I want to do this by quoting a couple of items about the wellbeing, respectively, of body and soul. What links these items is the way in which they show cultural change impacting upon health in the fullest sense of that word. The passages speak strongly for themselves and so require little commentary from me. Here she speaks about the times before the Highland Clearances - that era in history, which arrived late on Uist, where ruthless landlords forced people off the land to make way for the conquest of greed over authentic human need. A great change of life has come into the countryside - everyone observes that.
Much tea is drunk and much flour eaten nowadays.
There was nothing of that in my own time or in my mother's time. That is all changed today, my dear, and this has its visible effect and its result. Everything nowadays is sold for the sake of lowland food without worth or pith. In my day there was no jam except the kind that we made ourselves of brambles, of blaeberries, and of our own black and red currants. The people of today have not so much as a rose-bush.