The Chemistry of Cookery

proportion of deaths is far higher among the well-to-do classes than among the poorer classes. It seems to be the one disease that increases with improved general sanitary conditions. The evidence is not yet complete, but as far as it goes it points most ominously to a direct connection between cancer and excessive flesh feeding among people of sedentary habits. The most abundant victims appear to be women who eat much meat and take but little out-of-door exercise. CHAPTER XVIII. MALTED FOOD. A FEW years ago the ‘farmers’ friends’ were very sanguine on the subject of using malt as cattle food. At agricultural meetings throughout the country the iniquitous malt-tax was eloquently denounced because it stood in the way of this great fodder reform. Then the malt-tax was repealed, and forthwith the subject fell out of hearing. Why was this? The idea of malt feeding was theoretically sound. By the malting of barley or other grain its diastase is made to act upon its insoluble starch, and to convert this more or less completely into soluble dextrin, a change which is absolutely necessary as a part of the business of digestion. Therefore, if you feed cattle on malted grain instead of raw grain, you supply them with a food so prepared that a part of the business of digestion is already done for them, and their nutrition is thereby advanced. From what I am able to learn, the reason why this hopeful theory has not been carried out is simply that it does not ‘pay.’ The advantage in fattening the cattle is not sufficient to remunerate the farmers for the extra cost of the malted food. This may be the case with oxen, but it does not follow that it should be the same with human beings. Cattle feed on grass, mangold-wurzels, &c., in their raw state, but we cannot; and, as I have already shown, we are not graminivorous in the manner they are; we cannot digest raw wheat, barley, oats, or maize. We cannot do this because we are not supplied with such effective natural grinding apparatus as