This Famishing World

By Alfred W. McCann

One: The Human Scrap Heap Is Piling Higher

§ 1 -- God Has Prescribed

IS THERE any evidence that will stand the scrutiny of modern judge and jury, to indicate that God has prescribed a formula for the nourishment of the human family?

There is. We shall see it in all its wonder.

Does this formula endow human nature with disease-resisting vitality?

Does it fortify the prospective mother against the ravages so often suffered by her?

Does it protect the infant and control the development of the child?

Does it usher the adult uneventfully into the shadows of age? Does it stand on guard to protect men of good-will, their wives and children, against the assaults of those malign forces which seemingly, as if man were completely abandoned to the malicious whims of a superior but malevolent power, attack him from all sides? The imperious answer is "Yes." The Twentieth Century laboratory, which has nothing to do with the spiritual nature of man, is witness to the truth. When man's house is built its wonderfully organised inmate is constantly wearing and wasting away. Repair is necessary; incessant, never-ending repair. The repair materials are at hand. They are found nowhere but in food, in food alone. No officer tolerates an unfit soldier. No businessman tolerates an inefficient employee. No musician tolerates a jarring note. No physician tolerates incompatibles in his prescriptions, but in twenty-million homes in the United States to-day there is complacent toleration for food abuses that sap the stamina of the race.

These abuses, despite what is now known of them as a result of government research, parade the signatures of learned authorities, who sell their testimony for a fee, so that, as if by necromancy, the uninitiated may accept eminent names in lieu of missing elements in manipulated foods. Upon those missing elements life itself depends.

To expose this disorder in all its deadly significance, specialized effort has been made for years, but until 1912 little progress was recorded.

Public utterances from the platform and through the press, including at one time, 1916-1917, as many as forty-one newspapers scattered throughout the largest cities of the country, were greeted in high places with lofty sarcasm, and swept aside by the authorities as unworthy of consideration.

Finally with the aid of a great metropolitan journal came a long period of dragging the truth into the courts.

During the years dating from January, 1913, to the middle of 1918, in Municipal, State and Federal District Courts, that journal, the New York Globe, was responsible for the conviction of three hundred food sophisticators who, prior to their prosecution, had been able to hide behind the screens erected by the authorities, all of whom denied that its "unsupported" charges were true.

The court records of these cases, without an exception, have withstood the scrutiny of judge and jury and the fruits of that long and costly struggle are now passed to the people.

We know to-day, apart from the mere frauds that tax the pocketbook but do not affect human health, that a hundred food evils of grave significance constitute many of the building materials upon which young America, as well as stricken Europe, depends for growth and sustenance, under the eyes of man-made law that does not interfere.

Every pound of these food frauds is a pound of excess baggage borne by the growing child, the expectant mother and the invalid.

Every pound of food juggled, changed, denatured or chemically treated is balanced by a pound of human flesh.

Every pound of such food defies nature's standards, so marvellously formulated that each of them bears upon it the mark of divine origin. Advancing this assertion I shall prove that it is not tainted by mysticism or fervor; that it stands untrembling under the coldest light of pagan science; that our own government has helped to focus that light upon it.

Commercial wizardry attempting the impossible task of supplying the human family with food that will not support the life of animals, strives to maintain the dignity of its effort. Although thus far successful in its purposes it cannot longer ignore the truth, for from every laboratory in Europe and America are handed down to meet it indictments of such gravity that they can neither be disguised nor concealed.

Wondrous are the operations of Mother Nature, but she will suffer no wilful abuse. Her laws were established by a Higher Power, and man who feebly attempts to imitate them in his construction of a flying machine or in the development of his herds, turns his back upon that miracle of life, a growing child, and disdains to believe, or pretends to doubt, that the child is also subject to law.

§ 2: Food for Health or Disease?

Live stock and crops are fed according to fixed laws. Infants and children, men and women, are fed in ignorance and caprice.

Our daily food, less understood after years of agitation than the referendum or the fourth dimension, is so masked in mystery that scarcely one in ten thousand can give a definition of the phrase.

To the housewife and those dependent upon her judgment for health and life nothing is more vital, yet few are the homes in which the simple laws of nutrition are applied. The people no longer know the origin of their food or how it is prepared. They have lost control.

Babies are born every day, and every day children are fitted for school. Though food is their first and most important necessity, its knowledge is chiefly confined to owners of stock farms, producers of prize sheep, horses, poultry, hogs and blue ribbon cows.

Intelligent herdsmen apply their knowledge of its meaning and measure results according to fixed operations when not deceived by the feed manufactures. They know the growth, development and vigour of their animals depend upon the operation of clearly defined and inviolable laws.

