单项选择题
| Fried foods have long been frowned
upon. Nevertheless, the skillet is about our handiest and most useful piece of
kitchen equipment. Stalwart lumberjacks and others engaged in active labor
requiring 4,000 calories per day or more will take approximately one-third of
their rations prepared in this fashion. Meat, eggs, and French toast cooked in
this way are served in millions of homes daily. Apparently the consumers are not
beset with more signs of indigestion than afflict those who insist upon
broiling, roasting, or boiling. Some years ago one of our most eminent
physiologists investigated the digestibility of fried potatoes. He found that
the pan variety was more easily broken down for assimilation than when deep fat
was employed. The latter, however, dissolved within the alimentary tract more
readily than the boiled type. Furthermore, he learned, by watching the progress
of the contents of the stomach by means of the fluoroscope, that fat actually
accelerated the rate of digestion. Now all this is quite in contrast with
"authority". Volumes have been written on nutrition, and everywhere the dictum
has been accepted--no fried edibles of any sort for children. A few will go so
far as to forbid this style of cooking wholly. Now and then an expert will be
bold enough to admit that he uses them himself. The absence of discomfort being
explained on the ground that he possesses a powerful gastric apparatus. We can
of course sizzle perfectly good articles to death so that they will be leathery
and tough. But thorough heating, in the presence of shortening, is not the awful
crime that it has been labeled. Such dishes stimulate rather than retard
contractions of the gall bladder. Thus it is that bile mixes with the nutriment
shortly after it leaves the stomach. We don’t need to allow our foodstuffs to become oil-soaked, but other than that, there seems to be no basis for the widely heralded prohibition against this method. But notions become fixed. The first condemnation probably arose because an "oracle" suffered from dyspepsia, which he ascribed to some fried item on the menu. The theory spread. Others agreed with him, and after a time the doctrine became incorporated in our textbooks. The belief is now tradition rather than a proved fact. It should have been refuted long since, as experience has demonstrated its falsity. |