UUIIUIH i ™ i HuwHwutnu UKK' £ 4v> HJ>*" Class !p)C 55"^ Book , ' C- $ l$- - . Copyright N° _ COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. CA HP ENTER' S INDUSTRIAL READERS F ( ) I) S OR HOW THE WORLD IS FED BY FRANK G. CARPENTER V NEW YORK • CINCINNATI • CHICAGO AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY Carpenter's Geographical Readers NORTH AMERICA .... 60 cents SOUTH AMERICA .... 60 cents EUROPE 70 cents ASIA 60 cents AUSTRALIA, OUR COLONIES, AND OTHER ISLANDS OF THE SEA . 60 cents AFRICA 60 cents These Readers are not dry compilations from other books, but comprise vivid descriptions of the author's personal observations. Copyright, 1907, by Frank G. Carpenter. Carp. Foods. LIBRARY of CONGRESS Two Cooles Received MAY 28 I90r a Copyright Ertry CLASS /\ XXc, No ' COFY B. PREFACE This book on Foods is the first of a series upon the great industries of the world. Its purpose is to give the children a knowledge of the production and preparation of foods, and to show how civilization and commerce grew from man's need of foods and the exchange of foods between the different nations of the earth. The author takes the children on personally conducted tours to the great food centers of the world, to the markets of exchange, to the factories, the farms, the forests, and the seas. Together they visit the great wheat fields of our own and other lands. They follow the grain to the mills and from the mills to the markets. They go through the corn belt of the United States and learn the size and value of our corn crop. They visit the rice countries of the world and learn how this grain, which forms the bread of a large part of the human race, is grown and prepared for the market. They go to a western cattle ranch and aid the cowboys in a "round up." They follow the cattle to a great pack- ing center, where they inspect the stock yards and observe the killing and shipping. They also learn how pork is packed for shipment to all parts of the world. They live for a time with the shepherds in Australia and New Zea- land, and visit the factories to observe the handling and freezing of mutton. Visits are paid to dairy countries, and the manufacture of butter and cheese is explained. The children go to the poultry yards of the world and are shown how chickens, 3 4 PREFACE ducks, geese, and turkeys are reared, and what an impor- tant part of our national income our egg industry produces. They are taken with the fishermen of different lands to the great fishing grounds to observe how salmon and other finny creatures are caught and prepared for the markets. Several interesting trips are taken to the vegetable gardens of the world, and the children learn that many vegetables have histories and have long held important places in furnishing food for man. Journeys are made to orchards and vineyards when apples, peaches, berries, oranges, pineapples, bananas, and grapes are ripe, and the luscious fruit is picked and eaten fresh from the trees and vines. Also tours are made to the lands of the olive, date, and fig, and the children taste the many other curious fruits of tropical lands. With the author they take passage on a steamer at New York and sail to the warm coffee lands of Brazil. Here they watch the picking of the coffee beans and the differ- ent processes used in the preparation of the coffee of com- merce. They then make a flying trip to Japan to see how tea is picked, dried, and boxed for shipment. A peep is next taken into the world's big sugar bowl, and the children learn how the chief commercial sugars are made from beets or sugar cane. This Food Reader is, to a large extent, the result of the personal observations of the author. Many of the descrip- tions were written on the ground, and great care has been taken to make every part of it as accurate and up to date as possible. CONTENTS i. Introduction . 2_The Bread of the World — Wheat 3. How our Wheat is Marketed 4— The Wheat of Other Lands . Flour ...... The World's Great Corn Patch . Rice ...... Other Grains which Feed Millions On a Western Cattle Ranch . A Visit to a Great Packing Center Hogs and Pork Packing Mutton Milk, Butter, and Cheese 14. Dairying in Other Lands 15. Poultry — Chickens, Ducks, Geese, and Wild Animals used as Food . Rabbits, Squirrels, and Game Birds Fish in General .... Salmon ..... 20. Oysters ..... 21. Lobsters, Shrimps, Crabs, and Other SI 22. Sea Food of Other Lands 23. Turtles. Frogs, Snails, and Lizards 24. Vegetables 25. Potatoes ..... 26. Important Vegetables used for Food 27. In the Gardens of Other Lands 28. Odd Foods from Trees and Vines 5 9- 10. 1 1. 12. 13- 16. 17- 18. 19. Turkeys ;llfis CONTENTS 29. General View of our Fruit Industry 30. Apples 31. Peaches .... 32. Apricots, Pears. Quinces, Cherries, 33. Grapes 34. Berries 35. Oranges, Lemons, Limes, Pomelos 36. Pineapples and Bananas 37. Olives and Vegetable Oils 38. Dates and Figs 39. Some Other Tropical Fruits . 40. Nuts 41. Coffee . v . 42. Tea 43. Cacao — Chocolate and Cocoa 44. Tobacco .... 