Why We Can’t Follow
in Grandmother's Footsteps
ow often have we heard it said that great-grandmother knew nothing of vitamins and calories, she had thirteen children, did all her own cooking and spinning, and lived to a hale old age? Some did, and some didn’t! But it was grandmother’s closeness to nature, her ceaseless physical industry (not nervous effort), her kitchen garden, her whole grains from the nearby mill, her coarser, simpler food, that protected her health. Even if she did close the windows, the cold air came in at the cracks and down the fireplace, and in her day the houses weren’t steam heated! She needed no gymnasium or “daily dozen,” because water was carried (not just turned on at the spigot), food was cooked at the crane in the fireplace or on the wood range (not on the electric or gas stove), her foot was busy at the spinning wheel!
She did not need to know about exercise and fresh air, and vitamins and coarse foods, and where to get her iron and lime. They were all forced upon her. She couldn’t escape them. The further we get from nature and simplicity, the more we need to know in order to live wisely.
So do not try to wear grandmother’s hoop skirts under your tubular one-piece dress. It can’t be done! We who step from home or office to elevator, motor, or street car (whereas she jolted in a springless wagon over pioneer roads) cannot compare our life with hers. Civilization takes the physical stress and exercise out of life and substitutes for it nervous strain—hardly a compensating exchange.
Refrigerator cars, cold storage, transportation facilities, cables and telegraph wires have bound the nations so closely together that fresh fruits and vegetables from many lands are with us the seasons round. Our garden patch is the world—an advantage that we should make the most of, not begrudging the investment, for it pays big health dividends. All foods are more abundant, more available, more sanitary, better kept—the package cereals working a big advantage here. We must make use of all these compensating advantages as we exchange old ways for new ones.
In return for our greater leisure and shifting the weight of many household burdens to other shoulders, we must put more thought upon what we need and why, in order to choose from these modified foods.
If we eat refined grains, white flour that has lost the bran and germ, with their vitalizing minerals, vitamins and the “roughage” of the outer branny coats, then we need more of the bran itself in such appetizing forms as Post’s Bran Flakes and Grape-Nuts, and also bulky, moisture-bearing vegetables and fruits to offset this tendency in our diet.
If we eat only the overcooked meats, minced and sauced, and daintily refrain from the liver, kidneys, and brains, then we miss the important vitamin values that are contained in these organs. If we are overfatigued and nervous, we should sleep or rest, not lash our nerves to overeffort by caffein-bearing beverages; hence Postum!
These facts stand reiteration from different points of view. Plainly we must keep our eyes wide open and know how to keep in step with the times, if we would fare happily along the Road to Wellville.