The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1893-01-12
NUTRITION AND WHISKY.

Inn uence of Dietary Conditions Upon the
Desire for Drink.
1t has been well said that drunkards
are not made in the saloon, only grad
uated there, and it is pertinent ques-
ton: Where are they made?
Not SO often out of total depravity
and malice aforethought as we once
judged, and the abandonment of this
former ground marks great step for
ward in sociological study. 1t has long
been recognized that the tendency to
drunkenness is often a matter of de-
PRAYED heredity, and we are now COM
ing to suspect that conditions exist in
respectable and we'll intentioned homes
that are preparing fertile ground for
the first seeds of temptation.
We must lay large share of blame
upon home discomfort in it's many
forms, bad air, disorder, bad manners
and that intensified form of fretfulness
known as nagg,ng, for whether in the
home of the rich or of the poor all
those conditions that fill the air with
little vexations and annoyances drive
boys and men out into temptation.
But there is a more important factor,
the home table. What light is modern
knowledge shedding upon that? Far
behind US, let us hope, is the view that
eating is a necessary evil, something
quite beneath the nobler nature of man
and only grudgingly to be attended to
at natures imperious demand. More
and more do we respect the table as
the place where these wonderful bodies
of ours are renewed and where social
life is at its best, and more and more
do we consider worthy of study those
viards on whose right assimilation de-
ponds the action of brain and heart as
well as muscle. But very far are we
yet from knowing the full meaning of
this recreation of the body by food.
When we do right feeding will become
an act of dignity and Importance, the
palate will not be held sole Judge and
arbiter for the needs of the body, nor
will half-knowledge coax the unwill-
ing palate into compliance with an
erratic or one sided diet. In that gold
en- time not only shall we ''eat to live"
but we shall know the value of that
continual sense of physical well-being
that is in itself a great addition to the
joys of life, and also stranger to the
craving for unnatural stimulus.
1t has come to be commonplace
among students of sociology that a
half-fed peasantry in times of want re-
sort to alcohol to whip up the tagging
energies and TO bring forgetfulness of
misery. Matthew Williams tells us
that he spent an entire year travelling
in Italy during season of great abun-
dance and that he never saw in the
time drunken italian. But few
years later during a period of scarcity
and trouble when 1.-The three plaques"
the potato disease the silk worm fun
gus and the grape disease, had brought
about general privation, he found
drunkenness very prevalent. There
was little to eat but ''polenta, sort
of corn mush, there was no wine, and
potato spirit and coarse beer had be-
come the general drink"
There is no doubt that better food
would do much to wean the Russian
peasant from his vodka, and the COM
mon people of central Europe from
their excessive use of beer. About such
plain instances as these there never
can be two opinions The drink habit
here must be attacked directly by an
improvement in the food.
But the insufficient dietary is not
confined to the poverty-stricken. The
world over, and perhaps more in
America than anywhere else, there are
many people, especially those of deli
cate or nervous habit or living
sedentary life, who are under
pourished. So much has been said of
the prevalence of overeating and the
extravaganza of the American nation
as to food has so often been held up to
us that we are apt to think that if a
given diet contains the estimated re-
quirements in proteid fat and carbo-
hydrates the person fed upon it must
be well nourished, and that, except for
the very poor, we are well-fed people.
But the nutrition of the family is not
measured by the grocery bill. We must
first reckon with the cook, who is
capable of turning the best materials
into mess utterly lac 'ling in food
value; and then we have another great
factor-the assimilative power of the
individual
Here we have problem not so east
ly dealt with. Why is the foreign
laborer who eats his noon luncheon by
the roadside we'll nourished on his
beans and bacon, and that day after
day, while the sedentary student of
somewhat delicate tastes would starve
on such diet? Why is the peasant
used to one dish at a meal fully salts
fed and nourished by it, if it be of the
right quality and quantity, while for
the man of cultivated tastes it has be-
come well-nigh impossible to eat day
after day enough of any one kind of
food, however good. to keep him in
fully nourished condition? How could
one Lewis Cornaro, as we are told,
keep up his health, strength and vigor
for fifty years on a daily diet of four
reen ounces of food, mostly vegetable,
an amount quite inadequate for the
wants of the ordinary man?
The only answer is that individual