16 



HONEY. 



One of Nature's Best Foods. It is only within the last few cen- 

 turies that sugar has become known, and only within the last generation 

 that refined sugars have become so low in price that they may be com- 

 monly used in the poorest families. Formerly honey was the principal 

 sweet, and it was highly valued three thousand years before the first 

 sugar-refinery was built. 



It would add greatly to the health of the present generation if honey 

 could be at least partially restored to its former place as a common article 

 of diet. The almost universal craving for sweets of some kind shows a 

 real need of the system in that direction ; but the excessive use of sugar 

 brings in its train a long list of ills. When cane sugar is taken into 

 the stomach, it can not be assimilated until first changed by digestion 

 into grape sugar. Only too often the overtaxed stomach fails to pro- 

 perly perform this digestion, then comes sour stomach and various dys- 

 peptic phases. 



Now, in the wonderful laboratory of the hive there is found a sweet 

 that needs no further digestion having been prepared fully by those 

 wonderful chemists, the bees, for prompt assimilation without taxing 

 stomach or kidneys. As Prof. Cook says: "There can be no doubt but 

 that in eating honey our digestive machinery is saved work that it would 

 have to perform if we ate cane sugar ; and in case it is overworked and 

 feeble, this may be just the respite that will save from breakdown." 

 A. I. Root says: "Many people who can not eat sugar without having 

 unpleasant symptons follow will find by careful test that they can eat 

 good well-rjpened honey without any difficulty at all." 



Not only is honey the most wholesome of all sweets, but it is the 

 most delicious, and its cost so moderate that it may well find a place 

 on the tables of 1?he common people every day in the week. 



Indeed, in many cases it may be a matter of real economy to lessen 

 the butter bill by letting honey in part take its place. One pound of 

 honey will go as far as a pound of butter ; and if both articles be of the 

 best quality the honey will cost the less of the two. 



Give Children Honey. When children are allowed a liberal supply 

 of honey it will largely do away with the inordinate longing for candy 

 and other sweets. 



Ask the average child whether he will have honey alone on his bread, 

 or butter alone, and almost invariably he will answer, "Honey." Yet 

 seldom are the needs or the taste of the child properly consulted. The 

 old man craves fat meat ; the child loathes it. He wants sweet, not 

 fat. He delights to eat honey ; it is a wholesome food for him, and is 

 not expensive. Why should he not have it? 



Honey may be used to sweeten hot drinks, as coffee and tea. Ger- 

 man honey-tea — A cup of hot water with one or two tablespoonfuls of 

 extracted honey — is a pleasing and wholesome drink. 



