The danger to which I am about to allude—a real danger, as I believe—does not refer to abstinence from artificial salt, but rather to the loss of certain essential elements contained in the grains, fruits, and vegetables, owing (1) to their being cooked at all, and (2) to bad cooking. Vegetables form a large proportion of the food of even those who live on the “mixed diet”; and unless cooked (see Natural Diet) in the best manner, a large part of certain of their elements may be lost, and a degree of starvation result therefrom. For example: potatoes, when peeled and over-boiled, lose nearly one-half of their potash. So, too, when they are kept boiling until the skins break open—the “mealy” potato, often preferred,—more especially if they are permitted to remain in the water any length of time thereafter, a large additional percentage of valuable matters must be dissolved and turned away with the water. The chief aim should be to retain all the elements contained in the food articles, whether the cereals, vegetables, or fruits. Hence all of those substances that are acceptable in a raw state should be thus eaten; and when any of them are cooked, it should be (referring particularly to vegetables) done upon the principle adopted by well-informed cooks in boiling meat; they put the meat into boiling water, let it boil vigorously for a sufficient length of time (say ten or fifteen minutes) to “close the pores,” as they say, and confine the juices within the meat, and then the kettle is set back where the water will keep hot, just “simmering,” until the work is completed (four to eight hours, according to size of the piece of meat). The same plan should be used in cooking vegetables, except as to time—they are “done” when the fork passes through them easily. The impoverishment of vegetables, as sometimes cooked, is poorly compensated for—not at all, in fact, except in flavor—by the use of artificial salt; while this substance, so universally used, is altogether unnatural and injurious, in proportion to the amount swallowed. The loss of the natural salines, in the manner referred to, is especially observed by vegetarians who dine at ordinary tables, where exclusion of animal food and white bread is the only selection they can make. It is of vital importance for food-reformers to understand and guard against this danger—not that they will suffer more than those who take the mixed diet, for in fact the reverse is true (their whole-meal bread being a great aid)—but being, as it were, on exhibition before the world, it is important for them to obtain and enjoy all the advantages pertaining to the system they advocate.

Says Dr. Hunter:

“It is an old and a cruel experiment, that of the French academicians, who fed dogs on washed flesh-meat until they died of starvation. The poor animals soon became aware that it was not food, and refused to eat it. Were our instincts as natural, no charming of the eyes or tickling of the palate by our cook would persuade us to swallow those washed and whitened foods that deceive us into weakness.

“Analysis of the liver and other important vital organs after death, show that in some diseased states these organs contain only one-half of certain saline matters that are invariable in the healthy organ. And not only so, but that in proportion to this deficiency the organ is useless for its work. In fact, as the organ changed its tissue (as does every part of the body every three or four years), and was compelled to renew itself in the absence of sufficient potash and phosphates, it did its best to preserve its form and structure much as a fossil does. It rebuilt itself as best it could of such material as would make tissue with the minimum of potash; but such tissue, whilst useful and conservative in retaining the form, elasticity and contractility of the organ, is as useless for secretion and excretion as a fossil liver.”

The want of knowledge, not only on the part of the laity, but medical men as well, regarding such questions, and health matters in general, is exhibited in the utterances heard on every hand: “The doctor says the trouble is with my liver,” explains one who hasn’t a sound tissue in his entire body. “My blood is bad—so the doctor says.”[59] “‘He’ gave me something for my blood”—or my appetite, or my kidneys as the case may be—it might as well be “for my grandmother.” “The first thing to be done,” says an eminent physician, after citing an hypothetical case, “is to clear out the liver”; and then, after apologizing for “what might seem to be an unscientific expression,” he continues: “I have already explained the way in which certain purgatives may be said to have the effect of clearing out the liver, and first among these we must reckon mercurials.” The italics are my own. He then offers a generous dose of blue-pill “every night, or two or three grains of calomel either alone or combined with extract of hyoscyamos or conium, and this,” he continues, “should be followed next morning by a saline draught.” Mercury, to poison and exasperate the entire organism, and then a saline potion in the hope of getting rid of the mercury! And then he offers a grain of sense—a homoeopathic dose, indeed, but drowned in a deluge of something vastly worse than sugar and water: “But even with all this care in food and drink, with all this attention to what is to be taken and what avoided, how are we to keep the liver in order without exercise?” Again, the underlining is the author’s. How, indeed, without attention to all the simple laws of life—“so simple,” says Schopenhauer, “that we refuse to understand them!”

