DISEASE-GERMS IN FOOD 165 



softening with hot water than is the case with foods 

 prepared from animals. This is only a question of not 

 keeping food too long or in conditions tending to the access 

 of putrefactive bacteria. It is, on the whole, more usual 

 and necessary, in order to render it palatable, to apply 

 heat to flesh, iish, and fowl than to fruits. And it is 

 by heat — heat of the temperature of boiling water — 

 applied for ten minutes or more, that poison-producing and 

 infective bacteria are killed and rendered harmless. More 

 people have become infected by deadly parasites and have 

 died from cholera and similar diseases, through having 

 taken the germs of those diseases into their stomachs with 

 raw and over-ripe fruit or uncooked vegetables and the 

 manured products of the kitchen garden, than have suffered 

 from the presence of disease-germs or putrefactive bacteria 

 in well-cooked meat. Here, in fact, " cooking " makes all 

 the difference, just as it does in the matter we were 

 discussing above of the fitness of flesh and bone for 

 trituration by man's teeth. 



Once we remember that man is not fitted for the " raw 

 meat " diet of the carnivora, but is fitted for the " cooked 

 meat " diet which he has himself discovered — alone of all 

 animals — we shall get rid of a misleading prejudice in 

 the consideration of the question as to whether civilised 

 men should or should not make cooked meat a portion 

 of their diet, with the purpose of maintaining themselves 

 in as healthy and vigorous a state as possible. Do not 

 let us forget that ancient Palaeolithic cave-men certainly 

 made use of fire to cook their meals of animal flesh, and 

 that probably this use of fire dates back to a still earlier 

 period when, in consequence of this application of the red, 

 running tongues of flame, which he had learned to produce, 

 primitive man was able to leave the warmer climates of 

 the earth and their abundant fruits, and to establish him- 

 self in temperate and even sub-Arctic regions. 



