DAILY DIET

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 December 1934, Page 2

DAILY DIET

FASHIONS AND FADS. Changing fashions and fads in foods and the need for research in the problems Of diet were discussed by Professor H. V. Mottram, professor of physiology in the University of London, in an address delivered recently at the Municipal College, Bournemouth. The speaker told his audience how to distinguish a fad from a fashion; a fashion, he said, became a fad when it needed emotion to defend it. At some period, continued Professor Mottram, the arboreal ancestors of the human race descended from the trees and took to the land, and discovered that, in addition to insects and lizards, and perhaps small birds, the larger animals were worth eating. The first age of man was that of a hunter, living on an entirely meat diet.. At a later stage he discovered that he could tame animals, like the goat and the cow, and live on the milk or the cheese made fro mthe milk. Finally, he took to agriculture, and consumed cereals and vegetables. He survived these tremendous changes, though probably with difficulty. What happened in these days was largely conjecture, but in historic times food fashions had been changing in the strangest way. There was a delightful picture in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” of a poor person’s diet —the widow, in the Priest’s Tale who practised simple diet, exercise, and a contented mind. She drank neither red nor white wine, her food was mainly black and white bread, broiled bacon, and an egg or two. There were some who sighed for the great days of Elizabeth, but no one would want to live in her day who understood what people had to eat then. Sugar cost a sovereign a pound . and only the Queen could afford it; J too much sugar was said to have 1 caused the blackness of her teeth. Potatoes in those days were a curiosity, and cabbage and the French bean had just been newly introduced. There was no tea, coffee, or cocoa; for breakfast the drink was beer or wine, depending on the wealth of the drinker. Beer-drinking at breakfast, according to recent newspaper correspondence, continued until the seventies of the last qgntury in Oxford, that home of lost causes.

FOODS RECENTLY INTRODUCED. In one’s own time, continued Professor Mottram, diet had undergone many changes. In his own boyhood the tomato was just beginning to make its way; the banana had hardly appeared; grape fruit, now familiar on the breakfast table, came in about 1900. Before the war a certain commodity was discoverable only in German shops, but now every shop which supplied pig products furnished the liver sausage—he was sometimes inclined to think that it was the only good thing which had come out of the war. Frozen mutton and chilled beef had come in since the childhood of many of those present. The changes were partly due to better and quicker transport, but also to standardisation of food products. Enter, for example, was made in larger and larger factories. The cream from which it was made was soured always with the' same type of bacteria, and so the c taste was standardised. Persons who 2 had become accustomed to New Zea-

land butter and were suddenly switched over to Dorset said that they did not like the flavour. A great refinement of food had taken place, particularly in sugar and flour, the former of which was now almost 100 per cent. pure. Some curious mixtures of foods were often consumed. In the States the speaker had seen a person eating sausages with waffles and golden syrup, and in Germany gooseberry jam with stewed beef, though people who had red currant jelly with their mutton had no right to make a remark, any more than the Englishmen who favoured putrid cheese should express disgust at the diet of the Eskimo, which was largely putrid meat.

The order and times of meals had also changed. At the coronation feast of William IV. the courses, which had no particular order, began early in the afternoon and went on for most of the remainder of the day. Afternoon tea was a modern innovation. From the biography of Fanny Kemble it appeared to have risen about the fifties oi’ sixties, when, with whispers of secrecy, tea was served in the lady’s boudoir.

MODERN FADS AND FANCIES. Practically every change of fashion had its reaction. There were always those who said that a new introduction was producing some horrible disease. Cancer had been ascribed to bread made from white flour, also to tomatoes, for no better reason than since the introduction of tomatoes the cancer rate had gone up. He sympathised with the moral objection of the vegetarian to meat, although a psy-cho-analyst friend assumed him that vegetarianism was due to the repression of cannibalistic desire. A new attitude of mind was that foods should not be mitfed. “Onida,” J a novelist of some vogue in Victorian times, stated that animals never mixed their foods. Nor but if their foods were mixed for them he had never seen any animal refuse. But it was now once again .being said that one should have only starch or sugar foods at one meal, fat at another, and so on—a wholly irrational idea. He had no doubt that there would soon be a chivalrous war on .vitamins. The great need of to-day, concluded Professor Mottram, was more mass research into the problems of diet. The difficulties in research were the cost and the fact that man, with his complex psychology, was the worst research animal in the world, his psychological reactions to food being almost as strong and disturbing as towards sex. Auto-suggestion explained the vogue of many patent medicines ami many patent foods. i The principles of dietetics, so far as that subject had become a science, 1 were very simple. They were that a i mixed diet was essential, and that it must contain first of all dairy food, , then market garden produce, and ( third food from the sea. There were [ no fads in diet, and only one fashion ■ < should be allowed—namely, to eat a mixed diet. j 1