They make a business of feeding for certain desired ends. To them pure food is not a mystery. It is the means whereby they supply proper building materials to the physical needs of the creatures in which their money is invested; the instrument with which they prevent disorder and sickness among their herds, flocks, kennels and litters.

The average farmer, as far as his soil is concerned, instinctively recognizes the meaning of pure food. He knows if he does not supply his vegetables and grains with the right kind of soil food he will reap a stunted and a feeble crop, or suffer a crop failure.

The United States Government has developed around this truth one of its costliest departments, the chief of which, in the person of the Secretary of Agriculture, is a member of the President's cabinet.

That live stock and crops should receive the benefit of man's interest in pure food, while thus far in the affairs of our national development infants and children do not, is symbolic of the soul-sickness of the world.

Woman's interest in pure food has not yet crystallised, though she has love instead of commercial expediency to inspire her. Is love less potent than profit?

Thousands of untimely deaths, the true causes of which are rarely suspected, are occasioned by pitiable ignorance of the simplest of God's laws, yet upon its serene though neglected splendor beams the infinite love of the Creator.

The Journal of the American Medical Association declared, July 20, 1918, that when the announcement was made by the Bureau of Child Hygiene of New York City that between 12 and 15 percent of its school children are underfed, it was received with scepticism by some and with surprise by others. The world refuses to believe.

F. A. Manny of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor declares, as a result of systematic studies made in New York City, that at least one-third of the school children are so much below the standard of growth as to call for special nutritional care. The world disregards the fact.

There are now in the public and parochial schools of Greater New York more than 2,000,000 children. Of other children under six years of age and between the ages of six and sixteen not in school, either at home or at work, there are nearly 2,000,000 more.

New York City alone boasts of nearly 500,000 children in need of nutritional attention, but the problem is not a New York problem or a Chicago problem or a San Francisco problem; it is not even an American problem.

Back in 1910 the chief medical officer of the English Board of Education declared as a result of data collected by him that defective nutrition stands in the foreground as the most important of all physical defects from which school children suffer.

In 1906 Dr. W. R. P. Emerson collected into a class a number of the weakest and most poorly nourished children from several thousands of patients in the Boston Dispensary. These children were "fed up." Their response was magic.

Dr. C. H. Smith duplicated this experiment in connection with Bellevue Hospital, New York City, reporting it possible to make 57 percent of the under-nourished children gain nearly twice the average rate for their ages, and 22 percent gain at about the average rate, a total of 79 percent gaining at or better than the average rate.

These results, obtained under most adverse circumstances, are ignored where no problems make their application difficult.

Lack of food is not responsible for the tragedy. Rejection of the right kind of food is behind it.

Ignorance in the home is not the only highway to physical infirmity and death. The widest road, never marked with a signpost, is the road that leads through commercial greed to the little white casket.

We propose to take this road at whose every turn the laws of God are deliberately broken, so that we may learn just how, although so sacred when applied to animal life, they are outraged and debauched in the food factory.

Where the fault originates in the caprice of the housewife herself, through thoughtlessness of her own or inheritance from grandmother's superstitions, the picturesque, wonderfully interesting, though tragic results of such household sins, when applied to the diet of white mice, rabbits, guinea pigs, monkeys, chickens and cows will be disclosed.

Where the abuse is purely commercial the mask will be torn off, and in such instances as are borne in lust for gain at the expense of human life, the natural, obvious, practical reform will be pointed out.

For the old abuses, for which politics, clever lawyers and commercial scientists have succeeded in erecting a flimsy protection in the defence of unnatural and Godless practices, there will be no mercy.

The physician who follows these pages will come into possession of facts not to be obtained in the medical schools of Europe or America. He will receive new information with regard to many of the causes of malnutrition, anemia, neurasthenia, edema, Bright's disease, diabetes, cancer, hardening of the arteries, tuberculosis and other preventable diseases which, in the form of needless pain, are so frequently visited upon the bodies of the ignorant and unwary.

Whispering through the Twentieth Century laboratory the voice of God can be heard. It requires no strained ear to catch its echoes as they come up centuries old from Genesis, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy in waves that roll from enamelled wall to enamelled wall, protesting in the name of the cradle, the nursery, the kindergarten, the school, the home and workshop against the special privileges and follies that to-day as never before must render their long overdue account to a grim jury of awakened mother love. Faith in the all-wise but unheeded provisions of the Creator is the instant need.

§ 3 -- The World Faces a Rebirth

The reconstruction following the war, in which for many years not only the allies but also America will have to deal with the hardest of hard conditions, has already begun its clamour for the corporal as well as the spiritual reclamation of man.

