The Forerunner Part 43

KITCHEN-MINDEDNESS

It is physically possible to see through a knot-hole. If the eye be near enough, and the board be movable, one can, with patient rotation, see the universe in spots, through a knot-hole. Such a purview is limited of necessity, and while suitable to the microscope, is not congenial to the study of life in general.

When those who would save the forests of America began their work, the burden of effort lay in so stimulating and stretching the mental vision of our people, that they could see wider than their own immediate acreage, deeper than their own immediate profit, further than their own immediate time. Some such struggle was no doubt gone through, when that far-seeing iconoclast of early times strove to prove to the greedy hunter that more food was to be attained by breeding cattle than by killing them all at once; that meat kept better when alive. What mental labor, what arduous conflict between that prehistoric ant and gra.s.shopper!

Steadily up the ages the mind of man has had to stretch, and st.u.r.dily has he resisted the process. That protoplasmic substance of the brain, used so much and understood so little, astonishes us no less by its infinite capacity for new extension, for endless fluent combination, than by its leaden immobility. Here are some, open-minded, sensitive and hospitable to new impressions; and here are others, an innumerable majority, preferring always to know only what they have known, to think only what they have thought before. The distinction does not seem innate. A normal child provided with proper stimulus, responds with ever fresh interest as field after field of new fact and new idea opens before him.

Twenty years later that same child has lost this capacity, has become dull, inert, conventional, conservative, contented. Upon his growing mind have been imposed in long succeeding years, the iron limitations of his "elders and betters"; only in the rarest of cases has he the mental strength to resist these influences and "think new," think for himself.

Here we all are, living together in relations as complex as the pattern of some mighty tapestry; each of us, seeing only his own part in it, considering the pattern from the point of view of a st.i.tch. This att.i.tude is exquisitely expressed by the reply of a dull student to the earnest teacher who strove to arouse in him some spontaneous opinion on human conduct. With enthusiasm and dramatic force, this instructor exhibited the career of Nero,--showed his list of crimes natural and unnatural, personal and political; his indecency, and cruelty, demanding what should be said of the monster. The student, spurred by questions, some-what fretfully responded, "He never did anything to me!"

Consciousness is of varying range. We know its gradual development, its narrow field in childhood, its permanent restriction in idiocy. We know how it may be developed, even in animals, how we have added to the dog's field of consciousness a deep and pa.s.sionate interest in his master's life; how a well-befriended cat becomes desperately uneasy, when the family begins to pack for a journey. We know personally the difference between our range of thought at one age, and at another; how one's consciousness may include wider and wider fields of knowledge, longer ranges of time, deeper causal relations; and how the same object, viewed by different minds, may arouse in one as it were, a square inch, and in the other a square mile of consciousness. Those of us, who have the larger area under cultivation,--who are accustomed to think of human life as age-long, world-wide, and in motion, learn to see human conduct, not as something in neat detachable strata, like a pile of plates, but as having long roots and longer branches, and requiring careful handling to alter.

To these, studying the world's affairs, clear lines of causal sequence present themselves. Is it a thousand cases of typhoid? They trace the fever to its lair as one would hunt a tiger; they point out every step of its course; they call on the citizens to rise and fight the enemy, to save their lives. Do the citizens do it? Not they. Individually they suffer and die. Individually they grieve and mourn, bury,their dead (when they should cremate them), and pay the doctor and the undertaker.

Hundreds of dollars they pay as individuals to nurses, doctors, graveyard men, and monument makers. If, collectively they would put up a tenth of the sum to ensure a pure water and milk supply, they would save not only hundreds for themselves, but thousands and millions for those after them.--to say nothing of grief!

But they look at life through a knot-hole. They see their own personal affairs as things of sky-shadowing importance, and those same affairs, taken collectively, become as remote and uninteresting as the Milky Way.

Now in the mere labor of intellectual comprehension our average citizen of common-school education is able to see that where so much tuberculous milk is fed into so many babies, that such a proportion will surely die.

He sees, but it does interest him. Show him tubercular bacilli from the autopsy of his dead baby, show him the same in the bottle of milk reposing in his refrigerator, and show him the man who put them there--and you may get results.

He could see the larger facts, but only feel the smaller ones. It is a limitation of consciousness.

All workers for human advance know this. Whatever the cause upheld, those who work for it find everywhere the same difficulty; they have to stretch the minds, to stimulate the consciousness, to arouse the interest of their hearers, so that they will take action for the common good.

