Falling in Love

12. Food and Feeding

When a man and a bear meet together casually in an American forest, it

makes a great deal of difference, to the two parties concerned at least,

whether the bear eats the man or the man eats the bear. We haven't the

slightest difficulty in deciding afterwards which of the two, in each

particular case, has been the eater, and which the eaten. Here, we say,

is the grizzly that eat the man; or, here is the man that smoked and

dined off the hams of the grizzly. Basing our opinion upon such familiar

and well-known instances, we are apt to take it for granted far too

readily that between eating and being eaten, between the active and the

passive voice of the verb _edo_, there exists necessarily a profound and

impassable native antithesis. To swallow an oyster is, in our own

personal histories, so very different a thing from being swallowed by a

shark that we can hardly realise at first the underlying fundamental

identity of eating with mere coalescence. And yet, at the very outset of

the art of feeding, when the nascent animal first began to indulge in

this very essential animal practice, one may fairly say that no

practical difference as yet existed between the creature that ate and

the creature that was eaten. After the man and the bear had finished

their little meal, if one may be frankly metaphorical, it was impossible

to decide whether the remaining being was the man or the bear, or which

of the two had swallowed the other. The dinner having been purely

mutual, the resulting animal represented both the litigants equally;

just as, in cannibal New Zealand, the chief who ate up his brother chief

was held naturally to inherit the goods and chattels of the vanquished

and absorbed rival, whom he had thus literally and physically

incorporated.

A jelly-speck, floating about at his ease in a drop of stagnant water

under the field of a microscope, collides accidentally with another

jelly-speck who happens to be travelling in the opposite direction

across the same miniature ocean. What thereupon occurs? One jelly-speck

rolls itself gradually into the other, so that, instead of two, there is

now one; and the united body proceeds to float away quite unconcernedly,

without waiting to trouble itself for a second with the profound

metaphysical question, which half of it is the original personality, and

which half the devoured and digested. In these minute and very simple

animals there is absolutely no division of labour between part and part;

every bit of the jelly-like mass is alike head and foot and mouth and

stomach. The jelly-speck has no permanent limbs, but it keeps putting

forth vague arms and legs every now and then from one side or the other;

and with these temporary and ever-dissolving members it crawls along

merrily through its tiny drop of stagnant water. If two of the legs or

arms happen to knock up casually against one another, they coalesce at

once, just like two drops of water on a window-pane, or two strings of

treacle slowly spreading along the surface of a plate. When the

jelly-speck meets any edible thing--a bit of dead plant, a wee creature

like itself, a microscopic egg--it proceeds to fold its own substance

slimily around it, making, as it were, a temporary mouth for the purpose

of swallowing it, and a temporary stomach for the purpose of quietly

digesting and assimilating it afterwards. Thus what at one moment is a

foot may at the next moment become a mouth, and at the moment after that

again a rudimentary stomach. The animal has no skin and no body, no

outside and no inside, no distinction of parts or members, no

individuality, no identity. Roll it up into one with another of its

kind, and it couldn't tell you itself a minute afterwards which of the

two it had really been a minute before. The question of personal

identity is here considerably mixed.

But as soon as we get to rather larger creatures of the same type, the

antithesis between the eater and the eaten begins to assume a more

definite character. The big jelly-bag approaches a good many smaller

jelly-bags, microscopic plants, and other appropriate food-stuffs, and,

surrounding them rapidly with its crawling arms, envelopes them in its

own substance, which closes behind them and gradually digests them.

Everybody knows, by name at least, that revolutionary and evolutionary

hero, the amoeba--the terror of theologians, the pet of professors,

and the insufferable bore of the general reader. Well, this parlous and

subversive little animal consists of a comparatively large mass of soft

jelly, pushing forth slender lobes, like threads or fingers, from its

own substance, and gliding about, by means of these tiny legs, over

water-plants and other submerged surfaces. But though it can literally

turn itself inside out, like a glove, it still has some faint beginnings

of a mouth and stomach, for it generally takes in food and absorbs water

through a particular part of its surface, where the slimy mass of its

body is thinnest. Thus the amoeba may be said really to eat and

drink, though quite devoid of any special organs for eating or drinking.

The particular point to which I wish to draw attention here, however, is

this: that even the very simplest and most primitive animals do

discriminate somehow between what is eatable and what isn't. The

amoeba has no eyes, no nose, no mouth, no tongue, no nerves of taste,

no special means of discrimination of any kind; and yet, so long as it

meets only grains of sand or bits of shell, it makes no effort in any

way to swallow them; but, the moment it comes across a bit of material

fit for its food, it begins at once to spread its clammy fingers around

the nutritious morsel. The fact is, every part of the amoeba's body

apparently possesses, in a very vague form, the first beginnings of

those senses which in us are specialised and confined to a single spot.

