We have now to suppose that a wholesome but plain meal of good bread, and well-cooked meat and vegetables, selected and prepared according to the principles which have been explained, is set before you, and that you are about to apply these to their proper office of nourishing your body; how will you proceed? You will introduce the food, morsel after morsel, into your digesting bag. Now while you are doing this, take care to bear in mind what you are about. You are swallowing substances that will need to be brought most thoroughly within the power of the saliva and stomach-juices, in order that these may perform their wondrous dissolving work. Do not, then, forget the mill. Those ivory teeth have not been planted so firmly in your jaws for no purpose. They are meant for work, and for hard work too. Food is not intended to be bolted, but to be ground. Do not furnish one single morsel with its pass until it has been reduced to the finest pulp; then the saliva will get to every grain of the store-starch, and change it into serviceable sugar and gum, and the stomach-juice and liver-juice will get to every fibre of the flesh-substance, and reduce it to milk-white liquid, capable of entering the channels of the supply-pipes. If you bolt, instead of thoroughly grinding your food in the mill, be assured that the heavy lumps will prove too much for your digesting bag, however strong that may be. The greater portion, after having oppressed the offended stomach with their unmanageable load, will cause griping and all sorts of annoyance, and will at last be dismissed from it, undissolved and without having furnished any nourishment.
Another important thing is to get enough food if you can; the body requires to be sufficiently nourished. On the other hand, however, be very careful that you do not attempt to get more than enough. If you do try to accomplish this you will fail in the attempt, and have to pay a heavy penalty for your failure. Thousands upon thousands of people do try, and do fail, and then pay such penalties. You have heard it said that enough is as good as a feast. This is only a half-truth, it does not go sufficiently far. Enough is far better than a feast, if “a feast,” means more than enough. There is more danger really in over-feeding, than under-feeding. Countless numbers of underfed countrymen work through a long life in the fields, in happiness and contentment, and arrive at old age, almost without an hour of illness. But every overfed man sooner or later has to go to bed, and send for the doctor to help him to get rid either of rheumatism, or fever, or gout, or inflammation, which are forms of disorder into which superfluous food often changes itself. The life of labor and short commons, has upon the whole a much larger share of happiness, than the life of laziness and luxury.