In one field it is easy, that of public danger from war. The reason is clear. Wars are carried on by men, and men have reacted to conflict stimuli collectively, for so many ages, that it is a race habit with them. Only in the last extreme of terror is this habit broken, and the battle turns to rout, with every man for himself. Then comes the officer and strives to rekindle that common consciousness without which is no human victory.

In the economic world our habits of organization are not so old. We have fought in company since we fought at all, as humans; but we have worked, for the most part alone. The comradeship of shop and factory is of yesterday, compared to the solitary spindle, loom and forge of earlier centuries. Yet in that comradeship wherever found, comes the new consciousness, that recognizes common danger or common gain, and subst.i.tutes the army for the mob, the victory for the rout.

This effect is so strong, so clear, so quick in appearance, that even with one poor century or two of economic combination, we ought to find much better results than we do. Where the common interest is as clear as day, where the common strength is so irresistible, where the loss and the danger lie so wholly in isolation, one wonders over and over at the lack of comprehension which keeps us so helplessly apart.

We can see the immense activities of the nation, the multiplication of national wealth, power, and progress,--the saving of life, the elimination of disease, the development of art and science, of beauty and of health and glorious living that we might have, but we cannot feel these things. Therefore we do not act.

Can there be still among us some general cause, acting on everyone, which mysteriously checks out progress, which makes us "penny-wise and pound-foolish," makes us "save at the spigot and spend at the bung-hole," which continually intensifies our consciousness of personal interest and continually prevents the recognition of social interests?

It may seem almost grotesque to make so heavy a complaint as this, and then to put forward as chief offender our old companion the kitchen.

Briefly the charge is this: that in the private kitchen, we maintain in our civilization an economic inst.i.tution as old as house-building, almost as old as the use of fire. The results of this surviving rudiment of a remote past are many. The one presented here is the effect of the kitchen on the mind.

The condition is practically universal. For each house a kitchen. Be it the merest hut, the smallest tenement, one room; wherever the family is found, there is the kitchen. For each man there is a cook. In the great majority of cases the man's wife is his cook, and as she must spend most of her time in the kitchen, there must be her little ones also. In fifteen-sixteenths of American families, the children are thus reared,--by cooks in kitchens.

We, in our fatuous acceptance of race habits, have ceaselessly perpetuated this kitchen-bred population, and even defended it as an educational influence of no mean importance. "Children brought up by their mothers in the kitchen," we say, "early acquire knowledge and skill in various occupations; they see things done, and learn how to do them themselves."

This seems to the superficial listener like good sense. He never looks below the allegation for the evidence. He sees that daily observation, and practice should develop knowledge and skill, and fails to inquire further to see if it does.

Surely if all children were brought up in blacksmith shops, it would make them good blacksmiths; if they were brought up in dental parlors they would become good dentists!

Waiving the desirability of a form of training calculated to turn out an unvarying population of cooks, let us see if this daily a.s.sociation with the maternal house-servant in her workshop does educate as stated. On this point one clear comment has been made: "If kitchen life is such good training to mind and hand, why is it that so few of us are willing to follow the kitchen trades when we are grown? and why is it that competence in the kitchen is so rare?" This is a most practical observation. If fifteen-sixteenths of our women followed incessantly the occupation of shoemaking, and brought up their children in the shoe shop, we should hardly claim great educational advantages for that arrangement. If we did, would it not be disappointing to find that the trade of shoemaking was universally disliked and despised, and that good shoemakers were hard to find at any price?

Yet this is precisely the case in hand. Our kitchen-bred children, boy and girl alike, prefer almost any other trade, and when we wish to secure competent workers in the kitchen we find them extremely scarce.

Moreover, in its own special activities, the private kitchen makes no advance. Advance comes to it from outside; from the wider and more progressive professionalism of its various industries; specialized and socialized one by one. But, left to itself, domestic cook hands down to domestic cook the recipes of female ancestors, occasionally added to by obliging friends. It is endless repet.i.tion, but not progress.

The purpose of this discussion, however, is not to show the inefficacy of this ancient workshop, as a means of carrying on that great art, science, handicraft, and business--the preparation of food; but to point out the effect of the kitchen on the human mind.

The one dominant note of kitchen work is personality. Its products are all prepared for home consumption only. Its provisions are all secured and its processes directed with a view to pleasing a small group. It does not and cannot consider the general questions of hygiene, of nutrition, of the chemistry of improved processes of preparation, and the immense and pressing problems of pure food.