And it is because of the light which the amoeba thus incidentally

casts upon the nature of the specialised senses in higher animals that I

have ventured once more to drag out of the private life of his native

pond that already too notorious and obtrusive rhizopod.

With us lordly human beings, at the extreme opposite end in the scale of

being from the microscopic jelly-specks, the art of feeding and the

mechanism which provides for it have both reached a very high state of

advanced perfection. We have slowly evolved a tongue and palate on the

one hand, and French cooks and _p* de foie gras_ on the other. But

while everybody knows practically how things taste to us, and which

things respectively we like and dislike, comparatively few people ever

recognise that the sense of taste is not merely intended as a source of

gratification, but serves a useful purpose in our bodily economy, in

informing us what we ought to eat and what to refuse. Paradoxical as it

may sound at first to most people, nice things are, in the main, things

that are good for us, and nasty things are poisonous or otherwise

injurious. That we often practically find the exact contrary the case

(alas!) is due, not to the provisions of nature, but to the artificial

surroundings in which we live, and to the cunning way in which we

flavour up unwholesome food, so as to deceive and cajole the natural

palate. Yet, after all, it is a pleasant gospel that what we like is

really good for us, and, when we have made some small allowances for

artificial conditions, it is in the main a true one also.

The sense of taste, which in the lowest animals is diffused equally over

the whole frame, is in ourselves and other higher creatures concentrated

in a special part of the body, namely the mouth, where the food about to

be swallowed is chewed and otherwise prepared beforehand for the work of

digestion. Now it is, of course, quite clear that some sort of

supervision must be exercised by the body over the kind of food that is

going to be put into it. Common experience teaches us that prussic acid

and pure opium are undesirable food-stuffs in large quantities; that raw

spirits, petroleum, and red lead should be sparingly partaken of by the

judicious feeder; and that even green fruit, the bitter end of cucumber,

and the berries of deadly nightshade are unsatisfactory articles of diet

when continuously persisted in. If, at the very outset of our digestive

apparatus, we hadn't a sort of automatic premonitory adviser upon the

kinds of food we ought or ought not to indulge in, we should naturally

commit considerable imprudences in the way of eating and drinking--even

more than we do at present. Natural selection has therefore provided us

with a fairly efficient guide in this respect in the sense of taste,

which is placed at the very threshold, as it were, of our digestive

mechanism. It is the duty of taste to warn us against uneatable things,

and to recommend to our favourable attention eatable and wholesome ones;

and, on the whole, in spite of small occasional remissness, it performs

this duty with creditable success.

Taste, however, is not equally distributed over the whole surface of the

tongue alike. There are three distinct regions or tracts, each of which

has to perform its own special office and function. The tip of the

tongue is concerned mainly with pungent and acrid tastes; the middle

portion is sensitive chiefly to sweets and bitters; while the back or

lower portion confines itself almost entirely to the flavours of roast

meats, butter, oils, and other rich or fatty substances. There are very

good reasons for this subdivision of faculties in the tongue, the object

being, as it were, to make each piece of food undergo three separate

examinations (like 'smalls,' 'mods,' and 'greats' at Oxford), which must

be successively passed before it is admitted into full participation in

the human economy. The first examination, as we shall shortly see, gets

rid at once of substances which would be actively and immediately

destructive to the very tissues of the mouth and body; the second

discriminates between poisonous and chemically harmless food-stuffs; and

the third merely decides the minor question whether the particular food

is likely to prove then and there wholesome or indigestible to the

particular person. The sense of taste proceeds, in fact, upon the

principle of gradual selection and elimination; it refuses first what is

positively destructive, next what is more remotely deleterious, and

finally what is only undesirable or over-luscious.

When we want to assure ourselves, by means of taste, about any unknown

object--say a lump of some white stuff, which may be crystal, or glass,

or alum, or borax, or quartz, or rock-salt--we put the tip of the tongue

against it gingerly. If it begins to burn us, we draw it away more or

less rapidly with an accompaniment in language strictly dependent upon

our personal habits and manners. The test we thus occasionally apply,

even in the civilised adult state, to unknown bodies is one that is

being applied every day and all day long by children and savages.