45. Where the Sugar Cane Grows 46. Beet Sugar, Maple Sugar, and Honey 47. Salt 48. Spices and Other Flavoring Plants and Plums Citron, etc. PACE 225 229 237 243 248 255 259 267 274 28l 287 29O 297 308 3*7 323 328 338 345 352 FOODS: OR HOW THE WORLD IS FED i. INTRODUCTION WE start to-day upon a series of travels which will take us all over the earth. Our object is to learn about the foods of the world and how they are used by man. In our journeys we shall visit the farms of many nations and see how the crops are raised. We shall go into the orchards and pick apples, oranges, and other fruits fresh from the trees. We shall penetrate the wilds to hunt the game which man eats ; and we shall even look into the seas and study the fish, oysters, and other animals which live under the water. As we go on with our travels, we shall see ships and cars carrying food from place to place ; and, in the markets, we shall watch the exchanges of one thing for another. This will show us the commerce of the world as it affects our eating; while the work on the farms and in the orchards and the factories will show us the great indus- tries which have grown up in raising food and preparing it for use. Indeed, all our journeys are to be along the lines of industry and commerce. They will deal with the world at work and the world of trade. We all know that man is an animal, and, whenever we miss our meals, we realize that he is a hungry animal. Men 7 8 FOODS : OK HOW THE WORLD IS FED seldom work except to satisfy their wants ; and their wants along food lines are such that they devote the greater part of their lives to supplying them. Indeed, the story of the growth of the easier ways of satisfying these wants forms a large part of the history of civilization. Ages ago men ate their food raw. If they killed a wild animal, they tore it to pieces and devoured it. Some savage tribes do this to-day. The Australian aborigines, for instance, know but little about cooking, and a part of their food is worms, which they dig from the trees and eat raw. The Abyssinians eat raw meat, and there are other Africans who live largely upon roots, wild vegetables, and fruit. Some of these people are not much better than the savages of the distant past. It was some time before men learned that food is better when cooked. How they found out we do not know. It may have been like the discovery of roast pig by Bo-bo, the Chinese boy, as told by Charles Lamb. Bo-bo was the son of the swineherd, Ho-ti, and, as you may remember, he accidentally set fire to his father's house, in which some little pigs were kept. The house burned to the ground, and the pigs were roasted. Bo-bo felt one of the sizzling car- casses to see if it might not still have life ; and, as it burned his fingers, he thrust them into his mouth. His pain turned to delight as he got his first taste of the juicy cracklings which adhered to them. He told Ho-ti, and, as the story goes, the two burned down house after house to get more roast pig. They were arrested, and at their trial some of the roast was given to the judge. A few days later the judge, having bought some little pigs of a neighbor, burned his own house. Others did likewise, until a sage discovered INTRODUCTION 9 that a pig could be roasted on an ordinary fire, and after this, roasting became common throughout the nation. However true this story may be, we know that roasting was the first stage of food preparation, for it is common among all savage tribes. The next discovery was proba- bly baking. Holes were made in the ground and lined with stones. Fire was then built, and when the stones were red-hot, the food, wrapped in leaves or skins, was there covered up to be cooked. Such bake ovens are common to-day in the islands of the South Seas, and dressed pig or other animals are thus deliriously cooked. The savages of Africa cook hippopotamus and elephant meat in stone-lined pits made red-hot by fire ; and a deli- cious morsel to them is an elephant's foot placed in such a pit and allowed to remain until done. Boiling and steaming food came later. Our Indians sometimes cooked in this way, and one tribe of them, the Assiniboins, were known as the stone boilers, because they boiled their food with red-hot stones. Having killed a buffalo, they took off its skin and so fitted it into a hole in the ground that it was perfectly tight. They next poured water into the skin and placed pieces of the buffalo meat within it. Then, having made a fire near by, they heated great stones red-hot and tumbled them into the water. In time the water boiled, and the meat was cooked. There are places on the earth where nature herself fur- nishes plenty of boiling water and steam. The Yellowstone Park, for instance, has boiling springs in which one can place a basket of eggs and have them cooked hard or soft, accord- ing to the time they are left in, and into which one can drop fish and bring them out ready to eat. In the Hot Springs IO FOODS: OR HOW THE WORLD IS FED region of New Zealand there are pools of water which are always boiling, and also many wide cracks where the steam pours forth from the ground. Here Mother Earth does the cooking. The natives have steaming boxes with only network of ropes for a bottom. They put the food into Here Mother Earth does the cooking. the boxes and set them over the