We, keeping our food system still on this miserable basis of private catering to appetite, are thereby prevented from studying it with a view to race improvement. The discoveries of the food specialist and scientific dietist are lost in the dark recesses of a million homes, in the futile, half-hearted efforts of unskilled labour. What the immediate family "likes" is the governing law; no matter how wise may be the purpose of the mother-cook. With most of us food is scarcely thought of in its real main use--to supply bodily waste with judiciously combined materials.
The home-bred appetite cries out for "mother's cooking," with no more idea of its nutritive values than has a child. This is most remarkable among our enormous farming population, yet there most absolutely the case. The mechanic or business man has no dealings whatever with his food except to eat it. He gives over his life's health, his daily strength, into the hands of his beloved female domestic; and asks nothing whatever of her production except that it "taste good."
But the farmer has a different trade. With him the whole business of his life is to feed things that they may grow. He has to replenish the soil with the elements his crops exhaust, in order to reap the best crops, the most profit. And even more directly with his live-stock; from hen to horse, with pigs, sheep, and cattle, he has constantly to consider what to put into them in order to be sure of the product, not too much grain for the horse, not too much hay; enough "green feed" in season; the value of the silo, the amount of salt necessary; the effect of beets, of wild onions, in the grass and in the butter; what to give hens in winter to make them lay; how to regulate the diet for more milk and less cream, or for less milk and more cream; how to fatten, how to strengthen, how to improve--in all ways the farmer has to realise the importance of food values in his business.
Yet that same man, day after day, consumes his own food and sees his children fed, to say nothing of the mother of his children, without ever giving one thought to the nutritive values of that food. There must be enough to satisfy hunger, and it must "taste good," according to his particular brand of ancestry, his race habits, and early environment; but, beyond that, nothing is required.