Unsophisticated humanity is constantly putting everything it sees up to

its mouth in a frank spirit of experimental inquiry as to its gustatory

properties. In civilised life we find everything ready labelled and

assorted for us; we comparatively seldom require to roll the contents of

a suspicious bottle (in very small quantities) doubtfully upon the

tongue in order to discover whether it is pale sherry or Chili vinegar,

Dublin stout or mushroom ketchup. But in the savage state, from which,

geologically and biologically speaking, we have only just emerged,

bottles and labels do not exist. Primitive man, therefore, in his sweet

simplicity, has only two modes open before him for deciding whether the

things he finds are or are not strictly edible. The first thing he does

is to sniff at them; and smell, being, as Mr. Herbert Spencer has well

put it, an anticipatory taste, generally gives him some idea of what the

thing is likely to prove. The second thing he does is to pop it into his

mouth, and proceed practically to examine its further characteristics.

Strictly speaking, with the tip of the tongue one can't really taste at

all. If you put a small drop of honey or of oil of bitter almonds on

that part of the mouth, you will find (no doubt to your great surprise)

that it produces no effect of any sort; you only taste it when it begins

slowly to diffuse itself, and reaches the true tasting region in the

middle distance. But if you put a little cayenne or mustard on the same

part, you will find that it bites you immediately--the experiment should

be tried sparingly--while if you put it lower down in the mouth you will

swallow it almost without noticing the pungency of the stimulant. The

reason is, that the tip of the tongue is supplied only with nerves which

are really nerves of touch, not nerves of taste proper; they belong to a

totally different main branch, and they go to a different centre in the

brain, together with the very similar threads which supply the nerves

of smell for mustard and pepper. That is why the smell and taste of

these pungent substances are so much alike, as everybody must have

noticed, a good sniff at a mustard-pot producing almost the same

irritating effects as an incautious mouthful. As a rule we don't

accurately distinguish, it is true, between these different regions of

taste in the mouth in ordinary life; but that is because we usually roll

our food about instinctively, without paying much attention to the

particular part affected by it. Indeed, when one is trying deliberate

experiments in the subject, in order to test the varying sensitiveness

of the different parts to different substances, it is necessary to keep

the tongue quite dry, in order to isolate the thing you are

experimenting with, and prevent its spreading to all parts of the mouth

together. In actual practice this result is obtained in a rather

ludicrous manner--by blowing upon the tongue, between each experiment,

with a pair of bellows. To such undignified expedients does the pursuit

of science lead the ardent modern psychologist. Those domestic rivals of

Dr. Forbes Winslow, the servants, who behold the enthusiastic

investigator alternately drying his tongue in this ridiculous fashion,

as if he were a blacksmith's fire, and then squeezing out a single drop

of essence of pepper, vinegar, or beef-tea from a glass syringe upon the

dry surface, not unnaturally arrive at the conclusion that master has

gone stark mad, and that, in their private opinion, it's the microscope

and the skeleton as has done it.

Above all things, we don't want to be flayed alive. So the kinds of

tastes discriminated by the tip of the tongue are the pungent, like

pepper, cayenne and mustard; the astringent, like borax and alum; the

alkaline, like soda and potash; the acid, like vinegar and green fruit;

and the saline, like salt and ammonia. Almost all the bodies likely to

give rise to such tastes (or, more correctly, sensations of touch in

the tongue) are obviously unwholesome and destructive in their

character, at least when taken in large quantities. Nobody wishes to

drink nitric acid by the quart. The first business of this part of the

tongue is, therefore, to warn us emphatically against caustic substances

and corrosive acids, against vitriol and kerosene, spirits of wine and

ether, capsicums and burning leaves or roots, such as those of the

common English lords-and-ladies. Things of this sort are immediately

destructive to the very tissues of the tongue and palate; if taken

incautiously in too large doses, they burn the skin off the roof of the

mouth; and when swallowed they play havoc, of course, with our internal

arrangements. It is highly advisable, therefore, to have an immediate

warning of these extremely dangerous substances, at the very outset of

our feeding apparatus.

This kind of taste hardly differs from touch or burning. The sensibility

of the tip of the tongue is only a very slight modification of the

sensibility possessed by the skin generally, and especially by the inner

folds over all delicate parts of the body. We all know that common

caustic burns us wherever it touches; and it burns the tongue only in a

somewhat more marked manner. Nitric or sulphuric acid attacks the

fingers each after its own kind. A mustard plaster makes us tingle

almost immediately; and the action of mustard on the tongue hardly

differs, except in being more instantaneous and more discriminative.