steam holes or cracks. In a short time the food is cooked quite as well as in our own steamers. In one way or another, as time went on, the people of the world learned more about cooking. Their desire for different kinds of food and more food led them to trade with each other. Each learned what the others had dis- covered as to food getting, food keeping, and food manu- facturing. They began to exchange foods ; and through such exchanges, grew up what we call civilization and especially commerce. Our food now comes from all parts of the world, INTRODUCTION I I and our dinner tables have articles upon them which were brought thousands of miles for our use. The tea we drank to-day may have been picked by a Chinese boy or girl last year, and the sugar in it may have come from cane raised in Cuba. The coffee was grown on bushes in southern Brazil, and, if we could follow the pepper back to its home, we might find half-naked little brown boys of Java or Sumatra playing among the vines on which it grew. If the loaf of bread could tell its story, it might speak of vast fields of golden wheat beyond the Great Lakes ; and the roast beef, only a few weeks ago, was part of an animal which galloped over the Texas prairies, with a cowboy behind it. Every meal we eat, in fact, has been brought to us from many parts of the earth, and the people who furnished it are probably eating some things supplied by us. In this way the whole world is working for you and me, and we, in turn, are working for every nation which buys the things we make or raise to sell. It is thus through commerce that food is carried all over the world, from the places where each kind can be raised the cheapest, and sold for money in exchange. As we proceed with our travels, we shall see that almost every locality produces some things better than others, so that a continual exchanging goes on, and cars and ships are always moving this way and that, carrying food products from country to country, and from place to place. We ship quantities of food abroad every year and com- pete in the markets of the world with all other nations which have similar things to sell. In our travels we must study this globe as a workshop and as a vast retail store. 12 FOODS: OR HOW THE WORLD IS FED We must learn not only what we ourselves produce to eat and sell, but also what other nations raise and what they have to sell in competition with us. We want to know which nations are our chief customers and what they send back to us in money or goods in exchange. 2. THE BREAD OF THE WORLD — WHEAT BREAD is used more than any other food by civilized man. The Bible calls it the staff of life; and raising the grains which supply it is one of the world's chief indus- tries. The principal grains are wheat, corn, oats, rye, bar- ley, and rice. In our country more wheat and corn are used than any of the other grains. In some parts of Europe the people eat a black bread made of rye, and in others they live largely upon ground oats. In Asia and Africa some of the natives make bread of millet and in some countries rice forms the chief food, being cooked whole, or ground to a flour for bread or cake. All these grains are the seeds of different grasses. They are called cereals, from Ceres, who was worshiped by the Romans as the goddess of the harvest. Each grain grows best in certain places and climates. Some grains thrive better in the United States than anywhere else. We raise more wheat than any other nation and more corn than all the rest of the world put together. Our total crop of cereals for one year sometimes weighs ninety million tons and is worth fifteen hundred million dollars. The product is so enormous that we cannot realize it. Let us take our pencils and see what it would amount THE BREAD OF THE WORLD — WHEAT 13 to if it were loaded upon freight cars, joined end to end in one long train. We shall suppose that each car holds twenty tons, and that it will take forty feet of space on the track. Dividing the ninety million tons by twenty gives us four and a half million, the num- ber of cars required to carry the grain ; and mul- tiplying that number by forty, the number of feet to each car, shows us that the train would reach to a distance of one hundred and eighty million feet from its starting point. Now five thousand two hundred and eighty feet make a mile ; and, dividing by that, we find that our train of grain would have to be more than thirty- four thousand miles long, or long enough to reach around the earth at the Equator and leave enough cars over to fill three continuous tracks from New York to San Francisco. A large part of such a train would be loaded with wheat, and that part would be more valuable, in proportion to its Heads of wheat. 