feeding to anaphylaxis. This newly coined word perhaps needs explanation
for the benefit of my lay hearers. For many years it has been known that
some persons were astonishingly sensitive to certain foods which indeed
appeared to act as violent poisons. Oysters, shellfish, mutton, fish and
other animal products, as well as a few vegetable products, especially
honey, strawberries and buckwheat, were most likely to be the cause of
these violent disturbances. More recently it has been found that cow's
milk very often shows the same peculiarity. It is now known that this
remarkable phenomenon is due to the fact that the body sometimes becomes
sensitized to certain proteins which thereafter act as most violent
poisons and may cause death. Sensitization to animal proteins is much
the more frequent. In such cases nut products become a very precious
resource. This is especially true with reference to cow's milk.
Liquid nut preparations have saved the lives of hundreds of infants
within the last twenty years. I have had the pleasure of meeting several
fine looking young people who owed their lives to nut-feeding when other
resources had failed. One case was particularly interesting. A telegram
from a well-known Senator at Washington announced the fact that his
infant daughter and only child was dying from mal-nutrition, as cow's
milk and all the known infant foods had been found to disagree. I
advised nut-feeding, and fortunately the prescription suited the case
and the little one began to improve at once. When the physician in
attendance learned that the child was eating nuts he vigorously
protested, declaring that such a diet was preposterous and would
certainly kill the infant, but the child flourished wonderfully on the
liquid nut diet, eating almost nothing else for the first three years of
her life, and today is a splendidly developed young woman, a brilliant
witness to the food value of nuts.
I have by no means exhausted the physiologic phases of my subject, but
will now turn a moment in concluding my paper, to its economic aspects.
The high price of nuts is constantly urged as an objection to their use
as a staple. It is probable that a largely increased demand would lead
to so great an increase in the supply that the cost of production, and
hence the cost to the consumer, would be decreased. But even at the
present prices the choicest varieties of nuts are cheaper than meats if
equivalent food values are compared. This is clearly shown by the
following table which indicates the amounts of various flesh foods which
are equivalent to one pound of walnut meats.
Beef loin, lean 4.00 pounds
Beef ribs, lean 6.50 "
Beef neck, lean 9.50 "
Veal 5.50 "
Mutton leg, lean 4.20 "
Ham, lean 3.00 "
Fowls 4.00 "
Chicken, broilers 10.00 "
Red bass 25.00 "
Trout 4.80 "
Frogs' legs 15.00 "
Oysters 13.50 "
Lobsters 22.00 "
Eggs 5.00 "
Milk 9.50 "
Evaporated cream 4.00 "
But the great economic importance of the encouragement of nut culture in
every civilized land is best shown by comparing the amount of food which
may be annually produced by an acre of land planted to nut trees and the
same area devoted to the production of beef. I am credibly informed that
two acres of land and two years are required to produce a steer weighing
600 pounds. The product of one acre for one year would be one-fourth as
much, or 150 pounds of steer. The same land planted to walnut trees
would produce, if I am correctly informed, an average of at least 100
pounds per tree per annum for the first twenty years. Forty trees to the
acre would aggregate 4,000 pounds of nuts, or 1,000 pounds of walnut
meats. The highest food value which could be ascribed to the 150 pounds
of beef would be 150,000 calories or food units. The food value of the
nut meats would be 3,000,000 calories, or twenty times as much food from
the nut trees as from the fattened steer, and food of the same general
character, protein and fat, but of superior quality.
One acre of walnut trees will produce every year food equal to:
14,000 lbs. red bass (a ship load).
3,000 " beef (five steers).
7,500 " chicken broilers.
15,000 " lobsters.
10,000 " oysters.
60,000 eggs (5,000 dozen).
4,000 qts. milk.
A ton of mutton (13 sheep).
250,000 frogs.
And when one acre will do so much, think of the product
of a million acres.
Ten times the product of all the fisheries of the country.
Half as much as all the poultry of the country.
One seventh as much as all the beef produced.
More than twice the value of all the sheep.
Half as much as all the pork.
And many millions of acres may be thus utilized in nut culture.
And the walnut is not the only promising food tree. The hickory,
the pecan, the butternut, the filbert and the piñon are all
capable of producing equal or greater results.
A single acre of nut trees will produce protein enough to feed four
persons a year and fat enough for twice that number of average persons.
So 25,000,000 acres of nut trees would more than supply the whole people
of the United States with their two most expensive food stuffs. Cereals
and fresh vegetables, our cheapest foods, would be needed for the
carbohydrate portion of the dietary. Just think of it. A little nut
orchard 200 miles square supplying one-third enough food to feed one
hundred million of citizens. The trouble is the frogs and cattle are
eating up our food supplies. We feed a steer 100 pounds of food and get
back only 2.8 pounds. If we plant 10 pounds of corn we get back 500
pounds. If we plant one walnut we get back in twenty harvests a ton of
choicest food. In nut culture there is a treasury of wealth and health
and national prosperity and safety that is at present little
appreciated.
* * * * *
Here is a veritable treasury of wealth, a potential food supply which
may save the world from any suggestion of hunger for centuries to come
if properly utilized. Every man who cuts down a timber tree should be
required to plant a nut tree. A nut tree has a double value. It produces
valuable timber and yields every year a rich harvest of food while it is
growing.
Every highway should be lined with nut trees. Nut trees will grow on
land on which no other crop will grow and which is even worthless for
grazing. The piñon flourishes in the bleak and barren peaks of the
rockies.
