk or meat products, with bread, butter, and fruit is abundantly nutritious and much less expensive than a series of dishes beginning with bouillon and ending with pastry and other delicacies. The writer recalls a luncheon in the home of a gentleman of wealth and prominence that consisted solely of a large peach pudding, with cream. A dinner of a meat course, not over one vegetable, possibly a salad, potatoes, bread and butter, and a simple dessert, meets all the requirements of health and imposes much less burden on the family than a meal with the approved sequence of courses. Indeed, the usual dessert could be omitted with no loss to the physical welfare of the family, for desserts are dictated by habit rather than by physiological demands. As a matter of fact, breakfasts, luncheons, and suppers often may advantageously consist of not over two or three articles of food.

230. Examples Of Simple Living

Examples may be cited in great number where, in newly settled countries, the kinds of raw food materials being very limited in number, families have been well nourished and children have developed into fine physical types of men and women. It is known on good authority that in the early days a New England family, whose children became men and women of long lives and great endurance, was limited many times during the winter months to as few foods as bean samp, corn bread, and salt pork. Such narrow limitations may not be wholly desirable, but they show the possibilities of a simple diet. Wood choppers and river drivers have endured severe labor from October 1 to May 1 chiefly on baked beans and flour biscuit, the beans carrying a generous proportion of fat from salt pork. When it is possible for one or two articles of diet to supply the nutrients essential to the needs of the human body, it is not necessary to add others, excepting as a variety of food promotes a continuance of good appetite. The apparent demand for an elaborate diet is the result of education, and if simpler living were the fashion, there would be no loss of good appetite, and there would be a certain decrease in household expenses with a probable gain in good health. It is unfortunate, to say the least, that with so many opportunities for useful activity and real enjoyment, the lives of men and women should be burdened with the unnecessary labor caused by irrational dietetic habits.