84 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



right kind and quantity to digest the food. Every food if put into the mouth 

 and chewed long enough will produce in the stomach just the right gastric 

 juice to digest it. So the beautiful flavors, delicious flavors of fruit are 

 something more than pleasure and delight; they are one of the most marvelous 

 arrangements whereby the proper digestive process is set in operation to 

 care for the whole meal. 



Now another thing about fruit is, it is the natural diet of man. It is 

 better adapted to him than any other substance he can possibly eat; and it 

 can be eaten raw; and it cannot be improved by any process of manipulation 

 by the cook; and it is necessary for us to eat a certain amount of raw food, 

 and fruit is a thing which we can eat with pleasure and delight. 



I haven't any sympathy at all with the people who tell us we must eat 

 raw potatoes, raw oats, and come down to the horse diet, become herbi- 

 verous or graniverous. It is simply ignorance that leads people to that 

 conclusion, because raw wheat and flour and oats taken into the stomach 

 are passed right through the alimentary canal without any digestion at 

 all. Even raw starch that has been completely broken up and ground 

 fine, three-fourths of it will pass right through the alimentary canal. When 

 a man eats two ounces of raw starch, fully half passes through the alimentary 

 canal undigested. But fruit is a thing that is completely digested; that is 

 the one raw food that is adapted to us. 



Sailors go off on a long expedition with a lot of cooked food on board, 

 and they come back by and by with scurvy. Their gums are lacerated, 

 their teeth falling out, their faces swollen, and limbs swollen and blue. The 

 poor fellows are almost dead with scurvy; and some may have died on the 

 way. You bring in a few oranges, lemons, nice ripe apples, some fresh 

 fruits of an}^ sort, and supply them with them, and the change is marvelous. 

 In a few days those ugly wounds are healed up, the discoloration and abscesses 

 disappear, and it is a veritable miracle wrought by simply a little raw fruit. 

 We ought to have learned the value of that lesson long ago, and made, a 

 practical application of it, but we have not done it. 



In German}^, and since that time in England and this country, they have 

 recently made the discovery that if a baby is fed on some infant food, some 

 patent baby food, that costs three cents a pound and you have to pay 75 

 cents for it — you can make it just as good at home by toasting bread and 

 grinding it up in a coffee mill, just as good, and better than most of the foods 

 you buy. Anything in the shape of patent foods is not better for a baby 

 than flour ball, and every housewife knows how to make that; but it is better 

 to toast it a little. If you feed a baby on this kind of food continuously 

 it gets scurvy by and by — the best kind of cooked food in the world. Boiled 

 milk, sterilized milk, gives the baby the scurvy after a while; and it is found 

 out that fruit juices will prevent it. The only thing necessary is to give 

 that baby the juice of an orange every day, or the juice of a couple of apples ; 

 a little juice of that sort of raw fruit; if you cannot get any fruit, it probably 

 would be advisable to get a little juice from sweet corn, or the juice of some 

 vegetables like the beet perhaps, or some other vegetables, or tomato juice, 

 or anything of that sort; any kind of raw juice will save that baby from 

 the scurvy and cure it. It has been of immense value to us since we learned 

 that. We find at the sanitarium a great many people come there really 

 suffering from a kind of scurvy from living entirely upon cooked foods for 

 a long time, bread and meat and potatoes. A great many people eat no 

 fruit at all, nothing but cooked fruit. You know what happens to your 

 pigs fed on cooked food alone and nothing else; in six weeks that pig will 



