DINNER.

We wish to speak now of dinner, the principal meal of the day. Here, too, we shall take for standard neither the unhappy poor, who must eat what little he can obtain; nor the opulent rich, who finds a pleasure in eating what others cannot obtain. We shall take for base the plain household of the citizen, who takes healthy meals in order to strengthen him for renewed activity.

What may have been the reason for putting the principal meal in the middle of the day?

It was done for the reason that eating, too, is a labor; a labor which requires rest. Now bodily fatigue and appetite constantly keep pace with each other; they manifest themselves in the body in intervals of three or four hours. Since, then, we must rest at noon from the fatigue of the morning's labor, it is best for us to use this time of rest for our dinner; all the more so as the labor of eating ought not to be performed during manual labor. And because just at the middle of the day we rest from our labor and prepare ourselves for the afternoon work, it is natural that we should eat our principal meal at that time.

But this meal needs to be prepared carefully. The housewife is chained to the kitchen, because this meal is distinguished from others principally in this, that it is usually taken warm.

The question arises in the first place, Why must food be cooked? Is it not more natural to take the food as nature gives it to us? Why does man eat nothing raw except fruit? Why does he take such pains to grind, bake, boil, fry, etc., while the animal can live without all this? Again, whence does it come, that man is so very dainty in regard to eating and drinking, and that he uses an infinite variety of articles of food, as does no other creature in the world? Are there not animals that live on meat only, and others that live only on plants? Why, then, does man need mixed food, that is, partly meat and partly vegetable food?

To all these questions there is but one answer.

Nature herself has pointed this out to man; and experience, the natural instructor of mankind, has taught man how he can do best what nature wishes him to do.

The human stomach is so constituted that it can digest but very little of raw food. Just as the nutritive part of the pea is enclosed by a hull, so in every organic food the nutritive element proper is contained in a hull, called cell. The nutritive element of the potato, for example—the starch—is enclosed in millions of small cells, which are indigestible for our stomach. By means of good magnifying glasses, these cells, invisible to the naked eye, may be plainly seen. If the potato were eaten raw, these cells, together with the nutritive element in them, would leave the body unchanged. But if the potato is boiled, fried, or baked, the cells, by their expansion from the heat, burst, and thus allow the starch to be free. Now, while animals have been given a digestive apparatus strong enough to dissolve the hardest cells—pigeons, for example, swallow and are able to digest raw pease—man has been endowed with intelligence which enables him to prepare his food artificially.

Cooking, therefore, is as natural to man as the act of chewing; for chewing, the crushing of food with the teeth, on the part of animals that live on plants, is nothing but the tearing asunder of cells. Animals that have no teeth, birds for example, possess immensely strong powers of digestion. It would be as unnatural for the ox, who has good teeth to crush peas with, to swallow them entire as the pigeon does, as it were unnatural for man to take pease raw while he has the means of cooking them.

We often call art what really is nature in man; for his mental gifts are natural to him; women, therefore, when they perform the art of cooking, practise a natural art.