The Press., 1892-05-26

paid, better housed, better clothed, and better fed than the European. He has better opportunities for self-developrnent, more to stimulate his ambition, and more hope of reward if his work is efficient. He accomplishes great deal more. That this superiority is due to more nutritious food, as we'll as to greater intelligence, is hardly to be questioned.
 But the better nourishment of the Am erican wage-worker is largely due to our abundant food production. With the growth of population, and the increasing closeness of home and international con- petition, his own diet cannot be kept up to its present standard, nor can that of his poorer neighbor and his foreign broth CT be brought up to that standard without better knowledge of the laws of food econ- omy.
 To the farmer this subject is of vital in- terest. The agricultural production of the United States is out of balance. Our food supply for man and beast contains an excess of the materials which serve the body for fuel and are relatively deficient in the nitrogenous compounds which make blood muscle, and bone. In other words, the farmer produces relatively too much starch, sugar, and other carbohydrates; too much fat and too little protein. The crops he grows are, taken together, defi- cient in protein, and the meat he makes is excessively fat. The one-sidedness of our food consumption is the natural re- suit of the one-sidedness of our food pro- duction.
 This one-sidedness of our agricultural production is easily explained. In the first place, our vegetable products are de- ficient in protein. Corn, our great sta pie, is poor in protein at best. From careless culture, insuffit tent manuring, or other reasons, our grasses, grains, and other crops contain much lower propor- tions of nitrogen than they ought to, and much less than the same ones do in Eu- rope, where farming is more thoroughly done. In the second place, our meats, upon which we depend to supply the pro- tein which our vegetable foods lack, are excessively fat. This excessive produc- tion of fat in meat is uneconomical in sev- eral ways. A large amount of vegetable feeding stuffs is required to make a small amount of fat, much protein is lost in the process, and the fat thus produced is sold in food market where it comes in con- petition with other materials of which there is relative overproduction.
 The fat of meat, lard, butter, cotton seed oil, sugar, and the starch which con- stitutes the larger part of the nutritive material of wheat and other grains and nearly the whole of that of potatoes, all do the same work in nutrition-they are the fuel of the body. The cattle grower, the pork producer, the dairyman, the su- gar maker, the raiser of wheat and pota- toes, and the cotton planter, are engaged in an unwitting, but none the less severe, | competition with each other in supplying the food market with fuel-mateIials, with which it is relatively overstocked, and are all competing with petroleum.
 | The one-sidedness of our dietary is the result Of this one-SidedneSS or our agr1- cultural production. As the farmer is primarily responsible for this state of af- fairs, and the first loser by it, so he must be the one to take the first steps to amend it. The remedy for the evil is to grow crops with more protein.. The needed in- crease of protein may be obtained by l breeding and importing varieties of grains and grasses richer in nitrogen than those we now cultivate, and by growing more legumes, such as clovers, alfalfa, vetch, seradella, cowpeas, peas, and beans.
 The value of nitrogenous feeding stuffs is not sufficiently appreciated, but the progress of exact experiment in this coun- try and in Europe is bringing it out more and more clearly.
 |