Third Year

The feeding for the third year may be the same through the entire twelve months.

For the first meal of the day, every other day oatmeal, or any of the cooked cereals, may be cooked to a jelly, and then reduced with water to the consistency of good thick cream or buttermilk. This is to be eaten as slowly as possible with a teaspoon. All desired may be given, followed with orange juice. The alternate days, use thoroughly dried whole-wheat toast in place of the cooked cereal, followed with prunes, baked apple, or orange. Prunes or baked apple may take the place of orange juice.

For the second meal, fifty-fifty, followed with raw or cooked vegetables.

The third meal should be the heavy meal. Tender lamb-stew may be followed with a vegetable potpourri and a raw vegetable salad. The potpourri may be made by cutting up four or five vegetables--any except the potato--into coarse pieces, and cooking until tender in just enough water to keep from burning. Season with salt and butter.

The lamb may be alternated with raw egg beaten up with orange juice or milk, followed with vegetable potpourri and raw vegetable salad.

If the child is of good weight, it will probably get along better with the meat dinner for the third meal each day. If, however, the child is of light weight, the meat may be used for the third meal of the day about four times a week, and about three times during the week use one of the decidedly starchy foods in place of the meat with the potpourri and raw vegetable salad. The meat and starch dinners may be alternated. For the starchy dinners, a change may be made each day, using either baked potato, corn bread, whole-wheat bread, or rice, etc. The breads should be well dried out, so as to stimulate thorough mastication. They may be eaten with a little butter-- unsalted preferred--and followed with the rest of the meal. Milk may be substituted for meat or egg.

No Salt or Sugar Has Been Recommended.--I have not prescribed salt or sugar. Why add these condiments, when all children would thrive much better without them? If a salt-and-sugar habit is not developed in childhood, fiends for these life and health abbreviators are not so liable to be evolved after childhood.

Salt and sugar cause thirst, and thirst causes excess weight in some children and grown people, and poverty of tissue in others. The foundation for lifelong ill-health is often laid in childhood, in which salt and sugar play a large part, and to which rapid eating--failing to chew properly--adds very largely.

Medical nomenclature has a whole list of diseases peculiar to children. This peculiarity is largely built by feeding them starch with protein.

Eating milk and starch--milk and cereal or bread--at the same meal is a dietetic error that builds intestinal putrescence.

Why do I insist on no starch and protein at the same meal? Because I would prevent the "contagious" diseases "peculiar to children." The eruptive diseases will be done away with forever when children are no longer fed starch and meat or milk in the same meal. Intestinal putrefaction is the so-called contagion that is supposed to be the cause of infectious diseases epidemics. This is more fully explained in another chapter.

If it were not for teaching children table manners by example, they should be fed at a side table, or in a separate room, to keep them from wanting food which they see older people eat, but which is unfit for them.