Conspicuous consumption

“ Though the use of this earth is fatal to health, those desirous of profiting by its reducing qualities persevere in its consumption. Loss of appetite and inability to partake of more than most minute portions of food are not slow in bringing the wished-for consummation about. ”

“ On the other hand, the suffering of multitudes and the abstinence of everybody lead to the supposition that under-consumption, or failure to use what we might, is a principal cause. It is undoubtedly true that fear of absolute want checks consumption of articles within our reach. This is shown by the immediate increase of consumption as soon as the fear subsides. ”

“ THERE IS SENSE in carefully attending to the voluntary preparation of the food for the stomach, so that the involuntary functions of digestion and of assimilation may be performed with natural ease and freedom, thereby defying and preventing disease!
If we can save two-thirds of present [Pg 198] consumption and yet furnish all that is necessary for perfect nutrition, WHAT SENSE is there in wearing out our Mind-Power Plant with a glut of surplus?
Unless a person has a pressing engagement with his own funeral, WHAT SENSE is there in hurrying with his meals? ”

“ This is a fair metaphor, because we have all been forced to learn the precise nature of our limitations with regard to the consumption of food. Is it unreasonable to hope that in time we may become as conscious of our limitations in the consumption of other materials no less important? ”

“ There is no doubt, moreover, that the universal custom of buying each morning the food for the day's consumption, is an extravagant system to the householder, and a source to the tradesmen of constant illegitimate gains, but as there are no larders where food can be kept there is no alternative. ”

“ But, having within the past two centuries become known and almost indispensable as an article of diet in every civilized country of the globe, it cannot but prove interesting to inquire into the progress, properties and effects of a commodity which could have induced so large a portion of mankind to abandon so many other articles of diet in its favor, as well as the results of its present enormous consumption. ”

“ Under the requirement of conspicuous consumption of goods, the apparatus of living has grown so elaborate and cumbrous, in the way of dwellings, furniture, bric-a-brac, wardrobe and meals, that the consumers of these things cannot make way with them in the required manner without help. ”

“ But, great as this evil is, it has, by the circumstances and nature of things, a tendency to increase the very cause in which it originates. Though the highness of price diminishes the consumption of victuals in general, it diminishes the consumption of vegetable food, or bread, more than it does that of animal food. Though all sorts of eatables rise in price, in times of scarcity, yet bread, being the article that excites the greatest anxiety, rises higher in proportion than the others. This affords an encouragement to gratify the propensity for eating animal food ”

“ They, in time of plenty, reserve and store away food. But this is food necessary for their body consumption, not gold, silver, copper, or paper money for which they have no use. They cannot eat or cover themselves with it. ”

“ Consumption. Once our fathers were wild and lived in the open air: they scarcely ever died, as we do, of consumption. Crowded cities, bad drainage, overwork, want of healthful exercise, stimulating food, dissipation,—these are human cage-life. If a man is threatened with consumption, let him go back to the plains and forests before it is too late. ”

“ If I were in the woods, camping and fishing, or hunting or tramping or riding or taking any fairly arduous form of exercise, I could eat pretty much anything and everything, no matter how fattening it might be. Work in the open air whetted my appetite, but the added exertion burned up the waste matter so that the surplus went into bodily strength instead of into fatty layers. Consumption was larger, but assimilation was perfect. ”

“ Something is due in our case to the accumulation of money, to the decrease in an increasing number of our population of the daily anxiety about food and clothes, to more leisure; but abundant and better-prepared food is the direct agency in our physical change. Good food is not only more abundant and more widely distributed than it was two generations ago, but it is to be had in immeasurably greater variety. No other people existing, or that ever did exist, could command such a variety of edible products for daily consumption as the mass of the American people habitually use today. ”

“ THE WAR AGAINST CONSUMPTION. Sixty thousand people die every year of consumption in Great Britain.
One death in every eight is from consumption.
Two hundred and fifty thousand people, or one in every two hundred, have the disease in them.
Consumption is caught through carelessness or ignorance, by breathing the germs, or in drinking them in milk. ”

“ For the rich, as well as for the poor, there is need for careful consideration of this question of intemperance in the daily dietary. Were this the proper place, it would be easy to adduce figures showing the great waste which the consumption of food beyond the physiological requirements of the body entails. It needs no great imagination to picture the enormous saving per capita, in dollars and cents, by a reduction of the daily food to a true physiological basis. ”

“ One that is going on now is the battle against Disease. Very likely you have heard the grown folks talk about consumption, and saying that it is one of the worst enemies of our American people, and kills thousands and thousands every year. Men and women and boys and girls are joining together to fight against consumption and make [82] an end to it, and a big fight it is. ”

“ Consumption, we read, “is a disease of great frequency and severity, which, in the civilised nations of Europe, produces from one-sixth to one-tenth of the total mortality, in ordinary times.” Now if, as we have just seen, consumption can be arrested and cured by proper exercise of the lungs and chest in pure air, does it not follow that the neglect of such exercises makes certain parties criminally responsible for the greater number of deaths from consumption? ”

“ We frequently hear of patients in confirmed consumption being sent to Mentone, to Madeira, and to other foreign parts. Can anything be more cruel or absurd? If there be any disease that requires the comforts of home—and truly may an Englishman’s dwelling be called home!—and good nursing more than another, it is consumption.
361. What is the death-rate of Consumption in England? At what age does Consumption most frequently occur? Are girls more liable to it than boys? What are the symptoms of this disease? ”

