Henry Thompson

Food and Feeding Henry Thompson

It is not a sign of ancestral wisdom that so little thought has been bestowed on the teaching of what we should eat and drink; that the relations, not only between food and a healthy population, but between food and virtue, between the process of digestion and the state of mind which results from it, have occupied a subordinate place in the practical arrangements of life. No doubt there has long been some practical acknowledgment, on the part of a few educated persons, of the simple fact that a man's temper, and consequently many of his actions, depends on such an alternative as whether he habitually digests his food well or ill; whether the meals which he eats are properly converted into healthy material, suitable for the ceaseless work of building up both muscle and brain; or whether unhealthy products constantly pollute the course of nutritive supply... It is necessary to say that the subject of food need not, even with the views just enunciated, be treated in an ascetic spirit. It is to be considered in relation to a principle, in which we may certainly believe, that aliments most adapted to develop the individual, sound in body and mind, shall not only be most acceptable, but that they may be selected and prepared so as to afford scope for the exercise of a refined taste, and produce a fair degree of that pleasure naturally associated with the function of the palate, and derived from a study of the table. For it is certain that nine tenths of the gormandism which is practiced, at all events in English society - where for the most part it is a matter of faith without knowledge - is no more a source of gratification to the eater's gustatory sense than it is of digestible sustenance to his body...