The tearing down of the world is actually less visible in the devastated regions where cities, towns, villages and country sides are now but scorched and broken patches than in the physical ravages which all mankind dumbly suffered throughout the war, and which for many years prior to the war had been eating into the health of the white race of all lands. Are we civilised? Far from it!

In May, 1918, in New York City alone, Dr. S. Josephine Baker reported 216,000 children suffering from malnutrition, with all that malnutrition involves, as a direct result of the war, although America had been in the war scarcely a year. The war has taught us that our children do indeed constitute our second line of defence, just as the Boer war opened the eyes of Great Britain to the infirmities of its second line of defence.

During the Boer war so many men applying for service were rejected because of physical defects which could have been avoided or overcome that the whole British Empire, shocked into a realisation of its neglect of the child, turned its belated attention to the deficiencies thus so appallingly revealed.

In America's first draft 500,000 of our "best" young men in the very flower of their manhood were rejected as physically unfit for service.

After the long struggle our nation, for many years, will be engaged in tabulating two kinds of men, those that helped and those that did not; the fit and the unfit; the accepted and the rejected.

The finest types of physical manhood entered the service, the others were left at home, to father their kind.

In this single fact humanity faces a reaction against which, if it would tune up the vigor and stamina of infants yet unborn, must be thrown all its conscience, intelligence and energy.

We can no longer ignore our children as they have been ignored, otherwise our inspiring accomplishments in organising all the resources of America will degenerate into a mere expediency, leaving behind a long trail of calamity and misery. By looking squarely at the facts and acting upon them, our war energies, if they are also applied to the child, will in the physical sense literally regenerate America, while contributing at the same time to the rebuilding of stricken Europe.

As a nation we were long content to ignore the Child in the presence of the Moneybag, giving to the dollar an artificial value which war has taught us, to our amazement, it did not possess, even though we had been pouring all our foolish energies into it, permitting the Child, our second line of defence, to take care of itself.

Even New Zealand, in spite of its boasted accomplishments, found herself in the Moneybag class until she discovered the lamentable deficiencies of the young men who applied and were examined for her military service.

Dr. Truby King in February, 19I8, stopped off in New York on his way to England to reorganise child welfare work under the British Government. Through him we learned that the young men of New Zealand who were supposed to be supremely fit for military service were found by Major General Sir Frederic Morris so lamentably unfit that 60 of every 100 examined had to be rejected.

Tracing their unfitness to its cause, Dr. King was forced to the conclusion that New Zealand's absurd food habits, quite similar to our own, were responsible for the alarming evils revealed by medical examination.

In 1917 New York City boasted that only 88 of its babies died of every 1,000 born. This infant mortality record, compared with the record of many other American cities, is on the surface worthy of note, but Dr. King is responsible for the reduction of the infant mortality rate of New Zealand not to 88 per thousand, but to 5 per thousand, the lowest rate in the world.

In accomplishing this extraordinary achievement which has resulted in the British Government's recognition of the value of his services, Dr. King openly admits that he has followed precedents established here in America, even though they have been ignored here, and that his success in lowering the infant death rate in New Zealand is due to his having practised principles developed in the United States.

The shame of it!

We gave our American invention, the submarine, to the Germans. We gave our American invention, the aeroplane, to the Germans.

We have not applied to our own benefit the principles we gave Dr, Truby King for the benefit of New Zealand.

Yes, we have been asleep with the Moneybag under our pillow. We were gassed by its fumes.

What we might have spent to make America the most wonderful human thing under God's heavens we did not spend for that purpose, because in our blindness we could not see the simplest, the most wonderful and the most inexorable of God's laws, as it lay ignored, neglected and broken at our feet.

We are spending that money now. Never before were such expenditures recorded in the history of the world!

We are emptying the Moneybag, but little if any of its contents is being applied to our second line of defence, the Child. No wonder the bitter Bernard Shaw impotently raves over the infant mortality of Ireland!

Dr. Baker has told us of the handicap suffered by France through her fallen birth rate, a tragedy which made it almost impossible to maintain her army at its proper quota.

France recognises at last the importance of the child. Even in England the decreasing birth rate is wholly responsible for the loss of millions of potential lives.

At the Royal Institute of Public Health, June, 1918, Sir Bernard Mallet declared to an audience of London physicians that while the war has filled the graves it has emptied the cradles.

In England and Wales the births recorded for 1913 were 881,890. In 1917 they had fallen to 668,346, a decline of 24 percent.

Up to the beginning of 1918 England and Wales had lost on the scale of potential lives 650,000 unborn infants. During the same period Germany lost in potential lives the equivalent of 4.5 percent of her total pre-war population, Austria lost 5 percent and Hungary 7 percent.

