Frugivore

“ You have learned a good deal it is true; but learn more; learn to sustain yourselves; lay up grain and flour, and save it against a day of scarcity. Sisters, do not ask your husbands to sell the last bushel of grain you have to buy something for you out of the stores, but aid your husbands in storing it up against a day of want, and always have a year or two's provision on hand. A great abundance of fruit can be dried, There are but few families in this city who do not have the privilege of drying and laying up fruit. ”

“ Those nations whom we have lately discovered [the peoples of Hindustan and of parts of America] , so abundantly furnished with natural meat and drink without care and without labour, have just instructed us that bread is not our sole food, and that without toil our mother Nature has furnished us with every plant we need, to shew us, as it seems, how superior she is to all our artificiality; while the extravagance of our appetite outruns all the inventions by which we seek to satisfy it. ”

“ We must guard against those sorts of food which persuade us to eat when we are not hungry, bewitching the appetite. For is there not, within a temperate simplicity, a wholesome variety of eatables—vegetables, roots, olives, herbs, milk, cheese, fruits, and all kinds of dry food? ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ said the Lord to the disciples after the resurrection: and they, as taught by Him to practice frugality, ‘gave him a piece of broiled fish,’ and besides this, it is not to be overlooked that those who feed according to the Word are not debarred from dainties—such as honey combs. ”

“ To prepare the frugal family meal requires no roasting heat, nor black array of pots, kettles, spits, and gridirons. The little culinary preparation which vegetables and fruits require, is neatly and conveniently done in silver vessels; for silver is abundant, and well adapted for utensils for household use. To arrange their basins of milk and honey, and set out their baskets of fruit for a family united in esteem and love, is a pleasurable exercise.
The preparation of clothing for a people [186] of such simple habits requires comparatively little labour. ”

“ The word frugality, in its original sense, referred literally to a diet of tree fruits, in distinction to carnivorous fare, and nine out of ten children still decidedly prefer ripe fruit and farinaceous dishes to the richest meats. They as certainly prefer easy, home-made clothes to the constraint of fashionable fripperies. ”

“ Suffice it to say that the farmer without an abundance of fruits in their season is like the lad with empty pockets outside the circus tent: lots of fruit and fun, ready to be enjoyed by those who have made thoughtful provision for the gratification of desires which always come, sooner or later. Every farmer should grow most of the fruits suited to his soil and climate,—enough to eat and to sell and to give to the worthy poor. ”

“ The cow had ceased to give milk, and it was too early for the fruit trees to ripen.
‘Do you know, old woman!’ said he one day to his wife, ‘I must go out into the world and try to bring back food somehow, though I cannot tell where it is to come from.’
To the hungry man any road is long, and then there was always the thought that he had to satisfy a hundred greedy children as well as himself. ”

“ A curious and not altogether comforting reflection is that if the inexpensive and simple food of the agricultural labourer is sufficient, the section of the community which spends from five to ten shillings per head a day on a mixed diet of meat, fish, eggs, and vegetables [Pg 116] is guilty of waste and excess. Here, however, the remarkable, and, in fact, exceptional domination of "habit" (in the case of man) , in regard to both the actual articles of food and the mode of its preparation, has to be recognised. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We had plenty of fruit—wild strawberries and raspberries—pork and beans and potatoes forming the staple articles of diet. There was no cow, no horse, no dog belonging to the house. Fish we could get ourselves in plenty, and eggs made their appearance in a farmer's wagon about twice a week. Etienne and I spent entire days out-of-doors, shooting, fishing, walking, reading. ”

“ A man that comes right out like that beforehand is welcome to eat my bread."
When he came in after his hard day's work and sat down to dinner, he solemnly asked a blessing on the frugal meal, consisting solely of corn bread and bacon. Then, looking across the table at me, he said, "Young man, what are you doing down here?" I replied that I was looking at plants. "Plants? What kind of plants?" I said, "Oh, all kinds; grass, weeds, flowers, trees, mosses, ferns,—almost everything that grows is interesting to me." ”

“ Last year I cleared two dollars over the cost of feed from each of my layers, from the sale of eggs alone.
The pleasure and freedom of country life are worth much. A garden with high quality vegetables, fruit of all kinds and varieties, fresh eggs and poultry, goes a long way in making the cost of living less. (We save cracked, small, or misshapen eggs for our own use.) With a saddle horse and a tennis court, life in the country is far from dull. ”

“ For a thrifty and industrious farmer has a full wine-cellar, oil-cellar, and larder, and the whole estate is rich, abounding in swine, kids, lambs, fowls, milk, cheese, honey. The farmers themselves are wont to call their garden a second stock of the winter's relishing food. ”

“ “To be sure. Our throats and stomachs are lined with solid gold, and we find the thistles nourishing and good to eat. As a matter of fact, there is nothing else in our country that is fit for food. All around the City of Thi grow countless thistles, and all we need do is to go and gather them. If we wanted anything else to eat, we would have to plant it, and grow it, and harvest it, and that would be a lot of trouble and make us work, which is an occupation we detest.” ”

“ Just as wheaten bread from being a luxury reserved for the rich has become the staple of food for all grades of society, so fruits which are now commonly regarded as an indulgence, although a very desirable addition to the food of the well-to-do, must, in a short time, become practically a necessity to the great mass of the people generally. ”