14 FOODS: OR HOW TDK WORLD IS FED length, than any other. Wheat forms the chief food of about one third of the human race. It is the principal breadstuff of civilized man ; and it has been used for food so long that no one can tell who the first wheat eaters were. We know that the Egyptians raised wheat in the valley of the Nile about the time that the Pyramids were built, for on the tombs near by are paintings of men reap- ing and threshing the crop ; and we find wheat mentioned as food again and again in the Bible. Mills for wheat grinding and ovens containing loaves of baked bread were found when the city of Pompeii was uncovered. That city had been buried by the lava and ashes of Vesuvius only a few years after Christ was born. At that time, we know from this discovery that the Romans were eating wheat. The Chinese have a tradition that wheat came to them direct from Heaven. They say that their ancestors were growing it more than four thousand years ago; and to-day it is one of the grains planted by the emperor when he starts the spring plowing for his nation. Wheat has always been one of the chief foods of modern Europe. It was brought to America by our forefathers. George Washington was a noted wheat farmer in his day ; he had a mill at Mount Vernon and exported flour to the West Indies. As time went on, wheat was raised by our pioneers on the new lands farther west. For a while New York produced a great part of the crop. Then Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, and Michigan became the chief wheat states, and, a few years later, King Wheat drew on his seven-league boots and crossed the Mississippi. He trod northward and conquered Minnesota and the Dakotas, which are now THE BREAD OF THE WORLD — WHEAT 15 amongst our richest grain-growing states, and then marched over the Rocky Mountain plateau and extended his realm to California, Oregon, and Washington. Our wheat is of many varieties, each of which grows best in certain localities. In some kinds the kernels are white and in others red or amber. Some wheat grains are large, others small ; some are heavy and some light. The most of the wheat of the upper Mississippi Valley is spring wheat ; that is, it is planted in the spring and harvested in the fall. In other parts of the country winter wheat grows better. Such wheat is planted in the fall and har- vested in the early summer. Spring wheat is excellent for bread making, and it yields more bread to the barrel of flour than winter wheat. The winter wheat contains more starch ; it also makes good bread and is especially desira- ble for pastry. In some parts of the United States we raise a hard wheat which looks somewhat like barley. It is called durum and is excellent for macaroni. It grows upon our high, dry lands, where other varieties do not thrive. We raise much of it for our own use and ship a great deal to Italy, southern France, and other countries, where macaroni largely takes the place of bread. To-day wheat is grown in many parts of the United States. The bulk of the crop comes from the north cen- tral part and the Pacific Coast, but wheat is raised in forty- three different states and territories, and in many of them it is the most important crop. In one year we have pro- duced more than seven hundred and eighty million bushels, enough to furnish half a bushel to every man, woman, and child upon earth. We are now growing more wheat than i6 FOODS: OR HOW THE WORLD IS FED any other nation, more than we can consume, and so much that we send a vast deal to other peoples in different parts of the world. Much of our wheat in the Eastern and Central States is grown on small farms. Each farmer has one or more fields of five, ten, or perhaps fifty acres in wheat, and other fields devoted to other crops. In parts of California, in F^ WHEAT £M/60to 640 bushels' pen, ^Oier 640 „ Wheat districts of the United States. the Red River Valley, which runs from Canada down between Minnesota and North Dakota, and in western Canada, as well as in some other regions, the soil is so good for wheat that many farmers raise nothing else. In such places wheat is raised on a vast scale, a single estate employing hundreds of horses and men. There is a ranch in California, for instance, which contains ninety thousand acres, and another in North Dakota which has seventy thousand. In California one field of forty square miles has been planted in wheat. That field is so large that one THE BREAD OF THE WORLD — WHEAT 17 man would have to work steadily for sixteen years to pre- pare it for planting, if he did it in the old-fashioned way ; and it would require the labor of many years more for him to sow and harvest it all, if this were possible. Such farming, however, is easily accomplished by modern machinery. The planting is done by a small army of men with plows and drills, and the harvesting Sulky plow. by several hundred steam reapers and threshers, each of which may harvest seventy-five acres in a day. But we shall see this better in the wheat fields them- selves. Let us suppose that we are on one of the big farms of the Red River Valley. It is so large that we could ride about it for days and not see it all. It is man- aged like a great factory. It has hundreds of men working in companies, with foremen over them. It has offices where the books are kept, blacksmith shops where the machinery is repaired, and great stables for its horses. 