THE GENERAL NATURE OF DIET 147 



The variety required is not only the diversity of a day or a week, but 

 also of each meal, as is the custom more or less everywhere. A large 

 variety at a meal is necessitated more by the pleasure arising from the 

 varied flavors than from the precise needs of the organism from hour to 

 hour. Let us look a little, then, at the nature of the diversity in a well- 

 cooked meal as regards its chemical components, its digestibility, its 

 flavors, and its odor. We may take for this purpose a dinner such as is 

 served at an average American hotel; this will answer several purposes 

 at once. The first thing most people from habit wish after being seated 

 at the table is two or three swallows of cold water, and this, undoubtedly, 

 slightly stimulates the salivary glands and the mucosa of the stomach and 

 prepares the taste-organs for better action. The first food brought, we 

 will suppose, is bouillon and bread and butter. This soup is at once 

 nutritious, tasteful, and of pleasant odor, the two latter qualities coming 

 largely from the "extractives," salts, and soluble albumins which it con- 

 tains, the nutritive value from its richness in most of the proteids of beef. 

 Soup serves by its heat, liquidity, and salts to warm and stimulate gently 

 the glands and walls of the stomach and duodenum in preparation for 

 solid food. The bread adds physical substantiality to the liquid food, 

 while, as already noted, the butter adds the fat lacking in the bread, 

 makes the latter more pleasant to the taste, and, when melted in the 

 mouth, more easily swallowed. Between the soup and the fish the short 

 interval of waiting is an advantage, a distressing sense of hurry, leading to 

 indigestion, being thus avoided when time for eating is normally abun- 

 dant. Fish contains mostly proteids and fat, and potatoes are eaten with 

 it to supply the lacking carbohydrate. A little of some strongly flavored 

 condiment or relish, a pickle or an olive or two, often serves at this point in 

 a dinner to still more vigorously stimulate the digestive glands (by means 

 of the pepper, mustard, horseradish, acid, etc., which they contain) in 

 readiness for the piece de resistance, the flesh-meat, more difficult of diges- 

 tion than ordinary fish. This also, as in case of the fish and for like reason, 

 is served with potatoes, most often baked, and if properly cooked is to 

 most persons the most pleasant as well as the most substantial portion 

 of the meal. The seasonable vegetables, peas, beans, spinach, squash, 

 or what not, add each its flavor, its salts, its juice, and its quota of starch 

 and proteid to the food ; these are best handled by the digestive mechanism 

 while in the full vigor of the meal's solution. Two or three glasses or even 

 more of cool but not ice-cold water may have been drunk during the 

 meal thus far with pleasant effect. The pastry and dessert and a cup of 

 coft'ee are now served. The second if not the first usually contains much 

 sugar, and being in other ways intended to be delicious to the taste, thus 

 adds almost the finishing touches to the pleasant sense of "fulness" or 

 satiety which usually accompanies the satisfaction of basal organic 

 needs by normal functioning. A cup of coffee adds still more to the 

 liquid and heat of the digesting meal, both beneficial factors, while its 

 essential alkaloid, caffeine, stimulates gently the whole organism, 

 especially the nerves and the muscles. If a mild cigar be smoked after 



