The value of good food : no. 3 of deposits in the Savings' Bank of Wisdom, made in behalf of working men and women.

Date:
[between 1850 and 1859?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The value of good food : no. 3 of deposits in the Savings' Bank of Wisdom, made in behalf of working men and women. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    20/36 (page 18)
    used in tlie more artificial feeding of later life. Take then as A Eeeeipt for Pattern Food, the following, which expresses the relative quantities of cheese, butter, and ash, in milk. One ounce of Flesh-substance, Two ounces of Fuel-substance, and Ninety grains of Mineral=substanee, To twenty-two ounces of Water. The most extensively and generally used of all the articles of human diet is Bread. It has been fittingly called the stafe oe liee. Now it is a curious and remarkable fact that bread contains in itself just the same principles as milk; but it is of course drier, and has proportionally more fuel and less flesh-making substance. The flour, from which it is made, is composed of a stifl sticky ^aste, and a fine white powder, well mixed up together. The paste is Jlesh-suhstance ; it is nearly the same thing, indeed, as the flesh of the body, in all excepting arrangement. The powder is starch: just such as is used in the work of the laundry. Now starch is merely fat in its first stage of preparation. It is vegetable fat in so firm and dense a condition that it can be stored away in the husks of grain, or even in bags made by man, and kept there unspoiled until it is wanted. W hen starch is about to be used as fuel in the living frame, it is first turned into sn^ar and ^um^ and then into perfected fat, or oil. Sugar and gum are starch in the process of turning to fat. They are the store-fuel making ready for burning. Even seeds, when they begin to grow, become sweet, because their starch is then converted into sugar. Eemember carefully then, that starch, gum, and sugar, are all fuel-sulstance, in difierent stages of preparation lor burning. Now if you were going to make eloue into beead, how would you proceed ? I'irst you would place seven pounds, we will say, of flour in a pan. ^ou would