1 8 FOODS: OR HOW THE WORLD IS FED Some of the fields contain five hundred acres or more. At planting time forty or fifty men move across a field, each driving a sulky plow. Each sulky has from three to six horses to pull it; it has two plows below it which cut two furrows as it goes. After the plowing is finished, other men ride behind upon disk harrows which grind the earth fine, and behind them come others driving machine drills which drop the wheat into the soil. These drills are long boxes filled with wheat and mounted upon wheels. Steam plow. Each has a row of holes in the bottom, from which slender tubes run down to the ground. Each tube will let out the grain just as fast as it is needed; and behind each tube is a little plow, which follows and covers the grain as it drops. A long line of such drills will soon plant a great field. Sometimes traction engines take the places of horses in doing this work. One great engine will draw a line of plows, with harrows behind them, and still farther back the drills which sow the seed. THE BREAD OF THE WORLD — WHEAT IQ On a farm like this the work goes on systematically. The overseers keep every man moving. The brown sod is turned, and the black soil covers the wheat. Each grain is laid away in its little nest in the ground. It soon sprouts, and, by and by, the farm is covered with what looks like green grass. This grows rapidly, aided by the rain and the sun. Within a few months it is as high as your waist. Now each green stem bursts out at the top into a head filled with seeds. The seeds are soft and milky at first. They grow harder and harder as the wheat ripens, and after a while the tall green stem turns to pale yellow. It becomes more yellow as the sun continues to shine upon it, and the seeds of grain in the head turn yellow, too, inside their yellow husks. Now the heads be- gin to bend over, and the farmer knows they are ready for harvest. The wheat is ripe at the time of our visit to this great farm in North Dakota. On all sides of us, as far as our eyes can reach, the golden grain is rising and falling under the wind like the waves of the sea. We have been riding for days on our horses, with wheat on both sides of us ; and we might go on for days to come, seeing nothing but wheat, wheat, wheat. In many places they have begun to harvest the crop. We can see the smoke from the steam threshing machines rising here and there over the grain, and the long lines of reapers, drawn by horses, which are cutting it off close to the ground and binding it for the threshers. On several of the farms we have passed were machines moved by steam engines, which thresh the wheat as they cut it and put it into sacks ready to be carried to the elevators or cars. In other 20 FOODS: OR I IOW THK WORLD IS FED Long lines of reapers. places only the heads of the wheat are cut off and threshed, the straw being: left on the field. ] il ^ .j as they lie in the water, look SEA FOOD OF OTHER LANDS I8 7 much like large cucumbers, and they are sometimes called "the cucumbers of the sea." They are from one to four feet in length and from two to four inches thick. They live on the microscopic shellfish which are found in great quantities upon coral rocks. About the mouth of each slug are hundreds of little feelers with which it brushes the rocks and thus draws the food into its throat. These queer creatures are picked up at low tide by the fishermen, or are ob- tained by diving for them. They are cut open and cleaned, and then boiled and laid in the sun to dry. They are now smoked for twenty-four hours, when they are ready to be packed up and shipped off to China. The waters about our Pacific islands swarm with sea animals ; and Porto Rico, like most of the West Indies, has excel- Filipino casting his neU lent sea food. The natives of the Philippines live largely upon fish, and they have a great variety of nets and traps for catching them. In sailing along the coasts or upon the rivers and lakes of that far-away colony, one fre- quently sees the Filipino fisherman casting his net; and one often passes winding cages of bamboo cane stuck down in 1 88 FOODS: OR HOW THE WORLD IS FED the sand in such a way that the fish can swim in, but cannot find their way out. Off the shores of some of the islands are large fish corrals, fenced in with bamboo canes woven together with rattans. These corrals are so hidden at high tide that the fishes swim in, but, when the tide falls, they find themselves caught, and the fishermen scoop them out with dip nets, killing the larger ones with their spears. Everywhere along the coast and streams the natives have small fish traps, and, sometimes, bamboo cages somewhat similar to ours for trapping lobsters. How would you like to walk out into the fields near home, and be able to catch fish in almost every mud puddle ? This is possible in parts of our Philippine Islands. The lowlands of some sections are so underlaid with water that on breaking through a thin crust of earth, a slimy mud is reached, in which several different species of mudfish are found. Some are quite small and others a foot or more long ; but they are so plentiful that after a heavy rain the ditches and small streams are almost filled with them. The Filipinos go out after the rains to fish in the rice fields ; and during the wet season one may often see men and women wading about in the