The war up to June, 1918, had cost the belligerents not less than 12,500,000 potential lives. These losses, added to the 20,000,000 casualties of battle, show that race suicide on a colossal scale is but one of the outstanding results of German militarism.

Terrible as are these fruits of a Godless philosophy of life and death, the infirmities needlessly visited upon the living are incalculably more appalling, and the tragedy of it is that they are wholly controllable and preventable.

The hour to face the truth has come. The world steeped in luxury and seeking only physical comforts, had shut its eyes too long to the very means whereby comfort is attained.

Seeing but not comprehending, reading but not understanding, mankind, chastened by suffering, is beginning again to look to God for the pearls it had cast to swine in its hours of material blindness.

Among those pearls one of great price proclaims its lustre out of the darkness as if by its very beauty it would call all men into the area of its radiance, where reverently they may behold under the softness and sweetness of its light one of the many broken laws under whose benevolent operations, when recognised and applied, disease itself is banished, infirmities healed, health and strength attained.

To the task of revealing the glory of this pearl and its meaning to the reconstruction of civilization, these words and those to follow are devoted.

§ 4 -- Meaningless Phrases

In the last four years 1,500,000 children under ten years of age have died in the United States. With little knives and forks, with little baby spoons, with chubby little hands manifesting many of the outward signs of health, they dug their little graves.

Hundreds of thousands of adults hurrying to untimely graves kept them company. Why?

As late as April, 1918, the United States Public Health Service called attention to one of the many preventable ravages of food folly.

"There may be plenty of milk or eggs or meat," said the government, "but if you prefer to live mainly on cereals, starchy foods and sweets pellagra will result."

This warning will not be heeded because the people cannot understand it. They do not know what the government means by "cereals," for the reason that 90 percent of the cereals now prepared for human consumption in no manner resemble physiologically the cereals provided by Mother Nature.

The government's phrase "starchy foods and sweets" has no meaning for the plain people who do not know that pure starch or pure sugar are not found in nature.

Pure starch and pure sugar are laboratory refinements from which the "impurities" essential to life have been removed.

The government's phrase "pellagra" has little significance for the average man or woman because "only 150,000 cases" occur every year in the United States, and until a few months ago the entire medical world attributed its outbreak to every cause under the sun except the right one.

The government now knows that pellagra is a food deficiency disease, but there are a hundred stopping places this side of pellagra, every one of which is a direct attack upon our second line of defence.

Our Washington authorities, although they have occasionally spoken in plain terms, do not now refer to the menace of "refined" cereals, of "improved" starches, of "denatured" sweets and fats, of "patent" wheat flour, of "degerminated" corn flour, of "polished" rice, of "demineralised" corn starch and potato starch, of "robbed" rye flour, of "pearled" barley, of "refined" sugar or of any of the other manipulated foods sold in beautifully decorated packages that attack the vitality of prospective mother, nursing mother, child, soldier and civilian worker.

It is not enough that we heed these evils before they reach the pellagra stage.

Where there are but 150,000 cases of pellagra there are millions of cases of malnutrition which, though they do not reach the pellagra stage, are nevertheless symptoms of the great national folly which commercial science encourages and defends.

"The increased price of food is responsible," says Dr. Baker, "for the 216,000 children of New York City now suffering from undernourishment."

"It is most important," says the United States Public Health Service, "that at least three glasses (one and one-half pints) and preferably more milk be taken daily." The irony of these comments is solemn.

The importance of eggs, fresh vegetables and fresh fruits is emphasised as in the past has been emphasised the importance of whole grain foods, whole wheat bread, whole corn bread, natural brown rice. But what are the facts?

High prices do not keep these "offsetting" foods out of the hands of the poor. They are not offered to the poor at any price. Yet the government itself tells us that among the poor the symptoms of malnutrition are mostly prevalent.

On page 484, No. 14, Volume 33 of the Public Health Reports issued by the United States Public Health Service, are found these words:

"The unbalanced diet composed mainly of biscuits, corn bread, grits, hominy, rice, gravy and syrup with only a few vegetables develops disease."

Why such foods develop disease, and why all other similar foods, of which these are but typical, develop disease, will be explained here in the government's own phrases, although they are phrases rarely acted upon by the individual and never by the food manufacturer.

We now know that our second line of defence is in danger. A little later we shall clearly see why.

"The time par excellence," says Dr. Truby King, "for the growth of the brain and nervous system is during the prenatal period and the first two years of life.

"The whole future of the individual is determined for him before he is four years old, just as that of a calf is determined by the time it has reached the age of six months.

"That so many newly born infants survive in spite of the heavy toll taken among them is due to the fact that nature safeguards the child even at the expense of the mother's health."

This is indeed true but the mother's health is also part of the second line of defence, and proper food for her is just as important as proper food for the child; just as important as proper food for the workman; just as important as proper food for the boys in the trenches.

