p. 5 | Note and Comment

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 11, 1906

Note and Comment

An editorial in the September issue of The World's Work, with the title of the “Respect for One’s Stomach,” deals with the efforts to guard the people from adulterated foods. From this article we learn the result of analyses made by the Indiana State Board of Health. “Out of 889 samples of different things, 389 were bad or were improperly labeled—most of them bad.” The closing paragraph of the article runs as follows:—

The less bad food, the less bad medicine—if, indeed, all medicine be not bad. It seems very strange now that every rascal who chose should all these years have been allowed to put up unwholesome food in cans and bottles and packages for our murdering. Of course the ideal way out of such danger is for every household to have its own little garden and orchard, preserve its own fruit and vegetables, and not use “ready-made” foods at all. If every family would keep a cow and chickens, and eat few things whose whole history they do not know,

our people would live simply, healthfully, and long. What a lot of money even poor people waste in food that does not nourish, even if it does not poison! The best safeguard of all is to treat our stomachs with some reverence, and not to dump stuff into them that we can know nothing about.

This advice is sensible and sound, and is the real philosophy of “the simple life.”