Excerpt from The Hygienic Cook-Book

The table! How vast an influence it exerts on human life and charac ter; how much of the weal or woe of humanity clusters around it! In determining our physical, mental, and moral conditions, no other one thing in all the material universe has so vast a power as that which we take daily in the shape of food and drink.

Much, very much, of the sickness, suffering, and premature death in the world; much of its vice, immorality, and crime, can, if traced to its starting-point, be found to originate here. Anxious days and sleepl nights are spent by parents, in their earnest endeavors to devise some means to subdue the peevishness, the fretfulne'ss, the obstinacy or the immorality of their children, only to find alas! Their admonitions unheeded, their exhortations thrown to the winds, their agonizing prayers of no avail; they little dreaming that the causes of this perverseness lie, in a great measure, within their own control; that these unhappy mental and moral manifestations are caused by a disordered condition of the - bodily functions, produced by the improper kinds and quantities of food which they have allowed them to eat.

That abnormal conditions of the body never exist without more or less influencing the mind, no arguments are needed to prove. Take for instance the drunkard while under the dominion of alcohol. Of what avail are his own resolutions, or the prayers, the tears, the earnest entreaties of friends, to stay the fierce, ungovernable passions which rage within him, or to rouse him from the dull, leaden stupor into which the demon of drink often plunges its victims? What are moral influences then? So many wisps of straw to bind the Samson of evil. But, remove the cause, then your appeals to his better nature may be of some avail; while it remains, never.

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