this matter of selecting
one's daily food, and that is the respect which must be paid to the
appetite. The most carefully balanced ration will fail to satisfy the
ordinary human being unless it is served attractively and unless
sufficient variety is provided. To be sure, soldiers in the army are
furnished a carefully computed ration consisting of so much meat, either
fresh or salt, so much bread, and so much vegetable food, and the
variety being small, the soldier has to put up with his dislike to the
same food day after day. The need of fresh vegetables has been proved by
the results of a continuous diet of salty food on certain classes of
men, such as sailors.

It is well known that a failure to provide fruit or fresh vegetables
results in the disease known as scurvy, for which, practically, the only
cure is a changed diet. The writer has no doubt but that in many
farmhouses a very similar condition, perhaps not so pronounced, exists
on account of this very lack of variety in the daily menu. He remembers
to this day a week's experience in the house of a well-to-do farmer in
the early spring when the winter vegetables were exhausted and before
summer vegetables appeared, when the dishes offered three times a day
throughout the week were salt pork in milk sauce and boiled potatoes.

Providence intended the different digestive organs of the human body to
work, and there is no possibility of condensed or concentrated foods
taking the place of ordinary victuals, as has been suggested. The
stomach must have some bulky material on which to work, and similarly
the intestine must be comfortably filled in order to exert its forward
movements. It is in the same way intended that each organ shall supply
the necessary digestive juices to take care of the different kinds of
foods taken into the system. It is just as important that the liver
should be called upon to act on a certain amount of fat as that the
gastric juice should break up the molecules of the proteid, and just as
important as both of these is the fact that the saliva should flow
freely to decompose the starch before it enters the stomach. It is not
intended, however, that the healthy individual should deliberately
overload any part of the digestive system.

If a child, in a hurry to get to school, swallows bread and milk without
chewing and without allowing the starch to be acted upon in the mouth,
then an overburden is placed on the pancreatic gland, making that