THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



359 



A RAT WHOSE DIET CONSISTED TOO LARGELY OF CEREALS AND OE EAT PORK 



It was brought to this condition, approaching starvation, by being restricted to the fol- 

 lowing list of foods: wheat flour (bolted), corn meal (made of corn from which the germ 

 was removed), rice, starch, corn grits, molasses, sugar, pork fat, sweet-potatoes, cabbage, and 

 salt. There was too little of the leaf of the cabbage in the diet to "protect" the animal, as 

 95 per cent of it was derived from the endosperm (inner part) of seeds and pork fat. It is 

 this type of diet which is widely used in regions where pellagra is prevalent. 



There are some countries today where 

 every morning the housewife roasts the 

 coffee beans which she grinds for the 

 breakfast coffee. If you try to convince 

 any cook who has learned this way of 

 making coffee that the store-ground cof- 

 fee is just as good she will dispute your 

 claim to the bitter end. 



I once visited an epicure who had in- 

 stalled a little mill on his place, and in it 

 every evening he ground selected seed 

 wheat of the best quality for his break- 

 fast cereal the following morning, and I 

 must say that I never ate a more delicious 

 breakfast dish. 



But one by one these attempts to keep 

 close to ultra-fresh foods have broken 

 down under the strain of increasing popu- 

 lation ; whether for good or ill is still an 

 open question. It is no small comfort, 

 however, to find that the more accurate 

 researches of modern medicine and the 

 experiments of dietitians have shown that 

 our drift away from ultra-fresh foods is 

 not imperiling the health of the human 

 race. 



OUR EXPENSIVE EPICUREAN TASTES 



It is because we are accustomed to see- 

 ing lettuce on the table that we bring it 

 3,000 miles by train in special cars from 



California. It is just because we like 

 fresh string-beans that we bring them, 

 at $8 a crate, from the very tip of Flor- 

 ida in February, outdoing Lucullus, who 

 brought his sterlets to Rome from the 

 Danube by relays of runners. 



And yet our bodies get no more food 

 from string-beans at $8 a crate than they 

 do from dried ones at a fraction of the 

 cost, according to all the experience of 

 Arctic explorers. The food values, ac- 

 cording to McCollum, are not changed; 

 the mineral constituents are all there, 

 together with the "fat soluble A," which 

 is not found in the grains and without 

 which young human bodies cannot grow 

 nor old ones maintain their vigor. 



Old prejudices die hard, but we are 

 now eating some things which our fore- 

 fathers scorned or of which they had 

 never heard. They were unfamiliar with 

 celery and with olives. They did not 

 dream of the grapefruit, nor the soy- 

 bean, nor the wild rice of Minnesota, nor 

 the kaffir corn, nor the cassava melon, 

 nor the avocado, nor the banana, nor the 

 Chinese cabbage — all these and scores 

 more have come into our dietary within 

 the last generation, not to mention the ar- 

 rival of the whole canned fruit and vege- 