Our moneybags must be opened still wider. Their contents pouring forth cannot longer ignore these facts. We must know what proper food is; we must deal with forces able thus far to prevent the government's acting upon facts which the government itself has succeeded in establishing. That they are pigeonholed in Washington makes the task less difficult.

At this trying period in our national life, when we are bearing intense strains, the food of the plain people, measured by government standards, is more impoverished than ever. The function of the Food Administration as determined by itself was not to educate the public.

High prices and restricted diet mean wealth for a few profiteers, but such wealth does not flow into the war chest, nor into the reconstruction work that for many years must be done, nor does it prepare America for the future she now faces.

All will accept the proposition that the stricken parents of children who die before their time should move the world to avert these preventable tragedies, but the impulse rarely asserts itself until all is over.

The time to educate parents is not after the child is laid low. All the food knowledge this side of heaven will not put life and health into the tissues of a corpse.

Parents, clinging to old-fashioned traditions, knowing little of what goes on behind factory walls, are prone to regard the work of child conservation as a fad.

As a rule they refuse to accept the plainest facts unless proved in picturesque fashion. Fortunately, such picturesque proofs are at hand.

We shall peep behind traditions, if only for the purpose of receiving a shock that will excite our curiosity. Such shock is near.

Most of us will not stir from the beaten path tramped hard by the millions of feet of little children unless we are pushed by brute force. Brute force is happily available.

In the last four years in the United States 3,000,000 little feet have ceased pattering. This is not an idle statement made in a year of sensations. Its proof is found in the mortality statistics prepared by the Bureau of Census, Department of Commerce, and submitted to the Secretary of Commerce by the Director of the Census.

Gruesome? Yes.

True? Yes. But what of it? unless we are ready to take soundings, even though to do so means parting with much old-fashioned indifference that sits on an eggshell of happiness, ever ready to crack.

§ 5 -- Approaching Reform

There is a peg in your shoe. It hurts your foot. It bruises and cuts the flesh. It sets up an irritation. You consult a doctor. He applies oils, lotions and germicides. He bandages the sore spot. You continue his treatment but complain that your foot will not heal.

Of course not.

Some day it may occur to you to remove the peg. Nature will then do her own healing, but not until the cause of her woe has been removed.

All the serums, antitoxins, tonics and therapeutic agents of medical science will not heal our physical disorders while that peg remains in the national shoe. It is the cause of baffling infirmities that defy the scalpel of the surgeon and the prescription of the physician.

It is the unseen agent whose work laughs defiance at the soundest scientific revelations of the laboratory and clinic.

In Berlin, April, 1913, at the Sixth International Conference on Physio-Therapy, it was named in the following words:

"Natural immunity to disease is very closely allied to nutrition. As soon as a slight disturbance of nutrition occurs the child loses this natural immunity.

"An infection of the mouth with thrush is not possible in a normal-born and breast-fed child. The bottle-fed child is at a great disadvantage as compared with the breast-fed child.

"One-sided nutrition with carbohydrates (starches, sugars, table syrups, candies, white breadstuffs, denatured breakfast foods, refined cereals) injures the immunity of children.

"Tuberculous children nourished with such carbohydrate foods succumb more easily than when nourished on natural foods.

"The water content of the body is inversely proportionate to the natural immunity. Water-logged tissues lose their immunity. Refined foods increase unnecessarily the amount of water in the tissues, and promote a rapid rise in the body weight.

"Children fed on a carbohydrate diet become water-logged, fat, and show slight resisting power against infection.

"The lack of absorbable calcium salts in the diet favours the water-logging."

These words, describing the peg, may mean little to you now, but before we have proceeded far they will be repeated under such clear white light that you will marvel over their wisdom and simplicity, seeing that many of the miseries which we rashly and 'presumptuously attribute to Divine Providence are visited upon us not by God but by ourselves.

To understand the meaning of the phrase "our daily bread" we must first discover how the food manufacturer operates; what he does to accomplish his purpose; why he does it, and how to put an end to his trickery without the necessity of invoking legislation. Legislation will not bring about reform. Politicians, food industries and newspapers will not permit it.

We must first learn that the greatest temptation to juggle with food products is inspired by the people themselves.

The subject of insufficient wage or industrial injustice is not going to creep into this discussion, but in passing it must be said that in scanty incomes is frequently born the false standard of judgment which attributes an artificial value to "bulk," overlooking substance and quality.

Competition, when based on quality of product and honesty of workmanship, is the very life of trade decency, but in foolish and desperate competition which inspires fraud, false standards are imposed in all their evil influence upon society.