mud, with fishing traps of bamboo, in the shape of barrels open at both ends. The fishermen push these traps through the muddy water into the beds of the irrigating canals, and then feel down and around to learn what they have caught. Fish of many kinds are sold alive in the markets of Manila, being kept in bamboo baskets so tightly woven that they will hold water. Upon making a sale, the peddler takes the squirming fish out of his basket, lays it SEA FOOD OF OTHER LANDS 1 89 upon a stone, and kills it by striking it just back of the neck with a club. Going northward to Siberia, we find valuable fishing grounds all along its eastern coast. The Russians annu- ally catch several hundred million pounds of fish, trepang, and crabs in their Asiatic waters ; and the natives of north- ern and northeastern Siberia feed not only themselves, but their sled dogs on fish. The Eskimos of our continent also feed their sled dogs on fish, and they catch walrus and other sea animals for this purpose. The Russians have rich fisheries in their European rivers and seas. There are many fishing boats on the Volga, Don, Neva, and Dnieper rivers, and also on the Sea of Azov, the Black Sea, and especially on the Caspian Sea. An important industry about the Caspian Sea is catch- ing sturgeon for their eggs, which are salted, cured, and sold as caviar, an appetizing dainty, often eaten upon toast at the beginning of a meal. Caviar looks much like bird shot sprinkled with water. It has a bitter, salty taste ; and I doubt whether you would like it at first. It is put up in kegs or cans and shipped to all parts of the civilized world. It is now made in the United States, from sturgeon caught in our waters, but by no means in such quantities as in Russia, which might be called the chief caviar country of the world. The fisheries of the Baltic are extensive, as are also those of the North Sea. From these places comes most of the sea food of London, which has perhaps the largest wholesale fish market in the world. This is Billingsgate, situated in the heart of the city, not far from London Bridge. Steam vessels scurry about the North Sea and 190 FOODS : OR HOW THE WORLD IS FED gather the fish from the places where they are caught and bring them to the mouth of the Thames River. Here larger and faster boats are waiting to carry them to Lon- don. In addition, vast quantities of fish are brought in by railway and steamer from Ireland and Scot- land, so that- altogether many thousand tons are marketed daily. The fish are of al- most every variety, from whitebait, one of which is as big as a baby's finger, to great sturgeon, which sometimes weigh as much as a full-grown man. There are her- ring, sole, salmon, and haddock, as well as eels, prawns, shrimps, and smelts. The fish are sold at auction ; and there are thousands of peddlers and retail dealers who push this way and that as they bid. There are vehicles with boisterous drivers and also porters and wheelbarrow men. Indeed, the early morning sales at Billingsgate bring together one of the noisiest crowds of the world. The place has long been so notorious for its confusion and coarse language, that " talking Billingsgate " is a common expression for using slang or scolding in a vulgar manner. A Scotch fishwife. TURTLES, FROGS, SNAILS, AND LIZARDS 191 23. TURTLES, FROGS, SNAILS, AND LIZARDS FROGS, turtles, snails, and lizards ! Do people eat such things as these ? Yes, indeed ; in many parts of the world they are classed among the choicest dainties. Turtle soup is delicious, and the diamond-backed terrapin is a famous American deli- cacy. In our own cities frogs sell so largely that they are caught by the thousands ; and snails so delight the Parisians that small farms are devoted to rearing them. The Iguana lizard. great iguana lizard, which abounds on the Isthmus of Panama, has flesh which tastes like young chicken ; and the armadillo, another strange little animal, is prized in different parts of South America. The turtle is a shell- incased reptile with four little legs ending in feet with sharp claws, a short tail, and an odd snakelike head attached to a long flexible neck. Most tur- tles can draw their heads, legs, and tails within the shell, so that they are protected by it as though covered with 192 FOODS: OR HOW THE WORLD IS FEU armor. Some turtles have sharp teeth, and, when they take hold, it is almost impossible to make them let go without chopping off their heads. Turtles lay eggs, digging holes for the purpose in the sand or mud. After the eggs are deposited, the turtle smoothes the earth over, the eggs are hatched by the warm sun, and the little turtles pop out. Turtles lay their eggs in the same places year after year, and they are frequently caught by men who know their breeding grounds and who capture them while they are making their nests. Turtles are of many varieties. One found in some of the warmer parts of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, is so big that, when full-grown, it would make a cart load for a horse; and it has such powerful jaws that it can take off a man's finger at a bite. In catching such a turtle, the hunters are careful to keep away