UNCOOKED FOODS

eased. The majority of them have tuberculosis. All readers of this book may not be willing to wholly eschew the juicy sirloin, or even the fat pork chop; but we do believe that when they have thought the matter seriously over without the consultation of appetite, they will decide that the flesh of another animal is not only hazardous, but wholly unnecessary as an article of food.

If one decides that meats are absolutely neces- sary, it should be his object to take it In its best and most nutritive form. Cooking cannot possibly improve it. The only change that heat could possibly make would be to convert part of its nutritive value into heat and pass it off into the atmosphere. Inasmuch, therefore, as heat Is merely an expression of energy, the energy or heat lost In cooking might be applied to the body if the meat were eaten without the application of fire.

The most popular reason given for cooking meat is that It kills disease germs. In the first place, nothing should be eaten that contains dis- ease germs, and In the second place, heat does not kill them. The germs cannot be destroyed until the meat Is destroyed of which they are a part. In partly cooked or rare meats no germs are de- stroyed, and it is admitted by all authorities that rare meats are more easily digested and far more nutritious than those well done. There is no

FLESIi FOODS.

reason why the rare meat Idea should not be carried to its logical end, and the food served en- tirely raw.

In the form of meat there Is nothing more nourishing than beefsteak a la Tartar (see reci- pe), or Hamburger steak, uncooked, dried beef, jerked venison, etc. All of these are much to be preferred to the cooked article.

If cooking were abolished the taste and require- ments of the body would very soon solve the meat question. People would eat shell fish, dried and smoked meat, and possibly beefsteak a la Tartar so long as the body called for or demanded them, and no longer. This would also solve several other great questions with which misguided In- dividuals, societies, churches, political parties and State legislatures are vainly struggling.

It is impossible to keep alive the appetite for such stimulants as tobacco, fermented and distilled liquors, tea and coffee, when the body Is correctly fed. A being who subsists upon clean, elementary foods would have no more desire for stimulants and narcotics than a horse or a dog would have for a Manhattan cocktail.

It is the changing, the perverting, the cooking and the artificializing of foods that creates and keeps alive these abnormal desires. If we feed the body upon elementary foods, in the state In