When the size and price satisfy the individual few questions are asked. Most people are prone to accept even the shape of the package or its colour as evidence that its contents are all they ought to be. No questions are asked as to whether they will support life or slowly, insidiously, stealthily burrow under the foundation of the living temple to destroy it.

To gain a trade advantage over a competitor the food manufacturer makes his strongest appeal to the eye. Thus begins the work of puffing, bulking, filling, extending. Then follows the trick of conferring upon the bulk product that shadow of honesty which masks it against discovery.

At this point deception is braced with added flavour, manufactured in the laboratory. The "innocent" and "harmless" mass is kept from disintegrating by the use of legalised preservatives. Food is embalmed!

In addition to the filler evil the artificial colour evil, the flavour evil and the preservative evil there is a fifth and still more insidious evil responsible for tenfold, yes a hundredfold, more miseries than all the other evils combined.

The filler evil is now regarded as a crime by all State Departments of Agriculture where poultry food, cattle food or fertiliser is concerned.

The Federal government also recognises the filler evil when an attempt is made to ship a sophisticated food from one state into another, unless its manufacturer leaves in the form of small print upon the label, some inconspicuous tell-tale evidence behind.

Foods consumed in the state in which they are manufactured, not passing into any other state, need not declare this tell-tale evidence except in a few communities where an alert commissioner is active.

The experiment stations of nearly every state in the Union have discussed the enormity of adulterating cow food and earth food. These abuses have been followed occasionally by successful prosecutions, never heard of by the plain people, although they are based on no other ground than the evil so complacently tolerated in the preparation of human food.

Cattle food and fertilizer are considered by the State and Federal government of more importance than human food.

The reasons behind this inconsistency will be revealed in their proper place.

Dr. Harvey W. Wiley's first work, back in 1882, was the ejection of worthless fillers from the earth-food fertilisers sold to farmers for replenishing their soil with the food elements consumed by last year's crop, that there might be no crop failure the following year.

Commercial cow food, loaded with inert and foodless substances, was found, like commercial earth food, to fail utterly in the work it was intended to accomplish. Now, after 37 years of literally astonishing experiments with soil, plants and animals, and with an almost thorough knowledge of the cause of soil starvation and the cause of animal disease, the human family still persists in ignoring the meaning of pure food for its children.

Those who manufacture foodless foods for human beings tell us we have no constitutional right to interfere with their industries. Education of the masses, however, will bring about the necessary reform. It can be brought about in no other way.

§ 6 -- Red Blood Depends on Food

In the vast mixture of greed, ignorance, selfishness, oppression, sickness, darkness, vanity, sham, crime, love, compassion, justice, charity and truth which we call civilisation, nothing but nation-wide publicity will accomplish for pure food what legislation has failed to do. Enlightened selfishness is not the noblest motive but it frequently leads to noble ends. Newspapers and magazines through which the public obtains a large share of its canned information cannot now tell the truth about foods because their principal sources of income are derived through the advertisements of the very foods which truthful columns would be forced to condemn if they referred to them at all.

The publications which remain dumb to the most important issue of the home fail to see that by exposing the truth they would automatically develop advertisers to take the place of those whose truth-suppressing policies have sealed their pages with unholy silence.

The business managers of periodicals and dailies have said to me in substance, "Eagles, crows, squirrels were never taught anything of food; see how they thrive. Why create a controversy where there is none?

"In its home among the trees the monkey is ignorant of the meaning of pure food. No hunter ever captured a monkey in its schoolless habitat suffering from appendicitis, tuberculosis, tumour or swollen glands.

"The angler catches his hundred fish; the trawler's net catches its millions. All are healthy, firm and fit for the frying pan and grid.

"The horse is immune to tuberculosis. So is the sheep.

"Of every 10,000 sheep killed in the slaughter house the lesions of disease are found in only one, and sometimes not even in that one.

"Our fathers and mothers were taught nothing of pure food, yet millions of us are still alive. If pure food had been necessary we would all be dead.

"This certainly proves that knowing nothing of the meaning of carbohydrates, proteins, fats and ash, we do not need to know."

By such phrases the subject is dismissed, yet by such phrases do they who oppose the truth stand convicted.

Remove the monkey from its natural home and its natural food and the superintendent of the menagerie will bury it before its time.

Come with me to the zoological gardens in Bronx Park and see for yourself what happens to the chimpanzee in captivity. All the primates die before their time. Tuberculosis, pneumonia, tumours, kill them.

Later I shall tell you what they eat and why they die.

Nature's formula and man's "improvements" upon it have nothing in common. Pollute the streams and change thereby the character of the food upon which fish subsist and they are no longer fit for the dinner table.

Debase the food of the horse and sheep as we debase the food of the milch cow and they, too, like the cow, are cursed with disease.

