CLASSIFICATION OF FOOD. 



177 



from a point of view suggesting benefit to the users or the con- 

 sumers, the production of fruits is the healthiest, happiest 

 occupation to which man can lend himself. The proper pro- 

 duction of fruits necessitates also the employment of labour in a 

 degree which is not approached by agriculture, or by those 

 methods of culture which are engaged and expended upon the 

 coarser products, and therefore permitting the employment of 

 coarser methods. I need not follow this argument further, and 

 liave merely introduced it to strengthen the case from a point of 

 view which, to my mind, is one of its most important aspects. 



There is one other point which I must not altogether omit. 

 The importance of home-grown fruit will never be rightly 

 realised until the great masses of the population, especially in 

 the denser centres, are better educated in questions, first, of 

 household thrift and economy ; and, secondly, in habits of 

 domestic cleanliness and in the realisation of the importance of 

 happy, healthy environment ; and until, thirdly, they are 

 schooled and practised in the better methods of cookery, which 

 would imply and compel the immediate revision of their pre- 

 conceived notions of the relative values of foodstuffs, and would 

 introduce them forcibly to the importance of right dietetic 

 principles as applied to cottage homes and to the needs of the 

 working population generally. Whether we agree with the 

 extreme notion that fruit is the most important item in the 

 dietary list of the people or not, we shall all, I feel sure, agree 

 upon two points : first, that even in most well-ordered households 

 flesh foods at present form a too important and constant item of 

 diet ; and, secondly, with regard to the working classes fruit as 

 food is practically unknown. This is no exaggeration. I have 

 made personal inquiries. I have had statistics prepared for me 

 over different districts, and as bearing upon different conditions 

 of the population, and it is a lamentable fact that when home- 

 grown fruits have been so plentiful that they have been allowed 

 either to rot on the trees or spoil upon the orchard floor, there 

 are cottage homes that have not laid out one penny upon fruit 

 during the weeks in which it was so superabundant ; and if you 

 ventured down a street crowded with children, little and big, in 

 various degrees of neglect, and with squalor and thriftlessness 

 everywhere apparent, a basket of Apples or Plums would make 

 you the centre of a clamouring crowd. The great advance made 



