View report page

30
loaf and leaves as much water in it as possible ; in consequence the
bread is less digestible, more dough-like, and less nourishing. Bread
ought to be sold as containing a given weight of the food principles
found in wheat, not less than so much protein, so much carbohydrate,
and containing all the principles which suffice to support the nutrition
of pigeons when they are fed on bread and water. In three weeks
pigeons fed on white bread and water mope to die. On the wholemeal
wheat they live and flourish. This is the true physiological test of
bread value.
In the canning of foodstuffs heating to 120° destroys the vitamines.
Tinned food, therefore, cannot replace fresh foods. We want the nation
to have fresh foods, not faked foods.
Of very high value among cheap foods is the potato. With milk
and fat it forms an adequate and healthy diet. Cooked with cheese we
obtain a food at once nutritious and appetizing. Waste of protein, of
valuable salts and vitamines must be prevented by boiling or baking
potatoes in their skins, though for boiling, just a narrow scale of skin
can be removed. The ordinary habit of peeling and soaking potatoes
not only wastes the good things and flavour in the peel, but allows much
of the precious principles in the potato to dissolve out—to be thrown
away with the water in which they are soaked and boiled. If it became
necessary to add much potato to flour for the making of bread, the
nutritive value of the loaf will be lowered, for potato contains a lower
percentage of protein and starch than flour; the wholesomeness of the
loaf, on the other hand, will not be lessened, but the children will want
more slices of such a bread ; that must not be forgotten. The water in
which meat, bacon, fish, or vegetables are cooked should be boiled down
and become part of the stockpot into which all scraps of food, bread,
meat, bones, and vegetables should go. Probably as many people again
could be well fed by good cooks on the waste which is thrown away
from the kitchens of poor and rich alike.
The waste of food in our country is colossal. There is almost
nothing in our raw foodstuffs which cannot be used. The outside leaves
and peelings of vegetables, the bones, the waste of broken bread, put
in the stockpot make palatable and most nutritious broth. The pig
flourishes and waxes fat on the contents of the waste-pail. Children
could flourish no less well on the discarded material. The servant class
are often most wasteful, from a mistaken, uneducated, and snobbish
view of life.