Potato
We can’t forget the potato. This wonderful vegetable goes good with so many things and adds nutrition in such a delightful variety of ways to your meal no matter how simple it may be. They are particular about where they grow and how you feed them.
The sweet potato does a nice job of filling the pot in the house for the winter with beautiful leaves and will even grow some little potatoes for you.
"What food is supposed by most persons to be the most nourishing and invigorating?
The flesh of animals.
Is meat more nutritious than vegetable food?
The ablest and most accurate chemists of the present age have shown by actual experiment that the various kinds of flesh meat average about twenty-five parts of nutriment out of every hundred parts, while rice, wheat, peas, and beans, afford from eighty to ninety per cent. Potatoes, ranking first among the edible roots, afford about twenty-five per cent of nutriment, being quite as nutritious as meat. A pound of rice contains more nutritious matter than three pounds of the best butchers' meat; and three pounds of good wheat bread contains more than six pounds of flesh; and three pounds of potatoes as much as the same amount of flesh. Farinaceous seeds contain more nutrition than other kinds of aliment, which is probably the reason they have been called the "staff of life."
If flesh meat is less nourishing, may not the innutritious matter connected with it help the work of digestion?
No; the nutriment connected with the meat is more stimulating in proportion to the amount of nutriment it affords, than a vegetable diet. All the fluids and substances elaborated from blood made from flesh-meat, are more exciting to the parts on which they severally act, and cause a greater rapidity of vital action and expenditure in the whole system, than is effected by the use of pure and proper vegetable food. The pulse in a robust person, who lives on a vegetable diet, is from ten to thirty beats less per minute than that of one living on the ordinary highly-seasoned meat diet. Meat causes a great expenditure of vital power in its digestion, and hence, leaves the digestive organs much exhausted after the performance of their duties. So that, although meat may pass through the human stomach quicker than some vegetables, and consequently has generally been considered easier of digestion, it is actually the most difficult to digest. It is because a greater draft is made on the vital energies to digest meat than vegetables, that a greater degree of exhaustion is felt in the epigastric region, when the food has passed from the stomach into the intestinal canal, and why persons using flesh-meats suffer more distress from hunger when they pass their usual meal hour, than those who subsist on a pure vegetable aliment.
396. What kind of diet has the preference in proportion to its amount of nutrition?
That which exhausts the vital powers the least. Actual experiment has shown, that, although a pound of unbolted wheat-meal bread contains only about three times as much nutriment as one pound of meat, it will actually sustain a man accustomed to such a diet longer and better than four pounds of meat will sustain a man in similar strength, accustomed to meat diet. Persons subsisting on a well-chosen vegetable diet can endure protracted labor, fatigue, and exposure, much longer without food, than they who subsist mostly or entirely on flesh-meat.
But, if this is correct, why do those who leave off flesh-eating and subsist on vegetables feel weak and languid when they make the change?
It is because the flesh meat is more stimulating, and that which we suppose to be strength is only actually the whipping-up of our energies under the spur of stimulants. The system, too, may not be accustomed to this kind of diet, and, as it requires a different kind of gastric juice to digest vegetable than it does to digest animal food, a little time is requisite that the stomach may adapt its secretions to the new diet. For this reason a change of this kind should not be suddenly made. While such changes are being made, the person should be extremely careful not to exhaust his energies by over-laboring, either mentally or physically. In all changes of diet, the new kind should be partaken of sparingly at first, and the amount gradually increased, until finally the new may entirely take the place of the old. The reason many persons make themselves sick in using green peas, corn, beans, etc., is not because these articles are themselves injurious, but because they eat largely of them before the stomach and alimentary tube have become adapted to them."
1868 JNL, HBH 184-186