Chapter 18

THE FOOD OF MAN.

“This leads me to remark,” answered the eyeless seer, “that you speak without due consideration of previous experience. You are, or should be, aware of other and as marked differences in food products of upper earth, induced by climate, soil and cultivation. The potato which, next to wheat, rice, or corn, you know supplies nations of men with starchy food, originated as a wild weed in South America and Mexico, where it yet exists as a small, watery, marble-like tuber, and its nearest kindred, botanically, is still poisonous. The luscious apple reached its present excellence by slow stages from knotty, wild, astringent fruit, to which it again returns when escaped from cultivation. The cucumber is a near cousin of the griping, medicinal cathartic bitter-apple, or colocynth, and occasionally partakes yet of the properties that result from that unfortunate alliance, as too often exemplified to persons who do not peel it deep enough to remove the bitter, cathartic principle that exists near the surface. Oranges, in their wild condition, are bitter, and are used principally as medicinal agents. Asparagus was once a weed, native to the salty edges of the sea, and as this weed has become a food, so it is possible for other wild weeds yet to do. Buckwheat is a weed proper, and not a cereal, and birds have learned that the seeds of many other weeds are even preferable to wheat. The wild parsnip is a poison, and the parsnip of cultivation relapses quickly into its natural condition if allowed to escape and roam again. The root of the tapioca plant contains a volatile poison, and is deadly; but when that same root is properly prepared, it becomes the wholesome food, tapioca. The nut of the African anacardium (cachew nut) contains a nourishing kernel that is eaten as food by the natives, and yet a drop of the juice of the oily shell placed on the skin will blister and produce terrible inflammations; only those expert in the removal of the kernel dare partake of the food. The berry of the berberis vulgaris is a pleasant acid fruit; the bough that bears it is intensely bitter. Such examples might be multiplied indefinitely, but I have cited enough to illustrate the fact that neither the difference in size and structure of the species in the mushroom forest through which we are passing, nor the conditions of these bodies, as compared with those you formerly knew, need excite your astonishment. Cultivate a potato in your former home so that the growing tuber is exposed to sunshine, and it becomes green and acrid, and strongly virulent. Cultivate the spores of the intra-earth fungi about us, on the face of the earth, and although now all parts of the plants are edible, the species will degenerate, and may even become poisonous. They lose their flavor under such unfavorable conditions, and although some species still retain vitality enough to resist poisonous degeneration, they dwindle in size, and adapt themselves to new and unnatural conditions. They have all degenerated. Here they live on water, pure nitrogen and its modifications, grasping with their roots the carbon of the disintegrated limestone, affiliating these substances, and evolving from these bodies rich and delicate flavors, far superior to the flavor of earth surface foods. On the surface of the earth, after they become abnormal, they live only on dead and devitalized organic matter, having lost the power of assimilating elementary matter. They then partake of the nature of animals, breathe oxygen and exhale carbonic acid, as animals do, being the reverse of other plant existences. Here they breathe oxygen, nitrogen, and the vapor of water; but exhale some of the carbon in combination with hydrogen, thus evolving these delicate ethereal essences instead of the poisonous gas, carbonic acid. Their substance is here made up of all the elements necessary for the support of animal life; nitrogen to make muscle, carbon and hydrogen for fat, lime for bone. This fungoid forest could feed a multitude. It is probable that in the time to come when man deserts the bleak earth surface, as he will some day be forced to do, as has been the case in frozen planets that are not now inhabited on the outer crust; nations will march through these spaces on their way from the dreary outside earth to the delights of the salubrious inner sphere. Here then, when that day of necessity appears, as it surely will come under inflexible climatic changes that will control the destiny of outer earth life, these constantly increasing stores adapted to nourish humanity, will be found accumulated and ready for food. You have already eaten of them, for the variety of food with which I supplied you has been selected from different portions of these nourishing products which, flavored and salted, ready for use as food, stand intermediate between animal and vegetable, supplying the place of both.”

My instructor placed both hands on my shoulders, and in silence I stood gazing intently into his face. Then, in a smooth, captivating, entrancing manner, he continued:

“Can you not see that food is not matter? The material part of bread is carbon, water, gas, and earth; the material part of fat is charcoal and gas; the material part of flesh is water and gas; the material part of fruits is mostly water with a little charcoal and gas.[4] The material constituents of all foods are plentiful, they abound everywhere, and yet amid the unlimited, unorganized materials that go to form foods man would starve.