Cantharides work in just the same way. If you cut a red pepper in two

and rub it on your neck, it will sting just as it does when put into

soup (this experiment, however, is best tried upon one's younger

brother; if made personally, it hardly repays the trouble and

annoyance). Even vinegar and other acids, rubbed into the skin, are

followed by a slight tingling; while the effect of brandy, applied,

say, to the arms, is gently stimulating and pleasurable, somewhat in the

same way as when normally swallowed in conjunction with the habitual

seltzer. In short, most things which give rise to distinct tastes when

applied to the tip of the tongue give rise to fainter sensations when

applied to the skin generally. And one hardly needs to be reminded that

pepper or vinegar placed (accidentally as a rule) on the inner surface

of the eyelids produces a very distinct and unpleasant smart.

The fact is, the liability to be chemically affected by pungent or acid

bodies is common to every part of the skin; but it is least felt where

the tough outer skin is thickest, and most felt where that skin is

thinnest, and the nerves are most plentifully distributed near the

surface. A mustard plaster would probably fail to draw at all on one's

heel or the palm of one's hand; while it is decidedly painful on one's

neck or chest; and a mere speck of mustard inside the eyelid gives one

positive torture for hours together. Now, the tip of the tongue is just

a part of one's body specially set aside for this very object, provided

with an extremely thin skin, and supplied with an immense number of

nerves, on purpose so as to be easily affected by all such pungent,

alkaline, or spirituous substances. Sir Wilfrid Lawson would probably

conclude that it was deliberately designed by Providence to warn us

against a wicked indulgence in the brandy and seltzer aforesaid.

At first sight it might seem as though there were hardly enough of such

pungent and fiery things in existence to make it worth while for us to

be provided with a special mechanism for guarding against them. That is

true enough, no doubt, as regards our modern civilised life; though,

even now, it is perhaps just as well that our children should have an

internal monitor (other than conscience) to dissuade them immediately

from indiscriminate indulgence in photographic chemicals, the contents

of stray medicine bottles, and the best dried West India chilies. But in

an earlier period of progress, and especially in tropical countries

(where the Darwinians have now decided the human race made its first

_d***_ upon this or any other stage), things were very different

indeed. Pungent and poisonous plants and fruits abounded on every side.

We have all of us in our youth been taken in by some too cruelly waggish

companion, who insisted upon making us eat the bright, glossy leaves of

the common English arum, which without look pretty and juicy enough, but

within are full of the concentrated essence of pungency and profanity.

Well, there are hundreds of such plants, even in cold climates, to tempt

the eyes and poison the veins of unsuspecting cattle or childish

humanity. There is buttercup, so horribly acrid that cows carefully

avoid it in their closest cropped pastures; and yet your cow is not

usually a too dainty animal. There is aconite, the deadly poison with

which Dr. Lamson removed his troublesome relatives. There is baneberry,

whose very name sufficiently describes its dangerous nature. There are

horse-r****h, and stinging rocket, and biting wall-pepper, and still

smarter water-pepper, and worm-wood, and nightshade, and spurge, and

hemlock, and half a dozen other equally unpleasant weeds. All of these

have acquired their pungent and poisonous properties, just as nettles

have acquired their sting, and thistles their thorns, in order to

prevent animals from browsing upon them and destroying them. And the

animals in turn have acquired a very delicate sense of pungency on

purpose to warn them beforehand of the existence of such dangerous and

undesirable qualities in the plants which they might otherwise be

tempted incautiously to swallow.

In tropical woods, where our 'hairy quadrumanous ancestor' (Darwinian

for the prim*** monkey, from whom we are presumably descended) used

playfully to disport himself, as yet unconscious of his glorious destiny

as the remote progenitor of Shakespeare, Milton, and the late Mr.

