Neglected Foods.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19111, 21 September 1927, Page 8

Neglected Foods.

We printed a cable the other day describing an experiment conducted under the auspices of the Daily Mail to decide whether brown bread is better than white. A group of rats fed

on white flouf went into a decline and began to lose their hair, while another group, fed on brown, grew sleek and fat. Whether the Daily Mail inferred from this that white bread is bad for human beings and brown a good hairrestorer was not made quite clear, though, as we have pointed out before, man does not live by bread alone. Indeed, to those who can still sit down to dinner without thinking of vitamins, because they know that what they lose in the swings they will gain in the roundabout, it is far more interesting to consider some disclosures made the other day by an expert of the Smithsonian Institute, and reported in an issue of the New York Times to hand this week. According to this high authority, Dr. Austin Clark, it is not our carelessness in diet that is so much to be deplored, but our fastidiousness, which is, he says, leading to a shameful neglect of many possible sources of food supply. He points out, for example, that whales are more tender and tasty than the finest beef, that grasshoppers add interest to a curry and their eggs to sottp, that jellyfish, squibs, and octopi are delicacies in Japan, that sheep's eyes are popular in Asia "Minor, that domestic sparrows are worthy of being called poultry, and that the " manna " of the Biblical ancients was probably dried caterpillars. There is a song, not exactly a classic, in " Chu Chin Chow

"Here are oysters stewed in lioaey, And conger-eelß cooled in snow; Here aro lambs'-tails baked in butter And fricasseed sturgeons' roe"— which eonveys the same reproach against the average dietary, and yet we go on perversely worrying ourselves to death because our bread is not sufficient to support life on its own merits. But the fact is that diet has always been a dangerous subject. Marie, Antoinette, we seem to remember, on being told that the people were short of bread, asked why they did not eat cake, while a statesman of the same period, a green-leafer born before his time, said "Let them eat " grass." The Queen went to the guillotine, while the statesman was hanged from a lamp-post and had his mouth stuffed with grass, though neither had said anything worse on the subject of diet than that bread is an over-rated food.