from its mouth. They rush up to it and turn it over on its back, as it lies on the sand. It is then helpless, and can be dragged to the ship, which is to carry it to London or to some other market for sale. Enormous turtles which are said to roar and bellow at certain seasons of the year, are found upon the Gala- pagos Islands, off the Pacific Coast of South America. Other turtles utter a shrill piping note, especially in the spring. They are probably of the variety thus referred to in Solomon's Song : — " For lo the winter is past. The rain is over and gone ; The flowers appear on the earth ; The time of the singing of birds is come And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land. 1 ' TURTLES, FROGS, SNAILS, AND LIZARDS 1 93 On the banks of the Amazon there are turtles which lay so many eggs that the natives make an oil of them for cooking and lighting. The people know the laying sea- sons, and they then go out in crowds to the breeding grounds. They dig up the nests with spades and put the eggs in great piles, until all have been collected. Then each little party takes its heap of eggs to an empty canoe and mashes them into a filthy-looking mush. The eggs are as big as hens' eggs, or a little larger, and they have leathery shells which can be easily broken with sticks or with the feet. Sometimes the Indian boys and girls take off their clothes and jump up and down, treading the eggs, and smearing themselves with the yolks as they do so. After the stuff is thoroughly mixed, water is poured into it and the sun allowed to beat down upon it. In a short while an oil rises to the top and can be skimmed off. It is afterward refined by cooking in copper kettles over the fire ; and then it is stored for use as needed. It is said that about six thousand eggs are needed to make one jar of oil ; and the eggs annually destroyed for this purpose amount to many millions. Indeed, Henry W. Bates, from whose travels on the Amazon we get this information, says the destruction of the eggs for this purpose is so great that the Amazon turtle may in time disappear, espe- cially as the natives also collect the newly hatched young for eating. The favorite turtle of the United States, and, indeed, one which has become noted for the delicacy of its flesh, is the diamond-backed terrapin, found in the salt marshes along our Atlantic and Gulf Coasts from New York to Texas and especially in the Chesapeake Bay. This turtle FOODS — 13 194 FOODS: OR HOW THE WORLD IS FED is a pygmy in comparison with the great ocean turtles. It is usually from five to seven inches long, and it seldom grows to be more than ten inches long. When first hatched, it is about a half inch in diameter, and it grows at the rate of an inch a year for four or five years, and after that more slowly. The diamond-backed terrapin feeds largely upon shell- fish and small reptiles, varying its animal food with the tender shoots and roots of such plants as grow in the marshes. It spends most of the summer in the swamps. At the beginning of winter it buries itself in the mud at the bottom of some pool or stream and remains there until spring. The terrapin is so delicious that it always brings high prices in our city markets. A single fat turtle of this variety will sell for several dollars ; and there are many terrapin fishers who go about our coasts, wading through the swamps and poking down into them with rods to find where the terrapin nest. They also turn up the mud with spades and sometimes use dredges to drag the dia- mond-backs forth from their haunts. Terrapin are also trapped by very similar methods to those used for trap- ping lobsters, the traps being baited with fish. On some of our southern coasts they are hunted with dogs, the dogs trailing the turtles to their nests in the grass or bush and barking to show where they lie. Terrapin farms have been established for the purpose of determining whether the animals cannot be profitably raised. Our government has fenced in experimental ponds in Maryland and in North Carolina and stocked them with thousands of diamond-backs, the eggs of which are TURTLES, FROGS, SNAILS, AND LIZARDS 195 used to supply the marshes from which terrapin have dis- appeared. Have you ever eaten the fat hind legs of a frog, fried to a turn ? They taste like young chicken and are so much sought after that in the United States alone we kill mil- lions of frogs every year. It is said that we eat more frog legs than any other people, even the French. Frog catch- ing has become a business in some localities in Minnesota, California, Missouri, New York, Arkansas, Maryland, Vir- ginia, Ohio, and Indiana. The best places for catching them are along the marshes of our lakes and rivers. Frogs are caught with lines baited with worms, insects, or pieces of red cloth ; they are speared ; and they are also shot with guns and crossbows. The best time to hunt frogs is at night. The sportsman uses a lantern, the light of which enables him to take aim and, at the same time, blinds the eyes of the frog. Sometimes the frogs are sold alive, but they are usually dressed before Bullfrog. they are carried to the markets. In Paris I have seen skewers