CEREAL FOODS. 12/ 



The housewife finds a material gayi in time in the use of 

 cooked or partially cooked cereals. Do these preparations pos- 

 sess any advantage other than those already mentioned over the 

 raw goods? In other words, if the purchaser obtains the 

 uncooked cereals and devotes the necessary care and time to their 

 preparation, does not the final product possess all the virtues of 

 the prepared goods? 



This, too, is a difficult question to answer, inasmuch as the 

 opportunities for comparison are few. There are very few 

 cereal breakfast foods now on the market that have not been 

 subjected to some cooking process. Steaming, which results in 

 a partial cooking, is a necessary preliminary to the rolling to 

 wdiich so many of our cereal foods have been subjected. Indeed, 

 with the single exception of hominy, there is scarcely a wholly 

 uncooked cereal breakfast food to be found upon the market. 

 Out of 28 oat preparations examined at this station, only three 

 were entirely raw, and one of these was an imported article. 

 So far as relates to the difference between the old fashioned, 

 wholly uncooked wheat and oat meals and the modern rolled 

 articles, it may safely be stated that the important difference is 

 mechanical rather than chemical. 



During the past few years a series of experiments have been 

 carried out at the experiment stations of Minnesota, Connecti- 

 cut (Storrs), and Maine, for the purpose of determining the 

 digestibility of certain cereal foods. In some of these experi- 

 ments the food consisted exclusively of cereal foods, cream and 

 sugar ; in other cases the cereals were used with a mixed diet. 

 Including bread and meat, but in which the cereal still played a 

 very important part. Since the digestibility of cream and sugar 

 have been quite accurately determined, it is possible, where the 

 simpler diet is used, to calculate the digestibility of the cereal 

 alone with a considerable degree of accuracy. 



The details of these experiments will be found elsewhere, but 



the general results of those obtained at this Station are given in 



the table below. This shows the digestibility of the organic 



matter of the food — i. e., the dry matter of the food less the ash 



or mineral constituents ; the digestibility of the protein, one of 



the most important classes of the necessary constituents of our 



food ; and the percentage of the heat of combustion utilized by 

 the body. 



