complexity of preparation says that it "militates against physiological
old age and that the simpler food of the uncivilised races is better....
Most of the complicated dishes provided in the homes, hotels and
restaurants of the rich, stimulate the organs of digestion and secretion
in a harmful way. It would be true progress to abandon modern cuisine and
to go back to the simpler dishes of our ancestors." A few have lived to a
hundred years, and physiologists, including Metchnikoff, see no inherent
reason why all men, apart from accident, should not do so. Most men are
old at 70, some even at 60; if we could add 20 or 30 years to our lives,
what an immense gain it would be. Instead of a man being in his prime, a
useful member of the community, from about 25 to 60 or perhaps to 70; he
would have the same physical and mental vigour to 80 or 90 or even longer.
This later period would be the most valuable part of his life, as he would
be using and adding to the accumulated experience and knowledge of the
earlier period.

Some, perceiving the mischief wrought by luxurious habits, urge us to go
back to nature, to eat natural food. This is ambiguous. To speak of
animals as being in a state of nature, conveys the distinct idea of their
living according to their own instinct and reason, uninterfered with, in
any way, by man. The phrase, applied to man, is either meaningless, or has
a meaning varying with the views of each speaker. If it has any definite
meaning, it must surely be the giving way to the animal impulses and
instincts; to cast off all the artifices of civilisation, to give up all
that the arts and sciences have done for man, all that he has acquired
with enormous labour, through countless failures and successes, during
hundreds of thousands of years, and to fall back to the lowest
savagery--even the savages known to us use art in fashioning their arms,
clothing and shelter, to the time when man was a mere animal. Civilised
man is not only an animal, but an intellectual and spiritual being, and it