After reading his strictures I remarked to myself that really there remained but one field of useful popularity for the onion to adorn; in time it might hope to supplant the sunflower as the floral emblem of Kansas, as typifying a great political principle which originated in that state:  The Initiative, when one took a chance and ate a young onion; the Referendum, while one’s digestive apparatus wrestled with it; the Recall, if it disagreed with one.  Alone, of all the vegetables, stood spinach, with not a single detractor.  On this issue the vote in the affirmative practically was by acclamation.  I am tin position to state that boiled spinach has not an enemy among the experts.  This seems but fair—­it has so few friends among the eating public.

I observed much and confusing talk of the value of nitrogens, proteids and—­when I had reached the ultra-modernists—­vitamines.  Vitamines, I gathered, had only recently been discovered, yet by the progressives they were held to be of the supremest importance in the equation of properly balanced human sustenance.  To my knowledge I had never consciously eaten vitamines unless a vitamine was what gave guaranteed strictly fresh string beans, as served at a table-d’hote restaurant, that peculiar flavor.  Here all along I had figured it was the tinny taste of the can, which shows how ignorant one may be touching on vitally important matters.  I visualized a suitable luncheon for one banting according to the newest and most generally approved formula: 

=RELISH= MIXED GELATINOIDS

=POTAGE= STRAINED NITROGEN GUMBO

=ENTREE= GRILLED PROTEIDS WITH GLOBULIN PATTIES

=DESSERT= COMPOTE OF ASSORTED VITAMINES

Or the alternative course for one sincerely desirous of reducing, who believed everything he saw in print, was to cut out all the proscribed articles of food—­which meant everything edible except spinach—­and starve gracefully on a diet composed exclusively of boiled spinach, with the prospect of dying a dark green death in from three to six weeks and providing one’s own protective coloration if entombed in a cemetery containing cedars.

Personally I was not favorably inclined toward either plan, so I elected to let my conscience be my guide, backed by personal observation and personal experimentation.  I was traveling pretty constantly this past spring, and in the smoking compartments of the Pullmans, where all men, for some curious reason, grow garrulous and confidential, I put crafty leading questions to such of my fellow travelers as were over-sized and made mental notes of their answers for my own subsequent use.  Since the Eighteenth Amendment put the nineteenth hole out of commission, prohibition and how to evade it are the commonest of all conversational topics among those moving about from place to place in America; but the subject of what a man eats, and more particularly what he eats for breakfast, runs it a close second for popularity.