OUR FOODS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIV, Issue 239, 6 October 1923, Page 17

OUR FOODS.

BOOMING FRUIT AND MEAT. NATURE THE BEST GUIDE.

(ITy QUACK.)

Wondrous are the effects of advertisement. Published advice in the form of advertisements issued by financiallyinterested persons is said to have "produced increased consumption" of food. "Eat More Beef"; "Eat More Currants"; "Eat More Fruit." Let us consider these. A learned doctor has stated ( and he is probably right)-that, in the selection of food, instinct is more to be depended upon as a safe guide than reason. "The food that you like," says he, "is most often the food that is good for you," and he went on to point out that in normal health the body wil, assimilate the food which appears most palatable, and in disease there is an automatic or instinctive dislike for some, or all, food, it is here uhat wise professional -advice is of value, for habit, custom, rule of life, or tho unwise counsel of those ignorant of dietetics may over-ride instinct, and much harm be done. If you are told to eat more beef, and already like it, the advice is unnecessary, and if you do not like it, the advice is bad (if --ur learned doctor is correct), because instinct is a surer guide than reason. Personal Selection of Food Values. The scientific study of food values, the careful analysis of their component parts, their division into units of energy, and so on, is interesting, but as human stomachs differ as do their owners, and to as marked an extent, feeding on scientific lines is as experimental as feeding on chance. A patient put on milk diet will incontinently vomit all of it, to the astonishment of the doctor attending, who. regarding stomachs en masse, says, "Well, she ought to have kept it down." The child who "shies" at eggs, the woman who shudders at the mere naming of oysters, and the man who never drinks plain water, or "hates fruit." all are, with many others ' common objects" of the consulting room. Tho public—-.vhich receives *o much good advice—does not often have the opportunity of electing foods, either by reason or instinct; it is those who control the supply ~ho dictate and decide what the public shall have. Distant markets receive the first consideration and the best of everything. In a' country famed for its grazing, its milk and meat, there is consumed an enor- , mous quantity of tinned milk and l canned meat. Those who are told to cot y^LrzrTo^ E - r s y. often, to us, the old beef of New Zealand. Some years ago Greece was engaged m a great advertising campaign to encourage the use of currants. So frequent became the sight of the word that my soucitor wrote to rue referring to my "currant" account, and was annoyed when 1 replied that I was not worth a plum, and my sultana had spent all my money! Currants are of many grades, and the efforts of Greece gave the growers a chance of "unloading" all the small, dry, hard, chippy, stone-infested stock, and the doctored fruit—swollen, wet, and sticky—which (with paper bags weighted with china clay) gave the customer too much phort weight (in fruit) for mc to mention without offending the grocers' descendants. The "Eat More Fruit" Admonition. To-day it is "Eat more fruit." Well, I am paying eightpence per pound for second grade apples. The Chinese "combine" gives other fruit vendors courage to imitate the Oriental. The applee in the window may be brown and sodden in the middle, but they don't look it. All I know is that, out of each pound T buy, one or more apples will be the late residence of some departed insect, who has left no more than his midden heap within the fruit to indicate his species, that others will be bgjwn inside, and others again of a flavour resembling an elderly potato's odour—a sort of wet mustiness. "Eat more fruit!" Oranges also have their faults. I don't know the names of the orange's skin diseases, but I have suggested "green peel," "scaly leg," and "grey skin," as being appropriate. Internally, , they may be prolific in pips, scanty in juice, or amazingly disproportionate in relation of peel to eatable interior. "Eat more fruit!" Bananas? Look at them for yourself. An Island native told mc, "You eat tne bananas we give to pigs." This speech is capable of more than one interpretation, but I take it in the aenee he probably intended. There is but one period—and that not a long one—when a banana is safe, I digestible, and good. To capture it in this state from a shop is not easy. "'c all lite inside." I have not always found this to be true, and at least once I have been called to visit a case of banana poisoning The child was not "All lite inside." I did not see the banana before the mischief was done. There are growers of apples who sell direct to the public'(at about twice the price they accept from the auctioneers) in boxes of forty pounds. If you purchase, in this way—usually cash in advance —and the case reaches you full and unbroken as it sometimes does, you outwit the shop, but you are burdened with more than enough apples (unless a large family) and many rot before they are wanted. An Opening for Fruit Vending. Th(> grower who will sell to the- public on the Post Office c.o.d. plan, in lots of five, ten and twenty* pounds, sound fruit, at half shop price, will probably make a small fortune, and incidentally cause a drop in the sale of aperient drugs. ' Quality and price being satisfactory the local use of fruit would increase enormously, but sevenpence per pound for bananas, and .eightpence for apples, put them out of the reach of a careful housekeeper, even if she is not troubled by the unavoidable waste, due to unsoundness. The grower can afford but little waste at the price he receives. The retailer — the middleman—can regard waste with less regret than the grower or consumer, except in the case of fruit (such as the strawberry) which rapidly deteriorates. If retailers of fruit do not prosper it must be due to excessive competition. In large towns in England the weekly fruit and vegetable market, with open (rented) stalls, reduces the number of shops competing, and everybody benefits thereby. There is but one remedy in the hands of the public for exploitation—that is the somewhat cruel weapon invented by Captain Boycott.