HEALTHFUL FOOD by Mary E. Vandyne

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 20, 1887

HEALTHFUL FOOD.

By Mary E. Vandyne

No PEOPLE in the world are so luxuriously fed as Americans. And, alas! in no other country is the standard of health as low, especially among women. How much of this is due to our customs in the way of eating it is of course impossible to compute exactly; but let us for a moment glance at the habits of other nations in this and former ages, and see if we cannot draw some conclusions that shall modify our present habits of supplying our tables, especially during the season when our luxurious supplies of fresh fruits are exhausted, and we must fill their place with meat, poultry, entrées, desserts, and other products of culinary art.

We will begin with the athlete of ancient Greece. What would our youth of to-day think if training for running matches and footraces entailed such a regimen as the following: "The masters," writes one of our most reliable historians, "subjected their neophytes to those methods which they judged the most efficacious for the production and augmentation of physical strength and power of resistance to fatigue. And one of the means employed for accomplishing this object was the enforcement of a very strict dietary composed only of figs, nuts, cheese, and maize bread without wine." In the palmiest days of Greece and Rome, before wealth and luxury brought enervation and decadence, the young men subsisted on simple vegetable food,—rye, meal, fruits, and milk. The chief food of the Roman gladiator was barley cakes and oil. The daily rations of a Roman soldier were one pound of barley, three ounces of oil, and a pint of thin wine. And these men conquered at Salamis and Marathon, and defended Thermopylæ.

The Egyptian peasantry are healthy and robust, yet they eat little but coarse bread, lentils, and a few vegetables. The chief and almost only food of the post-runners who used to travel sixty-two miles a day during the journey of twenty-five days from Calcutta to Bombay, was boiled rice. In the copper mines of Central America, where the men will carry weights of two hundred pounds up eighty perpendicular yards twelve times per day, their diet is entirely vegetable. Few people surpass the Arabs in longevity, strength, and endurance, yet they live principally on dates and milk; and for months the Bedouin Arabs consume nothing else.

In comparison with all this let us repeat a story that is vouched for by a well-known ship owner of Portland, Maine. On one occasion a vessel of his arrived from the Canary Islands with a cargo of barilla aboard. While watching it discharged he saw four able-bodied American laborers vainly trying to move one large mass. The captain, who happened to be near, assured him that it was brought from the store-house and put on board by a single man, and that he had never known any other food than coarse vegetables and fruit. A traveler who some years ago penetrated a remote portion of Switzerland, tells a story of a sturdy Swiss herdsman to whom he offered a sandwich. The man ate it, and the meat, to which he was entirely unaccustomed, made him so ill that his life was despaired of, and the unhappy tourist came near being roughly dealt with as a murderer.

With all this evidence at hand, cannot we unhappy Americans, who are looked upon as the especial proprietors of dyspepsia and all the other ills that overfeeding brings on mankind, do something toward curtailing our luxuries, and adopting more healthful habits of eating? —Mary E. Vandyne, in Christian at Work.