Peace--in tropical woods, such acrid or pungent fruits and plants are

particularly common, and correspondingly annoying. The fact is, our

primitive forefather and all the other monkeys are, or were, confirmed

fruit-eaters. But to guard against their depredations a vast number of

tropical fruits and nuts have acquired disagreeable or fiery rinds and

shells, which suffice to deter the bold aggressor. It may not be nice to

get your tongue burnt with a root or fruit, but it is at least a great

deal better than getting poisoned; and, roughly speaking, pungency in

external nature exactly answers to the rough gaudy labels which some

chemists paste on bottles containing poisons. It means to say, 'This

fruit or leaf, if you eat it in any quantities, will kill you.' That is

the true explanation of capsicums, pimento, colocynth, croton oil, the

upas tree, and the vast majority of bitter, acrid, or fiery fruits and

leaves. If we had to pick up our own livelihood, as our naked ancestors

had to do, from roots, seeds, and berries, we should far more readily

appreciate this simple truth. We should know that a great many more

plants than we now suspect are bitter or pungent, and therefore

poisonous. Even in England we are familiar enough with such defences as

those possessed by the outer rind of the walnut; but the tropical

cashew-nut has a rind so intensely acrid that it blisters the lips and

fingers instantaneously, in the same way as cantharides would do. I

believe that on the whole, taking nature throughout, more fruits and

nuts are poisonous, or intensely bitter, or very fiery, than are sweet,

luscious, and edible.

'But,' says that fidgety person, the hypothetical objector (whom one

always sets up for the express purpose of promptly knocking him down

again), 'if it be the business of the fore part of the tongue to warn us

against pungent and acrid substances, how comes it that we purposely use

such things as mustard, pepper, curry-powder, and vinegar?' Well, in

themselves all these things are, strictly speaking, bad for us; but in

small quantities they act as agreeable stimulants; and we take care in

preparing most of them to get rid of the most objectionable properties.

Moreover, we use them, not as foods, but merely as condiments. One drop

of oil of capsicums is enough to kill a man, if taken undiluted; but in

actual practice we buy it in such a very diluted form that comparatively

little harm arises from using it. Still, very young children dislike all

these violent stimulants, even in small quantities; they won't touch

mustard, pepper, or vinegar, and they recoil at once from wine or

spirits. It is only by slow degrees that we learn these unnatural

tastes, as our nerves get blunted and our palates jaded; and we all know

that the old Indian who can eat nothing but dry curries, devilled

biscuits, anchovy paste, pepper-pot, mulligatawny soup, Worcestershire

sauce, preserved ginger, hot pickles, fiery sherry, and neat cognac, is

also a person with no digestion, a fragmentary liver, and very little

chance of getting himself accepted by any safe and solvent insurance

office. Throughout, the warning in itself is a useful one; it is we who

foolishly and persistently disregard it. Alcohol, for example, tells us

at once that it is bad for us; yet we manage so to dress it up with

flavouring matters and dilute it with water that we overlook the fiery

character of the spirit itself. But that alcohol is in itself a bad

thing (when freely indulged in) has been so abundantly demonstrated in

the history of mankind that it hardly needs any further proof.

The middle region of the tongue is the part with which we experience

sensations of taste proper--that is to say, of sweetness and bitterness.

In a healthy, natural state all sweet things are pleasant to us, and all

bitters (even if combined with sherry) unpleasant. The reason for this

is easy enough to understand. It carries us back at once into those

prim*** tropical forests, where our 'hairy ancestor' used to diet

himself upon the fruits of the earth in due season. Now, almost all

edible fruits, roots, and tubers contain sugar; and therefore the

presence of sugar is, in the wild condition, as good a rough test of

whether anything is good to eat as one could easily find. In fact, the

argument cuts both ways: edible fruits are sweet because they are

intended for man and other animals to eat; and man and other animals

have a tongue pleasurably affected by sugar because sugary things in

nature are for them in the highest degree edible. Our early progenitors

formed their taste upon oranges, mangoes, bananas, and grapes; upon

sweet potatoes, sugar-cane, dates, and wild honey. There is scarcely

anything fitted for human food in the vegetable world (and our earliest

ancestors were most undoubted vegetarians) which does not contain sugar

in considerable quantities. In temperate climates (where man is but a

recent intruder), we have taken, it is true, to regarding wheaten bread

as the staff of life; but in our native tropics enormous populations

still live almost exclusively upon plantains, bananas, bread-fruit,

yams, sweet potatoes, dates, cocoanuts, melons, cassava, pine-apples,

and figs. Our nerves have been adapted to the circumstances of our early

life as a race in tropical forests; and we still retain a marked liking

for sweets of every sort. Not content with our strawberries,

raspberries, gooseberries, currants, apples, pears, cherries, plums and

other northern fruits, we ransack the world for dates, figs, raisins,

and oranges. Indeed, in spite of our acquired meat-eating propensities,

it may be fairly said that fruits and seeds (including wheat, rice,

peas, beans, and other grains and pulse) still form by far the most

important element in the food-stuffs of human populations generally.

But besides the natural sweets, we have also taken to producing

artificial ones. Has any housewife ever realised the alarming condition

of cookery in the benighted generations before the invention of sugar?

