SOCIETY OF CENTRAL ILLINOIS. 243 



No home should be without its kitchen-garden, where vegetables 

 and fruits can be raised of varieties to supply the table all the year 

 around. Food, and how it is prepared, has mucdi to do with our 

 health and homes. Perhaps there is no one department of life where 

 it is so difficult to advise as to what one should eat. There is an old 

 adage (and a true one in practice), '' What is one man's meat is an- 

 other's poison." All stomachs will not tolerate the same food. Each 

 one must be a law unto himself as to what he may eat. Whatever 

 idiocratical tendency one may have, if he violates his constitutional 

 defects, he does it at the cost of his health and comfort. If any food 

 offends and acts as an irritant he should shun it as a deadly poison. 

 True he may, by long and constantly coaxing his rebellious instinct, 

 get it to put up with many offensive agents, such as rum and whisky, 

 and to chew and smoke tobacco; yet his nervous system rebels with 

 headache, sick stomach, cross and crabbed deportment, filth wherever 

 he goes. His home is polluted with fumes, revolting, nasty. Ah, 

 the instinct of manhood should rise above such health-destroying 

 vices, and shun it as he would a reptile's sting of death. 



How shall we determine a standard of diet? Perhaps the best 

 way will be to determine what is a frugal way of living by large 

 communities. This differs wideh' with different nations. Man is 

 so organized that his well-being demands a mixed diet. Still he 

 can live and maintain a fair degree of health on a very limited 

 variety of food. Some individuals may be excepted, — they become 

 sickly, and go down in death when restricted in the variety of food. 

 Frugal living differs very widely, as we said. Take, for instance, the 

 people of New England and part of New York, who, partly for 

 thrift, live in a kind of vegetarian way. Butter, eggs, and milk 

 enter into their frugal meal, not vegetable by any means. The 

 Puritans early lived on baked beans and buckwheat cakes, with maple 

 molasses. To this day New Englanders have these largely entering 

 into their frugal meals, and have grown up in its lore of excel- 

 lency with energy and character that has molded the type of civil- 

 ization of the United States. 



The typical Englishman must have his roast beef, mutton choj), 

 bread always an adjunct, potatoes, turnips and other vegetables are 

 subsidaries, not forgetting his almost indispensable plum-pudding. 

 This, perhaps, is the diet of the better class of Englishmen. As a 

 nation, it is one of brains, energy and endurance, not excelled by any 

 other nation on earth. 



In France and Spain the frugal meals and dishes are eggs, 

 stewed veal, lamb, roast fowls, pheasants, liver, brains, blood pud- 

 dings; in the former the frog is counted as a royal treat. This 

 diet, so unlike the P]nglish, is satisfactory to this light-hearted 

 {)eople. There is more pleasure and sociability among them than 

 any other nation on earth. As Goldsmith aptly writes in his 

 "traveler" : 



