SAWDUST FOOD.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume I, Issue 288, 25 November 1911, Page 2 (Supplement)

SAWDUST FOOD.

UPTON SINCLAIR’S MENTALITY.

IVTH- Upton Sinclair, the weli-know*n author, prominent Socialist, awl more recently an advocate of the “starvation euro” for bodily ills, has been having trouble lately with hi» wife, who .-ailed him "an essential monogamist. ” and whose own unesscntiality in this respect is advanced I*3’ Mr. Sincl tii- as the reason for a divorce su.the is bringing against her. Mrs. Sinclair’s father, Mr. W. 11. Fuller, has t('turned from a hunting trip, and ha; joined tho chorus of people who have been issuing statements about tho trouble in the Sinclair family. Mr. Fuller says:— “Upton is peculiarly mental. I know him so well that at this moment I'm sure all the trouble this so-called 'trouble’ is causing him is how to analyse it. “He decided some time ago that he would, by experiments on himself, determine what was the proper human food. He went through the courses —vegetarianism, raw-meatism- —all > f them. One night we had him to an ordinary dinner: he chewed a prune for twenty minutes. When he camo we never knew whether he was on the vegetarian or the uncooked meat or tho baled hay diet. ‘Beef!’ he would exclaim. ‘Poison!’ “I've been to Arden (the Soeialis*: settlement where Mr. Sinclair resides) 1 went in Upton's uncooked-food period. At night I asked Upton where dinner would be had. “ ‘Why, we don't cook,’ he said. ‘lf you’re hungry, you’ll find in that tent over there a loaf of bread. Go to that spring 200 yards off and you’ll find some butter my wife asked me to get for her. He'n yourself!’ “Once I went to visit Upton when he was demonstrating that vegetables were the food. When I walked up tho path I saw a dog leaning forlorniy agamst the side of the house.

“ ‘Doesn’t that dog get anything to eat?’ I asked the servant. “ ‘Yas, sail,’ replied the coloured girl. Dat’s his tomatoes still in his dish.’ “Next/lay I went into the village and got that dog five pounds of heart and liver, and from then he improved. “You see, Upton is all mentality. He carried the dieting so far once that when I asked what he was eating he answered:— ‘‘‘Nothing; nothing but cold water since a week ago last Friday? “Imagine, then, one night last winter, when we had him to dinner. Our own dinner was to be turkey. What to provide for Upton we didn’t know. Last I knew he had been out to Battle Creek and had ideas on ‘caloriee,’ and that one should take 1800 a day. Then he had eaten not meat, potatoes, coffee, etc., but things which had proteids, etc. “ ‘We’ve got turkey for dinner eurselves,' I told him, ‘but the cook can get you any sort of sawdust or prunes you want? “What do you think he replied? “ ‘Why,’ said he. ‘l’ve found thrti tho food I can best work and thri-.’? on (I noticed he had lost his peaked, pir.ehed looked) is meat!’ “And what he did to that turkey, taking nothing at all except turkey, I'd hate to tell you. It was marvellous. And ho’D be a marvellous young man when he gets himself adjusted, and sticks to meat.”