River Falls journal. [volume] (River Falls, Pierce County, Wis.) 1872-2019, 1895-05-30
EGGS AS FOOD.
They Are Consumed Without Due Regard
for Their Effect on the Human system.

They Are Consumed without Due Regard
for Their Eject on the Human System.
We know that some plants are stimu-
lants, and some are narcotics; there is a
belief even among savages that certain
articles of food give courage and others
make the eater chicken-hearted. There
is good reason to suppose that every sort
of food. vegetable or animal, has an ac-
ton as specific as what we call drugs
have. and specific relation to human
quality and capacity. We calculate
roughly that such thing is indigesti-
BILE. or that another article of diet in
creases nervOusness-the special dis
ease of this period of time But we do
not study what diet will make a man
kind, or truthful, or a lyric poet, or an
honest historian, or a disinterested
politician. We have got SO far as to
see that we must discriminate about
medicines, but il would be as reason
able to expect a dozen persons with as
many maladies to go to the drug shop
and swallow the same kind of doses as
is the spectacle of dozen people at
dinner table, all unequal in mental
gifts and habits and in physical
status, helplessly eating the same
things. Take, for instance, the egg,
one of the commonest articles of diet.
IL is assumed, in this case, that the egg
suits every body-we mean, of course,
mentally and that all ep are
alike. As a matter of fact, eggs are as
various as apples or oranges. Assum-
ing that the egg is in perfect condition,
its character depends upon thousand
prenatal causes. We can detect its OBJ
vious flavor; we say that one egg is
rich, and another poor aud thin; but
when we consider its more subtle rela-
tions to human life, the recklessness
with which we eat eggs without in
vestigation is amazing. 1t is strange
that the extreme believers in the doc
trine of heredity will ever eat an egg
without knowing the hen that laid II.
II may be the bellicose egg of game
chicken or the meeching egg of spirit
less farm-yard fowl. rhe hen may be
underfed as well as underbred. The
egg Is different from mutton, and vet
we lay great stress upon the breed of
mutton. though even in eating mutton
we take no account of its effect upon
the intellect. The mutton represents
death; the egg is the beginning of life,
and has in Il all the possibilities of new
existence. In taking different eggs
into the system we take in different
qualities, different impulses. Yet we
never inquire about the hen. Every
one who is familiar with fowls
knows not only that different kinds
have distinctive characteristics, but
that heus of the same breed have diff
ferent dispositions and characters. and,
il Is not too much to say, different
moral qualities Scientists, when taxed
with their failure to investigate the
subtle transmission of qualities by the
egg, will say that the human organism
is so coarse that IL cannot be affected
by such delicate influences, and they
cite the well-known cases of persons
who do not know the difference be-
tween a good egg and pretty good
egg. But this gives away the whole
case. The existence of such persons Is
an added proof of the lack of vigilance
in what goes to the building up of
human being This Generalization OF
the taste is probab bly, a sign of a deeper
insensibility. We may not be able now
TO prove that bad egg will produce
a bad man; il may be that only bad
man will eat a bad egg; but as we
know that a mans disposition is affect
ed by what he eats. aud that much OF
the evil in life comes from bad diges-
ton, IL Is a fair inference that moral
and intellectual qualities are transmit
ted in food 1t is the business of sci
araA
II gives itself great airs about heredi-
ty, but hitherto has done little in the
investigation of the subtle causes of
the so-called hereditary qualities in
our consuming relations to the animal
aud vegetable world.-Charles Dudley
Warner, in Harper's Magazine.