filled with frog legs, which were selling for a few cents a dozen. In our country the legs are usually sold by the pound, and the live frogs at so much apiece. In the United States the chief frogs eaten are bullfrogs, green frogs, and spring frogs. These varieties are much the same, although there is a difference in size, the bull- 196 FOODS: OR HOW THE WORLD IS FED frog, which often has a body eight inches long, being the largest. We have all heard of snails, the little round shell ani- mals which move so slowly, although we may not like Shakespeare's comparison of them with ourselves, when he says : — " The whining schoolboy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like a snail, Unwillingly to school." The ordinary American boy does not whine, and he usually goes on the run after he has his first pair of trou- sers and top-boots. He is not like a snail, and it is pretty cer- tain that he does not eat snails. It is dif- ferent, however, with the boys of southern Europe and especi- ally with those of France. They con- sider snails a delicacy and eat them in large quantities. Snails are sold in all the French markets. I have seen bushels of them in Paris and have watched the market women dishing them out to their customers at so much per dozen or per hundred. They are slimy and disgusting looking creatures, as they crawl about over one another on the market tables. The edible snail comes chiefly from the vineyards of Swit- zerland and southern France. It is fed in gardens made Snails in a French market. VEGETABLES I 97 for the purpose, and the fatter it is, the higher the price it brings. The best snail food is cabbage and clover, and it is said that a wagon load of cabbages forms a single meal for one hundred thousand snails. In some places the snail farmers keep their stock in the house during the winter, and they know just how to handle the eggs and the baby snails and how to fatten the full grown snails for the market. The most of the product of these farms goes to the French cities, although several hundred thousand pounds of snails are annually sent to the United States. J&Zc 24. VEGETABLES ACCORDING to investigations made by our Govern- ment Department of Agriculture, vegetables form more than one fourth of the daily food of the ordinary American family. They are eaten everywhere in large quantities, and there are few people so savage that they do not raise some kinds of them. The varieties of the plant world thus used are so many that we cannot mention them all. Some plants are valuable for their roots, as turnips, carrots, and beets ; some for their bulbs, as onions and garlic ; some for their tubers, as potatoes ; others for their stems, as asparagus and celery ; others for their leaves, as cabbages, lettuce, and spinach ; others for their seeds, as peas and beans ; and others for their fruits, green and ripe, as cucumbers, squashes, tomatoes, and melons. Some vegetables will grow well only in certain localities I98 FOODS: OR HOW THE WORLD IS FED and in certain climates, and some are found almost every- where. In the United States the principal varieties thrive, during one season or other, all over our country ; and out- side the cities almost every family grows its own vegetables. We have also many thousand farms and gardens where vegetables are raised for the markets, the product being A truck farm. so great that it sells for several hundred million dollars every year. The best soil close to our large cities is used for gardening ; and along our southern Atlantic Coast vast quantities of vegetables are raised during the winter, spring, and early summer, for shipment to our northern cities, where the weather is so cold that vegetables can- not be produced at such times. This business is called trucking or truck farming. VEGETABLES 199 One of the chief trucking centers of the United States is the lower shore of the Chesapeake Bay, whence vege- tables are sent upon fast steamers to our chief northern Atlantic ports and also to Richmond, Baltimore, and Wash- ington. During the height of the season several great ships loaded with garden truck steam daily from Norfolk for New York and Boston ; and vegetables are also carried in refrigerator cars to the larger cities of the interior. A little farther south, in North Carolina, is another truck- ing region, the chief port of which is Wilmington ; and still Shipping watermelons. farther down the coast, quantities of garden stuff are shipped from the ports of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Among the chief products of eastern Georgia is the water- melon, which is sent northward, beginning in early July, and which reaches nearly every large market east of the Missis- sippi River. About one half of all the watermelons used 200 FOODS : OR MOW THE WORLD IS FED in the United States come from eastern Georgia, although Norfolk sometimes ships as many as six hundred thou- sand in one year. Trucking is usually done upon small farms. A large amount of vegetables can be raised upon an acre ; but the crop requires careful cultivation and almost constant atten- tion. The plants must be weeded and hoed and the insects H M *^4r^sf • 2§ o*?