Kankakee Valley Post, Volume 2, Number 26, DeMotte, Jasper County, 19 January 1933 — THE HABIT OF EATING [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

THE HABIT OF EATING

By THOMAS ARKLE CLARK

Late Dean of Men, University of Illinois.

Eating is a very necessary process as human beings are now constituted

and to attain the most beneficial results it should be a regular one. It is an expensive habit at best, and made more so by the intricate and almost infinite processes by which food is now prepared. It isn’t always the original cost that is to be taken into consideration; it is the transportation and the passing of

products from one hand to another until it reaches the man sitting down to a meal, that have to be considered. We were guests at the Grays’ not long ago. We arrived in the late afternoon a while before dinner and just as Mrs. Gray had returned from a luncheon. It was the day on which Mrs. Gray’s luncheon club met and so an opportune time to discuss gustatory matters. “We had the most delicious luncheon,” Mrs. Gray announced almost before she was seated, “fruit cocktail at the outset and I’m sure by the way it tasted that Grace must have a private stock. There were blueberry muffins--they simply melted in one's mouth. She had a new kind of salad--prunes stuffed with roquefort cheese. I’ve never tasted anything more delicious.” We got all of it finally, and I presume that all the Grays sitting about listening had a distinct gnawing of the stomach and a stimulation of the salivary glands as they listened to the recital. At dinner, which I thought quite adequate to satisfy both taste and hunger, food was the sole topic of conversation. It was so throughout our visit--food all the time; nothing but food. The habit of eating had so obsessed them that they thought of nothing else. 1933, Western Newspaper Union.