Should a distressing fulness and flatulence result from their over-feeding, they lay the blame to the vegetarian dietary instead of to themselves.  Most persons, on changing to a vegetarian dietary, commence by imitating flesh dishes in appearance and flavour and even in the names.  There is the additional inducement that the food may be attractive and palatable to friends who lack sympathy with the aesthetic and humane principles of the diet.  After a while many of them incline to simpler flavoured foods.  They revert to the unperverted taste of childhood, for children love sweets, fruits, and mild-flavoured foods rather than savouries.  One who loves savouries, as a rule, cares much less for fruits.  By compounding and cooking, a very great variety of foods can be prepared, but the differences in taste are much less than is usually, supposed.  The effect of seasoning instead of increasing the range, diminishes it, by dulling the finer perception of flavours.  The predominating seasoning also obscures everything else.  The mixture of foods produces a conglomeration of tastes in which any particular or distinct flavours are obscured, resulting in a general sameness.  It is often stated that as an ordinary flesh-eater has the choice of a greater range of foods and flavours than a vegetarian, he can obtain more enjoyment, and that the latter is disagreeably restricted.  Certainly he has the choice, but does he avail himself of it to any considerable extent?  No one cares to take all the different kinds of food, whether of animal or vegetable that are possible.  Of edible animals but a very few kinds are eaten.  A person who particularly relishes and partakes largely of flesh-foods will reject as insipid and unsatisfying many mild-flavoured foods at one end of the scale.  The vegetarian may abstain from foods at the opposite end of the scale, not always from humane reasons, but because they are unpleasant.  Thus there may be little to choose between the mere range of flavours that give enjoyment to each class of persons.  The sense of taste is in its character and range lower than the sense of sight and hearing.  The cultivation of the taste for savouries seems to blunt the taste for fruits and the delicate foods.  The grass and herbs on which the herbivora subsist, seems to our imagination of little flavour and monotonous; but they eat with every sign of enjoyment, deliberately munching their food as though to get its full flavour.  In all probability they find a considerable range of flavours in the great varieties of grasses commonly found together in a pasture.

Our elaborate cooking customs entail a vast amount of labour.  They necessitate the cost, trouble and dirt from having fires in great excess of that required for warmth:  the extra time in preparing, mixing and attending to food which has to be cooked:  and the large number of greasy and soiled utensils which have to be cleaned.  Cooked savoury food is generally much nicer eaten hot, and this necessitates