Dr. Hunter continues:

“Not only the liver, but the kidney, spleen, and brain, and the small blood-vessels in every part of the body share in this degeneration of tissue; and strangely enough (and not unlike the French experiment), this amyloid, waxy, or lardaceous tissue is indigestible by the gastric juice. It is washed flesh made inside the body, and is good for nothing either dead or alive.

“The washed flesh fed to those poor dogs contained abundance of nitrogen and carbon; but these alone, as Liebig remarked, were as useless as stones in the absence of saline matters—not of common salt, be it remembered, for that is found in excess in the fossil organs mentioned. The essential salines that can be readily washed out of food are chiefly two—potash salts and alkaline phosphates. These are also the two that are found deficient, about 50 per cent. in the waxy form of degenerated tissue. This is the type most common in atrophied children, and in persons suffering from consumption[60] and other wasting diseases; but it is not uncommon in the capillaries and small arteries of many who seem in health.

“When vegetables are soaked in cold water to keep them fresh, when they are blanched in hot water to please our eye, or when they are well boiled and their essence drained off that we may eat the depleted residue, those soluble salines are almost entirely extracted. And what are left? Chiefly the less soluble salts of lime and magnesia—just those elements so abundant in the cretaceous degeneration of blood-vessels.

“Potash is the alkaline element of formed tissue; its absence is one great cause of scurvy, as well as of the waxy and perhaps the cretaceous types of degeneration.[61] A little examination of our modern commoner foods will show how deficient they are in this element.

“Bread was, I suppose, at one time, the ‘staff of life,’ but it could hardly have been white bread. Of it, one pound contains about seven grains of potash, or nearly twenty grains less than a pound of brown bread. Potatoes, if peeled, steeped and boiled in plenty of water, contain only about twenty-one grains in the pound, as against thirty-seven if boiled in their skins. The skins surpass the center about four-fold in salines. Cabbages and all leafy vegetables lose much more, as the water gets right through every portion of them.

“Arrowroot, cornflour, and most of those prepared foods are more deceitful than the washed flesh of the French academicians. Stewed fruits, as made by some cooks, are also guilty of the wash. Even porridge, haricot beans, pease, etc., are by some cooks soaked when raw (this water being thrown away), and thus much depleted.” After simple washing, all vegetables, including beans and pease, if soaked at all, should be boiled in the water in which they are soaked; and, finally, the water from which the cooked vegetables are withdrawn, should be used as “soup stock” thickened with bread, rice, or sliced vegetables, and seasoned with meat, if meat is used at all. Containing as it does a large percentage of the salts from the vegetables, this water supplies the necessary “seasoning” far better than artificial salt. Turnips, instead of being sliced before boiling, should be boiled whole. Onions are every way better boiled before peeling. At first, the taste, accustomed to the flavor (!) of depleted vegetables,—or rather to the condiments with which they are prepared, has to be educated to the real flavor of whole food. And, again, such food being more nutritious, less in amount must be eaten, upon pain of indigestion. “No wonder if this generation finds itself degenerating. Like a ship built of rotten timber, a man fed on depleted food goes all very well in good weather and with a light load; but when one can neither bear an average load, nor undergo unusual fatigue, let him cross-question his cook.”[62]

[62] Charles D. Hunter, M.D., F.C.S., in Herald of Health.