THE RAW-FOOD FAD.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 11825, 30 November 1901, Page 6 (Supplement)

THE RAW-FOOD FAD.

The eaters of raw food are feebly encouraged by the editor of Good Health (August), who remarks that whatever may be said of uncooked food it is certainly preferable to food • badly cooked. He says: Just now the raw-food diet threatens to become a fad. Certainly many people are experimenting ■with tins new dietetic idea- Fortunately it is not a very dangerous one. On the whole, much more mischief is done by bad cookery than could ever possibly result from the use of raw food, and there can be no doubt that it would be far better for the average man or woman to adopt an absolutely raw diet, and eat everything which he could possibly eat or relish, in a perfectly raw state than to swallow into his stomach the horrible messes which are concocted by the average cook. If the writer had to take his chances between

raw food and the food found upon the average table he would certainly dine with Nature every time. Raw potatoes would be far less likely to do mischief in the alimentary canal than -fried potatoes, Saratoga chips, or even ordinary baked potatoes well battered while hot. Raw beefsteak, dripping and quivering, from the side of a freshly slaughtered animal, is probably one oi the most digestible of all known • foods, although certainly not the most {esthetic or appetising; while the same steak, dried and fried on the griddle with burnt butter and salt, is only a little more digestible than a bit ol sole-leather. Raw wheat would certainly digest after a lengthy peregrination, but the same wheat made into doughnuts, griddle-cakes, pie crust, or noodles, might tarry for a lengthy period in fome nook along the digestive highway without undergoing that transmutation by which harmless foodstuffs are converted into live blood and vitilised tissues. It is ■iafer on the whole for man to take his food as he finds it in its natural state, than to take i: as he finds it on the table of the average boarding-house or hotel. In other words, it is far safer for man to receive his food straight from the hands of his Maker tLan from the hands of a French cook. The rawfood idea is not, to be hastily condemned nor too much discouraged. It will open the eve* of a multitude of people to the evils of our present ways in diet, and certainly will serve a purpose in pointing toward the natural way in diet, from which the civilised portion of the race has wandered so far astray. Our natural -food friends only need o drop off a few coarse and comparatively as well as unpalatable foodstuffs to find themselves in the perfect way in diet which was marked out for man in the beginning, and in which our neaivst relatives, the gorilla, chimpanzee, and orangoutang, are still walking."