Food

any substance taken into the body to assist or nourish life. Foods may be classified as gaseous, liquid, and solid. Air is a gaseous food. The oxygen which it contains is absolutely essential to life. Death results from lack of oxygen. Viewed in this light, smothering or want of air is a speedy form of starvation.

The liquid necessary to life is water. In one sense of the word water is not a food. It serves as a carrier. Particles of soild food are swept along in its currents through the arteries to all parts of the body. It also serves to render the various organs elastic. A muscle deprived of water becomes stiff and useless; a bone deprived of water becomes brittle--a mere white powder in fact.

Under solid foods, we must include the solid particles held in solution in coffee, tea, cocoa, milk, soup, and the like. Solid foods are classified usually as nitrogenous or tissue-making, non-nitrogenous or heat-making, and mineral foods. The nitrogenous foods are also called proteids. They form the muscles, bones, and other organs of the body. Milk, fish, eggs, meat, articles of food formed from flour and meal, peas, and beans are the chief tissue builders. They yield the food needed for growth and strength.

The non-nitrogenous or heat-giving foods include the sugars, starches, fats, and oils. The first two are called carbohydrates, because they are compounds of carbon and water. Sugar and starch are found chiefly in the various vegetables, fruits, cereals, sugars, and gums. The fats and oils are obtained from both animal and vegetable sources, as butter, cream, the fat of meat, fish, cereals, nuts, and olives. The non-nitrogenous foods supply the heat and energy of the body. Pound for pound, the fats and oils supply twice as much heat as the carbo-hydrates. They also form the fatty tissue of the body. Fleshy people should avoid their use.

The principal minerals required by animals are lime, phosphorous, potassium, sulphur, sodium, magnesium, and iron. They are found in milk, oatmeal, beef, and many other articles of food. The only strictly mineral food in popular use is common salt.

Substances that destroy life instead of sustaining it are called poisons. Substances that produce nervous or muscular action without providing food material are called stimulants.

The make-up of our food is of importance. The proportion of the various elements yielded by some of our standard ar-articles is shown in the following table. Waste refers to any portion that is not digested and utilized.

The following allowance is considered a fair and well balanced ration for an average man at moderately muscular work:

Total in pounds . . . . . . 4.38

Taking market prices into account, we may see that five cents invested in oatmeal, twenty-five cents in sirloin, and fifty cents in fish, yield about equal amounts of nourishing food.

The commissary department of the United States army enters into contracts for the regular supply of provisions. The following list represents a portion of the supplies required every ten days. It is by no means a complete list, but it gives a pretty good idea of the articles entering into the regular army ration:

The daily ration of a United States soldier in the Spanish-American War was the following:

The adulteration of food by mixing cheaper substances with the real article has become one of the crying evils of the day. Most states have passed pure food laws forbidding the manufacture or sale of impure food. State chemists are employed to test the articles of food offered for sale. One of the most common adulterations in that of milk with water. Butter is offered for sale containing lard, cheese, flour, chalk, excessive salt, gypsum, alum, glucose, cotton-seed oil, borax, and dyes. Cheese is adulterated with fats and potato flour; bread, with alum; flour, with cheaper meals; candy, with starch and sawdust. Coffee is ground up with peas, beans, tanbark, sawdust, and starch. Tea is mixed with the leaves of the basswood, sage, strawberry, and old tea grounds. Sugar refineries use glucose. Strained honey may be half syrup and sugar. Flour, potato, meal, sawdust, mutton tallow, and oil are sold in cocoa and chocolate. Mustard is reduced with flour and starch. Cheap jellies and jams are pretty sure to contain glucose, gelatine, and glue.

The difficulty of controlling interstate shipments of food supplies has led Congress to enact a pure food law. It is hoped that cooperation between national and state governments, together with rigid city inspection of milk and other articles of local production, may bar unfit food from the market.

According to government investigations, the average cost per workingman's family in the United States of principal articles of food during one year is shown in the following table:

Total. . . . . $326.90

See Starvation; Poison; Medicine; Wages