“ The increase in tea and sugar appears especially significant, the consumption per head now being four times in round figures what it was forty years ago. There could be no better evidence of diffused material well-being among the masses. The articles are not such that the increased consumption by the rich could have made much difference. It is the consumption emphatically of the mass which is here in question. ”

“ In the case of food, as those who have already enough do not require more on account of its cheapness, but rather expend in other things what they save in food, the increased consumption occasioned by cheapness, carries off, as experience shows, only a small part of the extra supply caused by an abundant harvest ”

“ Another, scarcely less obtrusive or less effective form of vicarious consumption, and a much more widely prevalent one, is the consumption of food, clothing, dwelling, and furniture by the lady and the rest of the domestic establishment. ”

“ Relationship between food consumption and prosperity. Erroneous ideas regarding nutrition. Commercial success and national wealth not the result of liberal dietary habits. Instinct and craving not wise guides to follow in choice and quantity of food. ”

“ Leisure held the first place at the start, and came to hold a rank very much above wasteful consumption of goods, both as a direct exponent of wealth and as an element in the standard of decency, during the quasi-peaceable culture. From that point onward, consumption has gained ground, until, at present, it unquestionably holds the primacy, though it is still far from absorbing the entire margin of production above the subsistence minimum. ”

“ We are made by that much more independent, in being elevated above the otherwise some-time-necessity of eating unmitigatedly bad, or badly-prepared food, or of going without any; for almost any corner grocery will furnish a better bill-of-fare than one often finds at poor hotels or restaurants ”

“ In the rare cases where it occurs, a failure to increase one's visible consumption when the means for an increase are at hand is felt in popular apprehension to call for explanation, and unworthy motives of miserliness are imputed to those who fall short in this respect. ”

“ The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical efficiency, but his consumption also undergoes a specialisation as regards the quality of the goods consumed. He consumes freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter, services, ornaments, apparel, weapons and accoutrements, amusements, amulets, and idols or divinities. ”

“ This last remark might in fact open up for us, had 197I space, a view, interesting to hold a moment, or to follow as far as it might take us, of the wondrous consumption by the “people,” over the land, of the most elaborate solid and liquid sweets, such products as form in other countries an expensive and select dietary. ”

“ This being so, let us recur to the point to which Sir Henry Thompson brought us. If flesh-food be, as he admits, entirely unnecessary, will not this additional consideration of economy turn the balance when we make our choice of diet? Will a nation whose food supply is becoming a matter of more and more anxiety persist in spending six times as much money as it is obliged to spend. ”

“ The increase of luxury is but the multiplication of dung! For nature has her limits, and what is beyond these is not nourishment, but injury, and the increase of ordure. Nourish the body, but do not destroy it. Food is called nourishment, to show that its design is not to injure the body, but to nourish it. For this reason perhaps food passes into excrement, that we may not be lovers of luxury. ”

“ Hunger determines the hours for the ingestion of food each day. Regularity of habit as to the times for serving meals is an outgrowth of economic convenience, and more often than not the participant is imposing a burden upon a system in no need, therefore with no desire of sustenance. In health, dependent upon occupation, hunger makes demand at least once but not more than twice daily, if the previous demand has been satisfied. ”

“ Sometimes loss of appetite announces the cessation of nutrition; otherwise the sense of hunger, present in the system, is for a time preternaturally acute, and marks the fact that the demand is occasioned by loss of power to appropriate, instead of any diminution of supply. ”

“ First, many people purchase needlessly expensive kinds of food, doing this under the false impression that there is some peculiar virtue in the costlier materials, and that economy in our diet is somehow detrimental to our dignity or our welfare. ”

“ A pure and enlightened system of diet almost of necessity disposes the minds of those who practise it to general habits of simplicity and unselfishness. Those who have realised the value of moderation and economy in matters of food and drink are not likely to look with a favourable eye on vast accumulations of private wealth, contrasted with an appalling destitution among other classes of their fellow-countrymen. ”

“ Undoubtedly, that scarcity and dearness under which we labour, can proceed from nothing but our excessive gluttony which devours things faster than Nature can bring them forth. And that plenty and cheapness, which crowned their happy days, was maintained and kept on foot chiefly through the good husbandry of that frugal and simple diet which they used. ”

“ Whence it is manifest that what in commercial affairs we call profit, answers to the excess of nutrition over waste in a living body. Moreover, in both cases, when the 411 functional activity is high and the nutrition defective, there results not growth but decay. ”

“ There is no economy in buying denatured grain, even though it is put up in cartons, at ten times the price of the natural grain.
"Put a knife to thy throat, if thou be a man given to appetite." Stop the immense waste of strength, energy, money, and time due to mere gratification of appetite.Pg 10 Stop preparing food that is intended simply to coax the appetite to the point where eating becomes gluttony. In the words of an eminent authority, "Most men would attain better health and greater efficiency if they would reduce their rations by twenty-five per cent or more." ”

“ But when the inexorable necessity for duly considering economy has been complied with, the next aim is to render food as easily digestible as possible, and agreeable to the senses of taste, smell, and sight. ”

“ It is upon this principle that luxury renders the great quantities of food we take in necessary; and those species of food which satisfy most by their stimulus are by no means such as are the most nutritious. It is also upon this principle, that in cases of accidental hardship from want of food, or in barren and inclement countries where food is scarce, the body is supported, in some measure, by what contains little or no nutritious matter, such as pure water, or the bark of trees powdered and kneaded into a sort of bread, as we are told of the inhabitants of Lapland. ”