350 



lives as his grandfather did, works as his grandfather 

 worked, and eats only the kind of food that his grandfather 

 ate, is out of place in these closing years of the nineteenth 

 eantury — he is a worm crawling in a rut with no ideas of the 

 possibilities outside it. We are so much the creatures of 

 custom and do things because they have been done, that 

 unless we are rudely interrupted, we are sometimes likely to 

 keep on doing the same old things in the same old way. 



One or two illustrations will show how the habits of the 

 American people change with regard to food. Thirty years 

 ago if a resident of a town of 5000 or less wished for some 

 oat-meal he would call at the drug-store instead of the gro- 

 cery. The druggist would hand down from among hi-s jars 

 and packages of drugs a can containing some stale, granular, 

 often mouldy oat-meal imported from across the sea. This 

 with all its mouldiness and taints resulting from standing 

 among vile-smelling drugs, would be weighed out by apoth- 

 ecaries' weight as a prescription for invalids or for some 

 one whose delicate appetite needed something tempting. 

 This was the relative position of oat-meal as a food supply 

 only a generation ago. None of the nutritious and appetiz- 

 ing cereal preparations that are now so abundantly manu- 

 factured in this country and so universally used for food, 

 were even known or thought of in those days. And I might 

 add a remark that so soon as people learn the simple art of 

 properly cooking these breakfast cereals and give us the 

 light appetizing dishes that are possible where now we 

 often have only the soggy, sloppy, flavorless preparations 

 that are far from inviting — the favor of these healthful 

 breakfast cereals will still more rapily extend. 



Thirty years ago bananas were rarely seen outside the 

 liWge cities and the}^ were scarcely more than an occasional 

 luxury even there, within the means of the better classes. 

 Only now with the largest port of entry for bananas within 

 our own State, and with special trains loaded with that 

 fruit alone moving northward from Mobile every day to be 

 distributed from Chicago and St. Louis into every little 



