Idaho County Free Press

INEXPENSIVE LIVING.

How a Healthy Person Can Live and Grow Fat on a Dime a Day.

At the gathering of scientists in Columbia College a learned professor fascinated his superintellectual hearers by telling them that a laboring man needs daily one-fourth pound of protein, one-fourth pound fat, and a pound of carbohydrates to keep him well and strong. If the knowledge-seeking laborer goes to the store for his four ounces of protein his experiment will scarcely increase his faith in the marketing knowledge of scientists. What the laborer and what most of us need more than technical essays on the "Physiological and Fecundary Economy of Food" is a plain talk about sensible feeding and economical marketing.

"How to live and thrive on a dime per day" may stand as the text for this talk. It certainly can be done, and, though the experiment may be uninviting, it is certain that good health is nearer akin to the simplest diet than to the costliest.

Now as to the laboring man and his protein. Tell him that three-fourths of his weight is water, and that to restore the day's waste he has to take food three-fourths of which must be water, and the remainder flesh-forming, heat-giving and bone-making substances, he will understand the case better. Give him a table of foods analyzed to show just how much heat giving, flesh-forming and mineral matter there is in each food, and he will soon take as deep an interest in what he eats because of its worth to him as because of its taste. When he finds out—as he can in half an hour—that only twenty-four parts in every hundred of butcher's meat count as flesh-formers, the rest being water, but that from seventy-five to ninety parts out of every hundred in dried peas, beans, oat and wheat meals and cheese are nutritious, and only ten to twenty-five parts waste water, he from that moment begins to use his common sense in feeding as he does in earning his living. The popular rule is: Never pay any heed to the feeding value of our diet; let us cultivate a glorious ignorance of the purpose of foods and go in might and main for palate-ticklers and dyspepsia.

Just a fact or two as appetizers. The great Peninsular and Oriental (P. and O.) Steamship Company employ East Indian coolies to do the hardest work on their steamers because they are stronger, healthier and stand the climate better than Englishmen, and because not being meat eaters—their diet costs only six cents per day. There are miners in the English coal-pits, the hardest workers in the land, who have not eaten any kind of meat for years. I am not a vegetarian, because I hanker after the flesh pots and their savory odors cast a spell over my innocent soul; yet I experimented for one whole year without tasting flesh or gravy in any form, and all the time my health was perfect and my weight increased. The dock porters of Constantinople carry heavier burdens—two hundred and fifty pounds and upward—more easily than the laborers of England and America, yet their main diet is bread and figs, and they are teetotal and vegetarian. The laborers in Spain live chiefly on bread and onions, and are marvelously strong.

The flesh-and-blood superstition is baseless. A horse is almost as strong, swift, healthy and handsome as a two-legged man, and they both have the same internal machinery; the one eats beef and enjoys dyspepsia, the other avoids it and flourishes. Ten cents worth of meat, oatmeal, rice, fruits, buttermilk, bread, cheese, onions or portions of several of these, will enable a man to do his ordinary day's work at least as well as any assortment of goods he can buy for a dollar.

What would be a good diet for those who do not need to study their purses, yet who would like a simple, healthy and enjoyable dietary? To such I would say drop the heavy meat breakfast right away. Not that meat is bad, but it is not the best to start the day on. Bread (not the spoiled white stuff, but the natural dark-colored wheat, as ground), tea or cocoa, eggs and the hundred and one non-flesh dishes, with a little fish, and as much fruit as you like. That's a model meal, as experience will prove.

Talking of fish, the more the better. Pound for pound it is as nutritious as flesh, though it doesn't seem to fill us so fully, and its chemical value is far above that of meats. When I have extra hard brain work to do, say an average of twelve or fourteen hours for two or three weeks at a stretch, I knock off meats entirely and eat all the fish I can. Result, perfect health and strength and no headaches.

For dinner, fish, soups (I am not excluding meat, though soups can be made without it that taste just the same and are quite as good every way), puddings, desserts.

I knew an eminent lady who for forty years had never tasted meat. She was a marvel of mental and physical strength. Another author friend kept his health and his average weight of one hundred and sixty pounds on a diet that never included meat, the average cost of his food being only six cents per day. Another, a well-known literary man, who looked as beefy as a butcher, was, when I last met him, in his eighth year of strict abstinence from flesh. Another friend, a hard literary worker, has been practically a life-long vegetarian, but he looks too shriveled up to be a champion specimen.—Richmond (Va.) Dispatch.