Fitness

The protein content of our food and the food of animals has decreased and continues to decrease still more. The mineral content of foods is apparently only a fraction of what it used to be or of what it could or should be. The vitamin content varies with the health of the plant. Fresh foods no longer have keeping qualities. Flavor is gone; there is little joy left in eating. I talked to a Frenchman from the provinces, an architect from a village in Mexico, an Englishman lecturing in American universities, an engineer who had lived in the north of China. All asked the same question, “What’s wrong with American food? You eat and eat, and it doesn’t fill you up. It has no flavor.” These people had been used to better foods. Our grandparents were used to better foods. From now on I am going to be used to better foods, but how the entire population of America can get better foods, I do not know.

For four years I raised all of our own vegetables and much of our fruits in soil composted and mineralized without chemical fertilizers. The worms in the compost piles looked like plates of spaghetti. Bugs and aphids were no problem; no disease which I could recognize invaded the garden. The flavors of these foods were superb. People say that flavor is due to freshness, but it is not freshness alone. Many times I have brought in too much and kept the excess in the refrigerator, using it later when I was busy or the garden was muddy; the marvelous flavors were retained. The quantities we ate were unbelievable; often the children had to be told to stop eating vegetables. This year I thought I was too busy to put in a garden; I bought the best vegetables I could find and cooked them the best I could; we tasted them and threw them out. The fruits were not much better. Now I have shipped to me vegetables and fruits grown on rebuilt soils without commercial fertilizers or poison sprays. They are not fresh when they reach me, but they seem fresh and are still delicious. Until I found a supply, we had stopped eating vegetables except as carriers of salad dressings. As I figure it, the cows ate “vegetables,” and their digestion is more complete than ours. We get some minerals in meat and milk. Chickens are better fed than humans. Ocean fish suffer no dearth of minerals. Perhaps the animal body detoxifies the poison sprays to a certain extent at least. A diet of these foods, however, is expensive.

In a city where I go to lecture live a doctor and his wife, both wonderful people; I stay with them so often that they file my bedsheets under D. The last time I was there, at about three 0′ clock in the morning, the three of us were dreaming though we were not asleep. The doctor’s specialty is agriculture, the health-starts-in-the-soil variety. He was saying:

“No virgin soil has ever been found to contain all the essential minerals in amounts now known to be somewhere near optimum in producing the health of plants, animals or humans. Experiments are carried on in which land is rebuilt with minerals and humus; the protein content of alfalfa grown on such land has already been increased from the average of 9 per cent to 32 per cent. The protein content of other foods is increased correspondingly. No one yet knows the upper limit. The quantities of the cobalt, copper, and other trace minerals can be multiplied in our foods, yet they never reach the point of toxicity. Plants grown on such soil stay healthy, free from the dozens of diseases which have changed agricultural journals into medical magazines and treatises on poison sprays.

“There are a number of experimental farms where soils have been improved to known standards for minerals and humus for several years. Animals grazed on such land were injected with the most virulent types of bacteria; a week or two later, the blood of these animals showed not one sign that bacteria had been injected. Illness could not be produced in them, not even Bang’s disease or the dreaded hoofand-mouth disease or any of dozens of diseases which plague stockmen. The milk, meat, eggs produced by animals ranging on such soil, and the vegetables, fruits, and grains grown on such soil may produce in man a degree of health, the potential of which is not known.

“Land built up with minerals and humus can surpass any virgin soil ever found. On a single acre a man can create his own Shangri-La. The land is available; the know-how is here; the application of that know-how is coming; the rewards for humans no one can guess.

Thus we dreamed into the dawn, but the dream was not original. Years ago Sir Albert Howard had dreamed that dream in India. Now Lady Eve Balfour is dreaming it in England. America has many such dreamers: Bromfield, an author in Ohio; Rodale, a publisher in Pennsylvania; Pfeiffer, a scientist in upper New York; Albrecht, a university professor in Missouri. Each of these dreamers has his followers. There are large groups of dreamers in South Africa and, New Zealand and Australia.

That dream has to do with agriculture, but it is not of agriculture. It is a dream of world peace. This dream starts with a family which perhaps creates its Shangri-La on an acre of land, a family in which a high degree of health has laid the foundation for character, courage, integrity, serenity, graciousness, and love in the home. Enough such families can make up a community, a state, a nation, a world at peace.