It is really almost too appalling to think about. So many things that we

now look upon as all but necessaries--cakes, puddings, made dishes,

confectionery, preserves, sweet biscuits, jellies, cooked fruits, tarts,

and so forth--were then practically quite impossible. Fancy attempting

nowadays to live a single day without sugar; no tea, no coffee, no jam,

no pudding, no cake, no sweets, no hot toddy before one goes to bed; the

bare idea of it is too terrible. And yet that was really the abject

condition of all the civilised world up to the middle of the middle

ages. Horace's punch was sugarless and lemonless; the gentle Virgil

never tasted the congenial cup of afternoon tea; and Socrates went from

his cradle to his grave without ever knowing the flavour of peppermint

bull's eyes. How the children managed to spend their Saturday _as_, or

their weekly _obolus_, is a profound mystery. To be sure, people had

honey; but honey is rare, dear, and scanty; it can never have filled one

quarter the place that sugar fills in our modern affections. Try for a

moment to realise drinking honey with one's whisky-and-water, or doing

the year's preserving with a pot of best Narbonne, and you get at once a

common measure of the difference between the two as practical

sweeteners. Nowadays, we get sugar from cane and beet-root in abundance,

while sugar-maples and palm-trees of various sorts afford a considerable

supply to remoter countries. But the childhood of the little Greeks and

Romans must have been absolutely unlighted by a single ray of joy from

chocolate creams or Everton toffee.

The consequence of this excessive production of sweets in modern times

is, of course, that we have begun to distrust the indications afforded

us by the sense of taste in this particular as to the wholesomeness of

various objects. We can mix sugar with anything we like, whether it had

sugar in it to begin with or otherwise; and by sweetening and flavouring

we can give a false palatableness to even the worst and most

indigestible rubbish, such as plaster-of-Paris, largely sold under the

name of sugared almonds to the ingenuous youth of two hemispheres. But

in untouched nature the test rarely or never fails. As long as fruits

are unripe and unfit for human food, they are green and sour; as soon as

they ripen they become soft and sweet, and usually acquire some bright

colour as a sort of advertisement of their edibility. In the main, bar

the accidents of civilisation, whatever is sweet is good to eat--nay

more, is meant to be eaten; it is only our own perverse folly that makes

us sometimes think all nice things bad for us, and all wholesome things

nasty. In a state of nature, the exact opposite is really the case. One

may observe, too, that children, who are literally young savages in more

senses than one, stand nearer to the primitive feeling in this respect

than grown-up people. They unaffectedly like sweets; adults, who have

grown more accustomed to the artificial meat diet, don't, as a rule,

care much for puddings, cakes, and made dishes. (May I venture

parenthetically to add, any appearance to the contrary notwithstanding,

that I am not a vegetarian, and that I am far from desiring to bring

down upon my devoted head the imprecation pronounced against the rash

person who would rob a poor man of his beer. It is quite possible to

believe that vegetarianism was the starting point of the race, without

wishing to consider it also as the goal; just as it is quite possible to

regard clothes as purely artificial products of civilisation, without

desiring personally to return to the charming simplicity of the Garden

of Eden.)

Bitter things in nature at large, on the contrary, are almost invariably

poisonous. Strychnia, for example, is intensely bitter, and it is well

known that life cannot be supported on strychnia alone for more than a

few hours. Again, colocynth and aloes are far from being wholesome food

stuffs, for a continuance; and the bitter end of cucumber does not

conduce to the highest standard of good living. The bitter matter in

decaying apples is highly injurious when swallowed, which it isn't

likely to be by anybody who ever tastes it. Wormwood and walnut-shells

contain other bitter and poisonous principles; absinthe, which is made

from one of them, is a favourite slow poison with the fashionable young

men of Paris, who wish to escape prematurely from 'Le monde o l'on

s'ennuie.' But prussic acid is the commonest component in all natural

bitters, being found in bitter almonds, apple pips, the kernels of

mangosteens, and many other seeds and fruits. Indeed, one may say

roughly that the object of nature generally is to prevent the actual

seeds of edible fruits from being eaten and digested; and for this

purpose, while she stores the pulp with sweet juices, she encloses the

seed itself in hard stony coverings, and makes it nasty with bitter

essences. Eat an orange-pip, and you will promptly observe how effectual

is this arrangement. As a rule, the outer rind of nuts is bitter, and

the inner kernel of edible fruits. The tongue thus warns us immediately

against bitter things, as being poisonous, and prevents us automatically

from swallowing them.

