der shoots. While man
still uses these fruits, nuts, and salads, his chief reliance is on
prepared food, bread, butter, meat, and cooked vegetables. The diet of
our progenitors must have been largely one requiring chewing,
consisting, as it did, of hard fruits and stalks and perhaps also grains
and flesh. Observation of manlike apes shows that they chew their food
more thoroughly than man. Doubtless nuts constituted a considerable part
of primitive food and required cracking by the teeth. The work we now do
in flour-mills or the kitchen or with the knife and fork, was then done
with the teeth. We even have our cook mash our potatoes and make
puddings and pap of our food after it reaches the kitchen. Having
already shirked most of the task of mastication by softening and cutting
our food before it reaches our mouths, we shirk the rest of it by
washing it down with water, or worse. An Italian dentist, who has had a
wide range of observation, says that the knife and fork have committed
"unpardonable crimes" by robbing the front teeth of their work of
cutting. He sometimes prescribes for loose teeth the task of cutting a
pound of bread daily. Whether any of it is swallowed or not is not
important, but he insists that it must be cut by the teeth.

[Sidenote: Concentrated Food Artificial]

The deplorable lack of residue in modern food is one of the consequences
of civilized life, for the bulky foods have been crowded out by
concentrated foods, and, in many cases, the concentrated foods have been
formed by getting rid of residue. Instead of chewing the sugar-cane, we
use sugar, a concentrated extract which leaves no residue. We crush the
juices from our fruits and throw away the pulp. We take the bran out of
our grain and with it the vitamins essential to health. The bulky
foods--fruits and fibrous vegetables--are often dropped from our menus.

[Sidenote: Hurry Artificial]

The hurry habit, another unfortunate by-product of civilized life, is
one of the chief promoters of indigestion. In civilization we live by
the clock. We schedule our trains and crowd our meal-time to catch them.
We make engagements in neglect of the requirements of digestion. We
have, in consequence, as one of the institutions of civilization, the
"quick-lunch counter." At first we bolted a meal purposely and
consciously. Later we formed the habit of food-bolting, and it now seems
quite natural.

[Sidenote: Use of Flesh Food]

[Sidenote: Misled Appe