22 FLIGHT FROM THE CITY 



tion which he maintained and which we have since 

 come to accept. But the incident prepared us for real 

 conversion shortly thereafter. 



Among the books published by the corporation by 

 which I was then employed were a number of vol- 

 umes by a Dr. R. L. Alsaker. I had never read them, 

 principally because they had seemed to me the works 

 of a dietetic crank. But I brought some of them home 

 after the Carrington argument and Mrs. Borsodi and 

 I both read them. Alsaker's arguments seemed to us 

 quite reasonable. We saw no reason why we should 

 hesitate about experimenting with diet as a means 

 of maintaining health, the medical profession having 

 signally failed to keep us healthy. But we did not 

 find this as easy as might be imagined. Indeed, it was 

 only after a period of years and after we had moved 

 to the country that we completely changed our diet 

 from the conventional pattern to our present one. 

 During this period Mrs. Borsodi made quite a study 

 of the chemistry of food; we dug up what we could 

 about the fight for pure and unadulterated foods 

 which Dr. Harvey W. Wiley had waged back in Presi- 

 dent Theodore Roosevelt's administration, and as a 

 result developed a thoroughgoing distaste for the com- 

 mercialized footstuffs which up to that time we had 

 eaten. 



One after another we gave up predigested break- 

 fast foods, white bread, factory-made biscuits and 

 crackers and cakes, polished rice, white sugar. But it 

 wasn't easy to secure suitable substitutes for all the 