'But how is it,' asks our objector again, 'that so many poisons are

tasteless, or even, like sugar of lead, pleasant to the palate?' The

answer is (you see, we knock him down again, as usual) because these

poisons are themselves for the most part artificial products; they do

not occur in a state of nature, at least in man's ordinary surroundings.

Almost every poisonous thing that we are really liable to meet with in

the wild state we are warned against at once by the sense of taste; but

of course it would be absurd to suppose that natural selection could

have produced a mode of warning us against poisons which have never

before occurred in human experience. One might just as well expect that

it should have rendered us dynamite-proof, or have given us a skin like

the hide of a rhinoceros to protect us against the future contingency of

the invention of rifles.

Sweets and bitters are really almost the only tastes proper, almost the

only ones discriminated by this central and truly gustatory region of

the tongue and palate. Most so-called flavourings will be found on

strict examination to be nothing more than mixtures with these of

certain smells, or else of pungent, salty, or alkaline matters,

distinguished as such by the tip of the tongue. For instance,

paradoxical as it sounds to say so, cinnamon has really no taste at all,

but only a smell. Nobody will ever believe this on first hearing, but

nothing on earth is easier than to put it to the test. Take a small

piece of cinnamon, hold your nose tightly, rather high up, between the

thumb and finger, and begin chewing it. You will find that it is

absolutely tasteless; you are merely chewing a perfectly insipid bit of

bark. Then let go your nose, and you will find immediately that it

'tastes' strongly, though in reality it is only the perfume from it that

you now permit to rise into the smelling-chamber in the nose. So, again,

cloves have only a pungent taste and a peculiar smell, and the same is

the case more or less with almost all distinctive flavourings. When you

come to find of what they are made up, they consist generally of sweets

or bitters, intermixed with certain ethereal perfumes, or with pungent

or acid tastes, or with both or several such together. In this way, a

comparatively small number of original elements, variously combined,

suffice to make up the whole enormous mass of recognisably different

tastes and flavours.

The third and lowest part of the tongue and throat is the seat of those

peculiar tastes to which Professor Bain, the great authority upon this

important philosophical subject, has given the names of relishes and

disgusts. It is here, chiefly, that we taste animal food, fats, butters,

oils, and the richer class of vegetables and made dishes. If we like

them, we experience a sensation which may be called a relish, and which

induces one to keep rolling the morsel farther down the throat, till it

passes at last beyond the region of our voluntary control. If we don't

like them, we get the sensation which may be called a disgust, and which

is very different from the mere unpleasantness of excessively pungent or

bitter things. It is far less of an intellectual and far more of a

physical and emotional feeling. We say, and say rightly, of such things

that we find it hard to swallow them; a something within us (of a very

tangible nature) seems to rise up bodily and protest against them. As a

very good example of this experience, take one's first attempt to

swallow cod-liver oil. Other things may be unpleasant or unpalatable,

but things of this class are in the strictest sense nasty and

disgusting.

The fact is, the lower part of the tongue is supplied with nerves in

close sympathy with the digestion. If the food which has been passed by

the two previous examiners is found here to be simple and digestible, it

is permitted to go on unchallenged; if it is found to be too rich, too

bilious, or too indigestible, a protest is promptly entered against it,

and if we are wise we will immediately desist from eating any more of

it. It is here that the impartial tribunal of nature pronounces

definitely against roast goose, mince pies, _p* de foie gras_, sally

lunn, muffins and crumpets, and creamy puddings. It is here, too, that

the slightest taint in meat, milk, or butter is immediately detected;

that rancid pastry from the pastrycook's is ruthlessly exposed; and that

the wiles of the fishmonger are set at naught by the judicious palate.

It is the special duty, in fact, of this last examiner to discover, not

whether food is positively destructive, not whether it is poisonous or

deleterious in nature, but merely whether it is then and there

digestible or undesirable.

