Fitness

Perhaps you put in an herb garden or plant a few vegetables among your flowers. If you have more land, you may go in for compost heaps and real vegetable and fruit gardening. Or, perhaps you move to the suburbs, buy a cow or goat, and value the milk and manure equally. Maybe you already live on a farm; gradually you change to biological methods. In any case you have your garden soil analyzed, add the trace minerals needed,” and return as much humus to the soil as you can. You read books on gardening 4 or farming 5 with biological methods and subscribe to magazines.” You give some of your fruits and vegetables to your friends and neighbors, let them see how delicious such foods can be, and get them interested in putting in a garden of their own. Thousands of gardeners and hundreds of farmers all over America are already using biological methods. Even some of the largest truck farmers are adding trace minerals to their land and as much humus as they can procure; they find that it pays because less produce is destroyed by insects and the food has much better keeping qualities.

You may have considered opening a small business and have wondered what would be best. The people you have given vegetables to like them so much that you may open a roadside stand; or you convert a front room into a small restaurant where you serve wonderful vegetable soup with stock you have to cut with a knife, your fresh vegetables added after the customer is seated; or your specialty may be slow-roasted meats and delicious cooked vegetables or a tossed salad seasoned with your fresh herbs.

Maybe a specialty food shop interests you even if you have no garden. The first thing you do is to learn to prepare some food better than anyone else in your part of the country; then you convert that front room into a place like the famous New York Central oyster bar, for example. People do not want big meals; they want delicious, filling meals. Think of the business a small specialty restaurant could do on a cold rainy day serving nothing but delicious soup and hot homemade bread; or a restaurant with a sign, “The Best WafHes in the World,” their product coming up to expectations, served with creamed chicken or turkey and a beverage, nothing more. I should like to find a place which serves only a delicious tossed salad with piping-hot cheese blini, made fresh for each customer instead of warmed over as in the restaurants which serve them at all. If 100,000 or more such specialty food counters could be opened across the country, motoring would be a pleasure.

Perhaps you start selling homemade bread, cookies, nut–breads, or cakes made of whole-wheat flour, wheat germ and other health-building ingredients; I know of several women who are, doing that. One of them makes the best orange nut-bread I have ever tasted. One acquaintance is now in the health-candy business, making delicious candies of such ingredients as powdered milk, honey, nuts, and peanut butter. Another man is making pure orange juice lollipops without added sugar; he supplies all the stores and schools in a moderately large city, his business far surpassing his expectations. A number of couples have opened small bakeries, using only health-building ingredients. Still other families have started health-food stores; every county seat needs at least one such store. A boy I know of is putting himself through college by raising goats and selling goats’ milk. Aside from supporting themselves with such businesses, these people are spreading the itch.

You find yourself wanting to learn more. You get such books as The Wheel of Health.’ Tomorrow’s Foods Body, Mind and Sugar/ Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Our National Malnutrition, and Diet Prevents Polio,” You may subscribe to Modern Nutrition:” The Journal of Applied Nutrition and to Carlton Fredericks’ Nutrition Neuis.” All of these you circulate among your friends; they borrow them again to lend to their friends who buy them to lend to their friends. Together you get your local library to order these books and to keep them prominently displayed. Soon you find yourself and your friends giving book reviews. You may long for company and join the American Nutrition Society or the American Academy of Nutrition 13 or even start a chapter of your own. Perhaps you go to a national convention where you meet wonderful physicians, dentists, agriculturists, chemists, laymen of every variety, all of whom think and feel as you do; you leave with your head in the clouds, determined to work harder than ever.

It soon gripes you that your money supports schools run so inefficiently because of poor nutrition. You dream about nutrition being taught in every classroom. That was the dream of the late Dr. Mary Swartz Rose, too. I studied under her and observed classes she herself often taught in a grade school near Columbia University. The fifth grade that year was studying calcium; they learned about milk, bones, and teeth and brought real teeth and bones to class; they soaked bones in acids to observe the bone base. They made milk drinks for parties; they raised white rats, some on milk, some without. They learned more about calcium than most adults know. The sixth grade was studying vitamin A, and they also had rats with and without this vitamin. They had parties with carrot-stick refreshments and ate dried apricots instead of candy. They learned a great deal; they loved it and went home to teach their parents about nutrition.

Suddenly you realize that every teacher in every public school in America could teach nutrition in one way or another; you quickly lend your books and magazines to teachers. Once interested, a teacher cannot help teaching nutrition even if she tries. She lives it and saves herself much fatigue; then she finds herself helping her students to feel better. Her work soon becomes easier because they are more alert. By this personal method many teachers are already doing a corking good job in nutrition education, although they do not consider that they teach nutrition at all. Some day such teachers will publish in the teachers’ magazines their experiences and methods which will serve as a guide and inspiration for other teachers.