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29
Economy in Food.
To waste food—that which acts in giving us the inherent power of
life—is against the higher nature of man, and the duty to avoid all
forms of food-waste should be inculcated, as a part of the moral
teaching of the public health administration, in every household and
school in the Borough.
It is an undoubted fact that factory life has done much to wean
many of our artizan men and women from the old-fashioned form of
home-life. Too frequently the woman is compelled to assist in keeping
the home together by outside work. This leads to loss of pride in the
home, and many become satisfied with a one or two-roomed tenement
where the cooking facilities are inadequate, and it becomes an easy
excuse, for the careless, to purchase their provisions already prepared.
Now that food-stuffs are rising in value, it is well to remember that
frequently wealth buys nothing but flavour, things which tickle the
palate, and that the very cheapest foods, if wisely chosen, have all
the nutritive value of the dearest. Moreover, by good cooking, cheap
food can be made as tasteful and appetising as the dearest, and quite as
stimulating to the digestive juices.
The rich set the fashion for fancy white bread, the servant class
spread the fashion, and the poor suppose that what their richer neighbours
eat must be the best. Having regard to the present danger of
the price of flour still increasing, and poverty spreading, the preference
for the white loaf becomes of national importance. Flour is bleached
wholesale to make it white, and, as a consequence, low grades of flour
are oftentimes bleached and sold as white thus enhancing the profit of
the miller. Economically, bleached flour is of no superior value, and,
if anything, it tends to deteriorate the flour from which the miller has
already taken useful active principles called " vitamines," the phosphates
and a part of the protein, some of which are physiologically necessary
for nutrition and others for bodily growth.
As the British Medical Journal recently stated: "Let the Government
once and for all forbid this bleaching and insist on the sale of
a household flour of the same standard as our forbears had from the
millers whose windmills ground the golden grain. The wheat then will
go much further, and the cattle cease to have the best part of the food
of man."
It is the bleaching and faking of flour which give opportunity for
the millers to form rings and force the prices up in times like these.
Bread is sold legally by weight, and too often the baker slack-bakes his