As our state of health varies greatly from time to time, however, so do

the warnings of this last sympathetic adviser change and flicker. Sweet

things are always sweet, and bitter things always bitter; vinegar is

always sour, and ginger always hot in the mouth, too, whatever our state

of health or feeling. But our taste for roast loin of mutton, high game,

salmon cutlets, and Gorgonzola cheese varies immensely from time to

time, with the passing condition of our health and digestion. In

illness, and especially in sea-sickness, one gets the distaste carried

to the extreme: you may eat grapes or suck an orange in the chops of the

Channel, but you do not feel warmly attached to the steward who offers

you a basin of greasy ox-tail, or consoles you with promises of ham

sandwiches in half a minute. Under those two painful conditions it is

the very light, fresh, and stimulating things that one can most easily

swallow--champagne, soda-water, strawberries, peaches; not lobster

salad, sardines on toast, green Chartreuse, or hot brandy-and-water. On

the other hand, in robust health, and when hungry with exercise, you can

eat fat pork with relish on a Scotch hillside, or dine off fresh salmon

three days running without inconvenience. Even a Spanish stew, with

plenty of garlic in it, and floating in olive oil, tastes positively

delicious after a day's mountaineering in the Pyrenees.

The healthy popular belief, still surviving in spite of cookery, that

our likes and dislikes are the best guide to what is good for us, finds

its justification in this fact, that whatever is relished will prove on

the average wholesome, and whatever rouses disgust will prove on the

whole indigestible. Nothing can be more wrong, for example, than to make

children eat fat when they don't want it. A healthy child likes fat, and

eats as much of it as he can get. If a child shows signs of disgust at

fat, that proves that it is of a bilious temperament, and it ought never

to be forced into eating it against its will. Most of us are bilious in

after-life just because we were compelled to eat rich food in childhood,

which we felt instinctively was unsuitable for us. We might still be

indulging with impunity in thick turtle, canvas-back ducks, devilled

whitebait, meringues, and Nesselrode puddings, if we hadn't been so

persistently overdosed in our earlier years with things that we didn't

want and knew were indigestible.

Of course, in our existing modern cookery, very few simple and

uncompounded tastes are still left to us; everything is so mixed up

together that only by an effort of deliberate experiment can one

discover what are the special effects of special tastes upon the tongue

and palate. Salt is mixed with almost everything we eat--_sal sapit

omnia_--and pepper or cayenne is nearly equally common. Butter is put

into the peas, which have been previously adulterated by being boiled

with mint; and cucumber is unknown except in conjunction with oil and

vinegar. This makes it comparatively difficult for us to realise the

distinctness of the elements which go to make up most tastes as we

actually experience them. Moreover, a great many eatable objects have

hardly any taste of their own, properly speaking, but only a feeling of

softness, or hardness, or glutinousness in the mouth, mainly observed in

the act of chewing them. For example, plain boiled rice is almost wholly

insipid; but even in its plainest form salt has usually been boiled with

it, and in practice we generally eat it with sugar, preserves, curry, or

some other strongly flavoured condiment. Again, plain boiled tapioca and

sago (in water) are as nearly tasteless as anything can be; they merely

yield a feeling of gumminess; but milk, in which they are oftenest

cooked, gives them a relish (in the sense here restricted), and sugar,

eggs, cinnamon, or nutmeg are usually added by way of flavouring. Even

turbot has hardly any taste proper, except in the glutinous skin, which

has a faint relish; the epicure values it rather because of its

softness, its delicacy, and its light flesh. Gelatine by itself is

merely very swallowable; we must mix sugar, wine, lemon-juice, and other

flavourings in order to make it into good jelly. Salt, spices, essences,

vanilla, vinegar, pickles, capers, ketchups, sauces, chutneys,

lime-juice, curry, and all the rest, are just our civilised expedients

for adding the pleasure of pungency and acidity to naturally insipid

foods, by stimulating the nerves of touch in the tongue, just as sugar

is our tribute to the pure gustatory sense, and oil, butter, bacon,

lard, and the various fats used in frying to the sense of relish which

forms the last element in our compound taste. A boiled sole is all very

well when one is just convalescent, but in robust health we demand the

delights of egg and bread-crumb, which are after all only the vehicle

for the appetising grease. Plain boiled macaroni may pass muster in the

unsophisticated nursery, but in the pampered dining-room it requires the

aid of toasted parmesan. Good modern cookery is the practical result of

centuries of experience in this direction; the final flower of ages of

evolution, devoted to the equalisation of flavours in all human food.

Think of the generations of fruitless experiment that must have passed

before mankind discovered that mint sauce (itself a cunning compound of

vinegar and sugar) ought to be eaten with leg of lamb, that roast goose

required a corrective in the shape of apple, and that while a

pre-established harmony existed between salmon and lobster, oysters were

ordained beforehand by nature as the proper accompaniment of boiled cod.

Whenever I reflect upon such things, I become at once a good Positivist,

and offer up praise in my own private chapel to the Spirit of Humanity

which has slowly perfected these profound rules of good living.