Our government is responsible for the assertion that scarcely a single herd of dairy cows in a thousand is free from disease. No tuberculin test of any herd in New York, including the so-called "certified" herds, has failed for eight years to find tuberculous cows. They are in every herd, and in many herds every cow is affected.

All animals have natural instincts to guide them in their selection of food until they are caged, harnessed or put into a stall.

The human animal possesses intelligence rather than instinct. His failure to exercise this intelligence is responsible for the thousand ills which his ignorance imposes upon innocent children.

The divinely constituted truths, with which man should be familiar, reveal to him, if he has the heart to face them, why some plump children are pale, why some pale children are thin, why some children with normal red blood haven't an ounce of useless fat upon their bodies.

The weight of the child has little to do with its morals, but the poorly nourished child manifests many abnormal characteristics which wise people tell us are "evil."

Many a little heart pumping impoverished blood to hungry tissues, feeding starved nerves with an unhealthy stream, nourishing a tired little body and a wearied little brain with debased foods goes for correction to the Children's Court, or is "punished" for the pranks over which it has no control.

You have seen "bad" children, "cranky" children, "peevish" children, "cruel" children, "reckless" children, "nervous" children and "delinquent" children. Many of them, after a diet of six months on the food God intended they should eat, can preach sermons to their elders.

The angels -- perhaps they can weep -- know this, yet the world disregards the most beautiful of nature's laws in its consumption of degraded, debased, denatured foods, and then murmurs against God, blaming Him for the prevalence of disease upon the earth.

Food, of course, has nothing to do with man's natural inclination to evil; nothing to do with the weakness of his will. Food will not confirm him in grace, but it will irritate and kill him, and before the end it will make those about him miserable, affording them ample opportunity to practise the heroic virtues of fortitude and patience.

In the creation of our esthetic dishes there are constant wanderings into fields far from nature's own.

We need not consider the normal fish, the healthy monkey or the disease-resisting sheep. Let us consider instead the hundreds of thousands of cases of cured tuberculosis among men, women and children. Hope and faith are carried again on joyful backs, when victims of this preventable affliction return to nature, eating the foods that re-create normal blood, providing anew resistance to disease, and vigour that had been lost.

New red blood arrests disease, walls up tuberculous lesions, and the patient, if not in the very shadow of death, is reclaimed.

New red blood depends on food, on food alone.

§ 7 -- Food Calcium and Tuberculosis

The worn out body suffering from low resistance and tuberculosis can be cured.

What, then, is society's justification for permitting tuberculosis to develop in a healthy body?

Go to the morgue; witness the autopsies; ask a surgeon what causes the scars in the lungs and glands before you.

He will tell you the scar is a healed wound, a calcified lesion. That dead body, while living, suffered tubercles to feed upon it, yet never suspecting their existence threw them off and was cured.

Thousands of cases of accidentally renewed vitality overcoming the ravages of tuberculosis are on record.

Physicians report their continued surprise in the number of instances of cured tuberculosis, evidence of which they find in operations or in post mortems among adults and children.

Calcified lesions, completely walled off from the rest of the body, are common. They show how nature, when given an opportunity to thwart the advance of the disease, performs her protecting task without exciting the faintest suspicion that the disease is present.

There is no combination of foods, if consumed as nature gives them to us, which can fail to fortify the growing child against the ravages of tuberculosis. All food, if unrefined, is good food. Let there be no mystery about that. Food, unprocessed by man, contains all the elements necessary to a successful journey through the human body. That God put them there for a purpose we shall prove.

In nature there are no irritating tables of proteins, carbohydrates, fats or ash to vex the child. It is the breaking down of nature's schemes which over-emphasises the importance of these curious subdivisions into which man has learnedly split his dietary.

Any combination of natural foods, unrefined, which you can think of, will place at her disposal the raw materials needed by Mother Nature not only in her process of curing tuberculosis, but in her function of protecting the body against it.

In an earlier chapter we heard the Sixth International Congress of Physio-Therapy tell us that the lack of absorbable calcium salts in the diet favours loss of resisting power against infection.

Remember those words, for as they zigzag their course through what is to follow they will gather many new meanings, every one of which will be as transparent to you as distilled water.

Absorbable calcium salts (organic lime) constitute the building materials employed by the body in plugging the tuberculous gap. With organic lime and its accompanying salts, furnished only through food and never through medicine, the body builds its fortification against tuberculosis.

When the surgeon's knife 'cuts through a healed tuberculous area the effect is exactly like that which follows an attempt to cut sand.

