"Preserve and treat food as you would your body, remembering that in time food will be your body."

Food ingested to supply the solid waste of the body is taken from the extermal world; and this food needs contain all the elements of the body, the principal of which are carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, iron, etc. These, except oxygen, cannot be taken into the body as elements, but need be presented in combination, as albumen, starch, sugar. These are called the food principles. Plants live upon elements (that is, plants cannot take care of complex substances), and, in the process of assimilation and growth, they unite or fashion the elements into food principles. Mankind takes these more complex structures and, by the processes of cooking and digestion, changes them into soluble and diffusible matter, which may be assimilated and made a part of human flesh and blood.

In making out bills of fare, it is quite necessary to consider, not only the office which each food principle performs in the body, but also various points relative to the subject of digestion.

The digestive process is both mechanical and chemical; and for present purpose it has to do with mastication, insalivation, gastric and intestinal digestion.