“ What need to go hungry when there were eggs in a farmer's henhouse not a half-mile away, and potatoes in the farmer's store-house, and sundry other edibles all spread out, as if waiting, in the farmer's cellar? ”

“ Now, canon, you are going to see how this gluttony, so dear to you and me, becomes one of the causes of the progress of agriculture, the real basis of the prosperity of the country. And with this subject let me introduce to you my nephew Mathurin, a tiller of those salt meadows, which nourish the only beasts worthy of the gourmand, and which give him those invaluable legs of mutton, those unsurpassed cutlets, those fillets of wonderful beef which even England envies us. ”

“ Broadly speaking, the farmer has been engaged in a struggle with nature to produce certain staple traditional raw foods and human comfort materials in bulk. He has been excused, on the whole, from the delicate situations arising from the demands of an infinite variety of human wishes, whims, and fashions, perhaps because the primary grains, fruits, vegetables, fibers, animals, and animal products, have afforded small opportunity for manipulation to satisfy the varying forms of human taste and caprice. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They believed in man's unlimited power of expansion, and that this growth demands a more highly organized food product than that which merely sustains animal life. They saw a finer nutriment in the landscape, in the meadows, than could be ground into flour, and which escaped the loaf. ”

“ Fruit will become more generally and largely an article, not of luxury, but of daily and ordinary diet. It will find its way down to the poorest table—and the quantity consumed will make up in profit to the dealer, what is lost in lessening its price. ”

“ Our instinct-guided Darwinian kinsmen are frugal in the original sense of the word; i.e., subsist chiefly on tree-fruit, but have no objection to eggs, and vegetarians of the Alcott school may have prejudiced their cause by prohibiting eggs, milk, and all kinds of fat, as well as meat. ”

“ We are not intended to be all keepers of granaries, nor all to be measured by the filling of a storehouse; but many, nay, most of us, are to receive day by day our daily bread, and shall be as well nourished and as fit for our labor, and often, also, fit for nobler and more divine labor, in feeding from the barrel of meal that does not waste, and from the cruse of oil that does not fail, than if our barns were filled with plenty, and our presses bursting out with new wine. ”

“ Here—of the provisions left behind them—flour, sugar, soups, peas, vegetables, pickles, and lemon-juice, were in abundance; but of preserved meats there remained not more than would suffice for their voyage in the boats during the next season. A monotonous winter was spent in their house; and the want of exercise, of sufficient employment, short allowance of food, lowness of spirits produced by the unbroken sight of the dull, melancholy, uniform waste of snow and ice, had the effect of reducing the whole party to a more indifferent state of health than had hitherto been experienced. ”

“ The desire for what is rare and costly is a common trait in human character. In nothing is it more plainly displayed than in the demand for food products out of their natural season. An article which in its season of abundance is a staple article of diet, within the means of all but the very poorest, at its season of scarcity becomes a luxury which only the wealthy can afford. ”

“ Thus, though I walked sometimes twenty-four miles in a day, and was out for eight or ten hours, I never had a penny with which to buy even a bit of bread, and many a time sank down by the wayside from the faintness of sheer starvation, often most gratefully accepting some of the food from the common working people I met. ”

“ Rich fruit that gives the divinest satisfaction of any this old earth affords. Food that never changes through the centuries, though fashion often changes, and riotous plenty or food famine may exalt or depress the sperit of the householder. Nothin’ but time has any power over this divine fruitage. He gradually, as the light of the honeymoon wanes, whets his old scythe and mows down some of the luxuriant branches, either cuttin’ a full swath, or one at a time, and the blessed consumers have to come down to the ordinary food of mortals. But this wuz still fur away from them. ”

“ All fruit should be bought ripe and sound; it is poor economy to buy imperfect or decayed kinds, as they are neither satisfactory nor healthy eating; while the mature, full flavored sorts are invaluable as food. ”

“ In the article of food these happy people may almost be said to be exempt from the curse of our forefathers; scarcely can it be said that they earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, when their chief sustenance, bread-fruit, is procured with no more trouble than that of climbing a tree and pulling it down. ”

“ You will get a little fruit from your garden in summer, and will have a prospect of much more. You will have cows, and plenty of butter and milk and eggs; you will have pigs, and, if you choose it, bees, plenty of vegetables, and, in fact, may live upon the fat of the land, with very little trouble, and almost as little expense. ”

“ For their place is already filled, and the new husbandmen, their children, have in their turn come into the field, to eat of the fruit they sowed, to sow in turn a seed of which they themselves shall not see the harvest, whose sheaves others shall bind, whose ears others shall thresh, and of whose corn others shall make bread after them. ”

“ Their nourishment consisted entirely of the vegetables of their garden, and the milk of one cow, which gave very little during the winter, when its masters could scarcely procure food to support it. They often, I believe, suffered the pangs of hunger very poignantly, especially the two younger cottagers; for several times they placed food before the old man, when they reserved none for themselves. ”

“ I asked him if he thought corn a hideous production, and he replied that there is nothing more unbeautiful than too much food. I think that to feed the world too well, however, that will be, after all, a beau rôle. ”

“ They will find their souls in other and more profitable directions, and it is pretty certain that the production of food will occupy a large number of the emancipated ones. We shall have vegetables and fruit and eggs in such abundance as was never dreamt of four years ago. ”