Foods : nutritive value and cost / by W.O Atwater.

  • Atwater, W. O. (Wilbur Olin), 1844-1907.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Foods : nutritive value and cost / by W.O Atwater. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    another way, the food purchased contained nearly 10 per cent more protein, 12 per cent more fat, and 5 per cent more carbohydrates than were eaten ; and, worst of all, the wasted protein and fats were mostly from the meats, which supplied them in the costliest form. From the statistics of the amounts and composition of the table and kitchen wastes of a boarding house at Middletown, Conn., it appears that these contained one-ninth of the whole nutritive material of the food purchased. They included one-fifth of the protein and fats and one-twentietli of the carbohydrates. Here again the rejected portions were mostly from the meats. Except in so far as parts of the waste were fed to chickens or possibly used for soap, it was simply tkiiown away. The boarding house was a very good one, the mistress was counted an excellent housekeeper, and the boarders were mechanics and other thrifty and industrious people with only moderate incomes. In the studies of dietaries of students’ clubs in Middletown it was necessary to determine the weight and composition of the rejected por¬ tion of meats. In buying meat in the retail markets in this region it is a common practice to have the bone and considerable of the fat cut out and left. In thus removing the u trimmings” the butcher is apt to cut out considerable else than the bone and fat. In a piece of roast beef weighing 16 pounds, the u trimmings,” which consisted of tne bone and meat cut out with it, and which were left for the butcher to sell to the soap man or get rid of as he might otherwise choose, weighed 4J pounds, so that 11Jpounds of meat went to the consumer, who, of course, paid for the whole. The butcher said that he sold this sort of'beef largely to the ordinary people of the city—mechanics, small tradesmen, and laborers; that many of his customers preferred not to take the “trimmings;” and that they were not exceptionally large in this case, either in amount or in proportion of meat and bone, for that cut of beef, which was the arib roast.” Inquiries of other meat men brought similar information. The 44 pounds of “trimmings” consisted of, approximately, 2J pounds of bone and 4 pound of tendon (“ gristle”), which would make a most palatable and nutritious soup, and If pounds of meat, of which 1 pound was lean and f pound fat. It is estimated that the nutritive materials of meat thus left unused, saying nothing of the bone and tendon, contained some 15 per cent of the protein and 10 per cent of the potential energy of the whole. The price of the beef was $2.24. Assum¬ ing the nutritive value of the ingredients of the u trimmings ” to be 124 per cent of the whole, 28 cents worth of the nutritive material, besides the bone and tendon, was left at the butcher’s. The common saying that u the average American family wastes as much food as a French family would live upon ” is a great exaggeration, but statistics show that there is a great deal of truth in it. Even in some of the most economical families the amount of food wasted, if it could be collected for a month or a year, would prove to be very large, and in many cases the amount would be little less than enormous.