The kitchen mind, focussed continually upon close personal concerns, limited in time, in means, in capacity, and in mechanical convenience, can consider only; a, what the family likes; b, what the family can afford; and, c, what the cook can accomplish.

The most perfect type of organization we have is the military. Military success depends most absolutely on the commissary and sanitary departments. "An army travels on its belly," is the famous dictum.

Is there any difference in this respect between soldiers and other people? Are we not all gasteropods whether singly or in regiments? Is not the health and strength of the productive workers of the world, at least as valuable as that of the c.u.mbrous forces of destruction?

In our last little war, and in the big one before that, disease killed more than sword and steel. We lament this--in armies. We prefer to keep our soldiers healthy that they may fight more strongly, and die more efficaciously, and this sick list is pure waste.

Is it any less waste in private life? Can we easily afford the loss in money--annual billions; the loss in strength, the loss in intellect, the loss in love, that falls on us so heavily from year to year? Study the record of man's fight with disease. See how the specialists devoting not only lifetimes, but the acc.u.mulating succession of lifetimes to the study of causes, cures and preventions, announce to us at last, "thus and thus are you made sick. Thus may you be cured, and thus may you so live as to be well."

See then the sanitary work of an aroused public; a truth is discovered; a truth is announced; a law is made; the law is enforced--a disease is conquered.

This is vividly shown in the work of our Government against pleuro-pneumonia--in cattle. The Federal Government, furnishing information and funds, and cooperating with the various States, attacked that disease, and stamped it out completely.

There is an effort now to rouse our government to fight the White Plague, in people as well as in cattle. And, as always, the difficulty is to stir and stretch and rouse our kitchen minds, to make us see things in common instead of individually. The men whose cattle had pleuro-pneumonia, kept them in herds, and lost them in herds, losing much money thereby. Many men were so afflicted. Therefore these many men got together, and, using the machinery of the State, they together destroyed their enemy. Cattle-raising is a business, a social industry.

But child-raising, husband-feeding, the care of the lives and health of all our families, is a domestic industry, in the management of the kitchen mind.

it has been shown recently that 72 per cent. of the cattle in New York State are tuberculous. This does not kill them quickly like pleuro-pneumonia. They live and may be sold. They live and may give milk. It has been shown recently (as stated in our unimpeachable daily press), that in some of the milk sold in New York City, there were more germs to the cubic millimeter, than in the same amount of sewage!

This milk, and most of the milk in all our cities, goes into the kitchen; the blind, brainless, family-feeding kitchen, and from there is given us to drink.

What protest rises from the kitchens of New York, or Chicago, or any city? What ma.s.s-meeting of angry women, presenting to their legislators the horrible facts of strong men poisoned and babies slain by this or any other abomination in the food supply?

A young man writes a novel exhibiting the badness of our meat supply.

Men become excited. Men take action. Men legislate. The great meat industries stagger under the shock, recover, and go on smiling. Before this meanwhile, and afterwards, the meat went into out kitchens and we ate it.

Being kitchen-minded we cannot see that health is a public concern; that the feeding of our people is one of the most vital factors in their health, and that the private kitchen with its private cook is not able to keep the public well.

Ask the physician, the sanitary expert. He will tell you that the great advance in sanitary science is in its battle with the filth diseases; and that we die worse than ever from food diseases.

In fighting the filth diseases we have the public forces to work with; compulsory systems of sewage and drainage, quarantine, isolation hospitals, and all the other maneuvers by which an enlightened public protects itself.

But who shall say what a child shall eat, or a man or woman? Is it not wholly their own affair?

We cry out upon our women for the falling birth rate;--why not say something about the death rate of their babies? The average family must have four, merely to maintain a stationary population, said Grant Allen; "two to replace themselves and two to die." The doctor will tell you that they die mostly of what are called "preventable diseases" and that those diseases are mainly of the alimentary ca.n.a.l.

Kitchen-fed are we all, and those of us who survive it, who become immune to it, cry loudly of its excellence! If we could once see outside of these ancient limits, once figure to ourselves the vision of a healthy world, and the n.o.ble duty of making it,--then we should no longer be kitchen-minded.

Our narrowness of vision, our petty self-interest, does not end its injuries with our bodily health. Its leaden limitation is felt in all the economic field.