SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited by Deborah Madsen):

In this short article, which instigated a correspondence between Rumford and Marietta Stow in her capacity as editor of The Woman's Herald of Industry, Rumford promotes raw veganism, a diet of uncooked plant-based foods, which he himself terms “the grainia diet.” He reports that his feeble health, particularly dyspepsia, liver complaints, and headaches, led him to try out this new regime, which he first heard about in 1881. He “concluded to try it for a week and begun by using fresh grapes, followed by canned and dried fruit, soaked raisins, etc. with about eight ounces per day of grainia – or grain with bran and all cut fine in a steel mill, as my teeth were nearly all gone.” Rumford claims that his dyspepsia was gone within two weeks and his “health was improving in every direction.” He does concede that he found the grainia not particularly palatable unless mixed with fruits, and that he lost weight at first. “Still that was no real loss,” he contends, “as the muscles grew more solid every day, and mental exercise increased” until he was “able to accomplish more than double the work done before, enjoying what was formerly exhausting labor.” At the time of writing, Rumford eats “daily from a quarter to a half pound of grainia with two or three pounds of fresh fruit – grapes, apples, etc., or the equivalent in fruit dried and pounded until mellow.” He claims that people “take me to be thirty instead of fifty, and old friends say they never saw me look so well.” He claims no longer to use any salt or other stimulants, which he believes leads to “the use of tea, coffee, tobacco, and alcoholic drink.” Also, the new diet frees his wife from the “toil” of cooking.

The following question by Stow, appended to Rumford's article, instigated their correspondence: “If cold, raw food is so much more wholesome for human beings, how is it that scientists recommend warm cooked food for cattle and fowl? Farmers say that the latter is much more nutricious [sic] and fattening than the former. Will the raw food advocates please explain?”