SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited by Deborah Madsen):

This is the first of a series of letters to the editor of The Woman's Herald of Industry (Marietta Stow), in which Rumford responds to comments on his “article on uncooked food selected from the Laws of Life” concerning the feeding of farm animals with cooked food (col. 2). Rumford concedes that “cooking food” helps “if you want to make pork rapidly, without regard to the quality” (col. 3). Similarly so with cows, who “may look sleek and give more milk” which, however, will be “deficient in quality.” Horses, too, “may in time improve in appearance,” but ultimately will not be as useful as “the hard grain fed animal at work” (col. 3).

Rumford then expounds on his own experience with uncooked food: “I lost in weight and looked thin the first six months on the uncooked diet but gained in ability to do, improved in feeling, and now have regained my old weight made of muscle twice as hard as that I used to have” (col. 3). He quotes from reports of friends and acquaintances. “I would not return to the mixed diet,” a friend writes about his and his wife's experience with raw veganism, “we are both so much happier, healthier, lighter in heart, limb stomach; lighter too in spirit, that we can arise to our best nearly all the time” (col. 3). Another friend's report emphasizes his feeble and unhealthy constitution until, at Rumford's suggestion, he tried the “uncooked diet”: “The remarkable result was,” he writes, “that in three weeks, I could cut and haul wood by the wagon load, and am now fully convinced that it is the best way to live for health, and I enjoy the living” (col. 3). Rumford ends his article by recommending the writings of “Dr. C. E. Page, of Biddeford” on the subject (col. 3).