These calcified lesions complain of our folly in remaining deaf to the beautiful rhythms playing everywhere about us, reminding us constantly that in creating earth for man God in His wisdom neglected nothing, left nothing to chance, but rather from His infinite Providence provided for every human need, heeding not alone the requirements of the new born infant at its mother's breast, but also the requirements of the adult, if the adult will but bend his knee and bow his head, accepting without question the dispensations of his Creator's love instead of capriciously breaking in upon them, disordering, changing, improving, refining, destroying them.

Pure food not only endows the child with disease-resisting vitality, but it promotes and controls its normal growth and development, and fortifies maternity against the many preventable evils that beset the sublimest episode of life.

Pure food is designed to keep the cradle filled and to stand the grave off to its proper time.

It is designed to carry its lesson to stricken Europe, whose under-nourished children, like our own, now need more attention than ever.

It is designed to erase the horrible records of childhood mortality and to substitute for them the cheering fruits of decent and humane consideration for the physically defective so frequently condemned to meaningless misery, and premature death.

These chapters will trace the fortunate accident that even in ignorance sometimes removes the peg.

They will locate that peg. They will reveal the operation of a beautiful and harmonious law. They will make plain the natural processes which, when applied, can be substituted for the accident that sometimes intercepts the journey of a useful creature on his way to untimely death.

The proper place to teach the mysteries of food is in the school, but even we who were not taught there can begin now to learn with inevitable increase in the number of our days, and blessings untold to our children.

The most indifferent of us know that chicken food must be food that will make chickens grow and keep them well. There is such food upon the market.

Children's food must perform the same service for children, but there are hundreds of foods now on the market which children eat every day. These foods in six weeks will destroy the health of chickens, and in three months kill them.

They do not cause children to topple over on the streets in paroxysms of pain. They do not bring about sudden death. They rob the child a little at a time, slowly but surely undermining its vitality and lowering its resistance until eventually it becomes the ready victim of any disease organism that may take up residence in its tissues.

The same law of building with building materials operates for children and chickens.

Universities have not yet been able to suspend the law, though some of them have sought to change our notions regarding its divine origin. The world's food problems have not ended with the end of war. Peace has stepped in upon the deadliest of food perils. The time has come to probe the depths if civilisation is to harvest the material and spiritual fruits of the carnage of four terrorised years.

The extraordinary activities of the governments of Great Britain and the United States in establishing, 1918, a unified international food control, were inspired by a vision of a long, grim, hard future. The world is going to get hungrier and hungrier year after year for many years to come. America during each of these years will become progressively responsible for feeding the famished mouths of Europe. As the surpluses of foods increase in Australia and the Argentine, the difficulty of carrying them to hungry Europe will also increase.

The distance from Australia to Liverpool is 11,890 miles; from Australia to San Francisco is 6,966 miles; from Buenos Ayres to Liverpool is 6,258 miles; from Bombay to Liverpool is 10,680 miles.

The distance from New York to Liverpool is only 3,036 miles. The tonnage saved by shipping food 3,036 miles from New York to Liverpool instead of by the long routes is equivalent to 12,000,000 tons of shipping. The submarine, with its monstrous toll of destroyed vessels, is paralleled by the ravages that have depleted the dairy herds and breeding stock of America from which the European milk and meat supply must be reconstructed and restored. There is a world shortage not only of ships but of food.

With Belgium and Northern France evacuated by the Germans, 10,000,000 more mouths will have to be fed by America. Even Austria and Germany must be helped if anarchy is to be averted.

Europe cannot starve while America is using ships to bring her soldiers home. If America cannot fill those ships with food on their return voyages they will be sent to South America, to India, and Australia where there will be food to put into them. Europe must either draw upon those distant countries for the nourishment she needs, or she must depend upon America.

The United States Food Administration estimates that in Eastern Europe there are 180,000,000 people who must be fed after the war if famine more horrible than the world has ever known, is to be averted. The total deaths among British troops from the beginning of the war to the end of 1918 numbered a little more than one million. During the same period five million civilians in Europe starved to death, and more are starving every day.

With the establishment of peace, all Europe becomes a bidder for American food and for the ships to carry it. It is for this reason that America faces at home a food shortage far more serious than any through which she passed during the war.

Judson C. Welliver emphasises the fact that perfectly sane men who have brooded over this problem talk gravely about the possibility of famine in the United States unless measures are taken to establish food reserves, and later to maintain such rigid control of food production and distribution as will protect the country from having its own necessities of life taken away through the frantic bidding of starving multitudes on the other side.

If America would do her full duty to herself and the rest of the world she must learn how to maintain her stamina, her health, her resistance to disease while sharing her vanishing supplies with others.

This book tells how to meet the crisis and makes clear a path through which we may come out of it healthier and sturdier than when we entered its shadows.

Next: 8. Denatured Foods Destroy Life

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