suicide as
an inside job all would be fine and dandy. I do not claim that these were
his words; this is the free interpretation of his meaning. Sink the knife
in the butter to the very hilt--there will be no ill effects but only a
beneficial outcome--declares such-and-such a food faddist. Eschew butter
by all means or accept the consequences, clarions an earnest voice. Well,
I never was much of a hand for eschewed butter anyway. We keep our own cow
and make our own butter and it seems to slip down, just so.

In the vegetable kingdom the controversy raged with unabated fury. The
boiled prune, blandest and most inoffensive of breakfast dishes, formed
the basis of a spirited debate. There were pro-prunists and there were
con-prunists. The parsnip had its champions and its antagonists; the
carrot its defenders and its assailants. In this quarter was the cabbage
heartily indorsed, there was it belittled and made naught of. The
sprightly spring onion, already socially scorned in some of the best lay
circles, suffered attack at the hands of at least one scientific and
scholarly professional.

After reading his strictures I remarked to myself that really there
remained but one field of useful popularity for the onion to adorn; in
time it might hope to supplant the sunflower as the floral emblem of
Kansas, as typifying a great political principle which originated in that
state: The Initiative, when one took a chance and ate a young onion; the
Referendum, while one's digestive apparatus wrestled with it; the Recall,
if it disagreed with one. Alone, of all the vegetables, stood spinach,
with not a single detractor. On this issue the vote in the affirmative
practically was by acclamation. I am tin position to state that boiled
spinach has not an enemy among the experts. This seems but fair--it has so
few friends among the eating public.

I observed much and confusing talk of the value of nitrogens, proteids
and--when I had reached the ultra-modernists--vitamines. Vitamines, I
gathered, had only recently been discovered, yet by the progressives they
were held to be of the supremest importance in the equation of properly
balanced human sustenance. To my knowledge I had never consciously eaten
vitamines unless a vitamine was what gave guaranteed strictly fresh string
beans, as served at a table-d'hote restaurant, that peculiar flavor. Here
all along I had figured it was the tinny taste of the can, which shows how
ignorant one may be