The nut should no longer be considered a table luxury. It should become
a staple article of food and may most profitably replace the pork and
meats of various sorts which are inferior foods and are recognized as
prolific sources of disease.
* * * * *
Ten nut trees planted for each inhabitant will insure the country
against any possibility of food shortage. A row of nut trees on each
side of our 5,000,000 miles of country roads will provide for a
population of 160,000,000. With a vanishing animal industry, nut culture
offers the only practical solution of the question of food supply. As
the late Prof. Virchow said, "The future is with the vegetarians."
THE IMPORTANCE OF NUT GROWING.
H. W. COLLINGWOOD, NEW JERSEY.
In these days the importance of most things is valued in figures. I
never was good at figures. It seems to me that you can do anything you
like with figures, except make them clear, yet it was the failure to
figure that gave me my first idea of the importance of nut culture. Some
50 years ago a small boy on a New England farm could not, or would not,
do his sums in the old Coburn Arithmetic. It made no difference that the
teacher called it Mathematics, and pointed it with the end of a hickory
stick. By any other name it was not sweet.
This boy got stuck on a question about a hare and a hound. It appeared
that the hare jumped a rod at a time, and made 33 jumps a minute. The
hound started 200 feet behind the hare. This hound made 18 ft. at a
jump, and made 321/2 jumps a minute. Now, would the hound catch the
hare before they got to a hickory tree half a mile away?
I am glad they introduced that hickory tree because the question was a
hard nut at best and needed brain food. I couldn't tell where the hare
would be, and I can't now; nor do I believe that some of you wise heads,
grown hairless with constant thinking, could really tell how the hare
came out. If I saw one of my children headed for me with such a problem
in hand, I confess that I should make a prompt engagement outside. The
old folks who brought me up, had sterner ways of enforcing education.
They decided that the boy should live on brown bread and water until he
did that example. In order to assist hunger in bringing the boy to it,
after the first day showed that the boy was still going, the old
gentleman hunted up all the axes and hatchets, scythes and knives on the
place, and made the boy turn grindstone while he held the implements on.
Greek met Greek. The boy wouldn't give in, and the old man couldn't and
preserve his dignity, but try as he might the old man could not tire out
the boy; the old hands gave out first, and the old man straightened his
back and gazed at that wonderful boy. Now it wasn't in brown bread and
water to sustain strength and will in that way. Not when there are baked
beans for supper and you can smell them! The old man had to acknowledge
a higher power which beat him. He wouldn't do it openly, that was not
the New England way, but he did it on the second night by helping the
boy to baked beans and fried potatoes without a word. The old man went
to his death thinking that he had a most wonderful boy, and the little
fellow did not give his secret away. Now we may have it as a slight
contribution to the importance of nut culture. The sustaining power
which carried the boy through his trial was the hickory nut. There was a
pile of them in the attic, and the boy on the quiet, cracked and ate a
quart of them every day. That boy could not spell protein to save his
life, and carbo-hydrates would have scared him off the floor, but the
nuts and the brown bread gave him a balanced ration which did everything
except find out about the hound and the hare. I think it would have
required a balanced ration fed to an unbalanced brain to settle that
problem.
Now I think the importance of the nut industry must come to the general
public in that way, through the stomach rather than through the mind.
The human mind is a marvelous piece of mental machinery, so is the
machine which sets type or weaves fine cloth, yet both are powerless
unless the fire pot under the engine, or the stomach of the man, are
kept filled with fuel or food. I have heard very old men tell of the
prejudice which existed against coal, years ago, in New England, when
attempts were made to introduce the new fuel. Cord wood was the local
fuel, people knew what it was, and its preparation provided a local
industry. The introduction of coal meant destruction for this local
business of wood cutting, and wiped out the value of many a farm. Coal
had to win its way against prejudice and local interest, and it only won
out by showing power. I am sure that 75 years ago, if some visionary
Yankee had said that coal would be so freely used in New England that
cord wood would be almost unsaleable, the public would surely have given
him that honorary title which goes with prospective and persistent
knowledge, "nut."
In like manner the importance of nut growing will not be truly
recognized until we can show a man in the most practical way that nuts
provide the energy to be found in beef steak. It is said that knowledge
creates an atmosphere in which prejudice cannot live. I know an old man
who is absolutely settled in his conviction that New England has
degenerated because her people have given up eating baked beans and cod
fish balls, and introduced the sale of these delicacies in the West.
That man says, with convincing logic, that in the old days when New
England lived on brown bread and baked beans, we produced statesmen on
every rocky hillside, and we dominated the thought of the nation. Now,
he says, we have not developed one single statesman since the canned
baked bean industry took our specialty away from us. The only way to
convince him is to produce a dozen statesmen out of men who are willing
to subscribe to a diet of nuts. I have a friend who says he feels like
throwing a brick every time he passes a modern laundry. He says the
invention of the linen collar kept him a poor man. His grandfather
invested the family fortune in the stock of a paper collar factory. Many
of our older men remember the time when we all wore paper collars, and
bought them by the dozen in boxes. It seemed like a sure thing when the
old man put all his money into it. He figured that by 1915 there would
be 40,000 people in this country, each one wearing at least 200 paper
collars a year, something like the hound and the hare, perhaps, but he
didn't know that the hare in this case would drop dead, and the hound
double his jump, as happened to paper and linen collars. Some one
invented the modern linen collar. The laundry service started up, and
paper collars disappeared with the family fortune. Now, my friend must
work for a living, and throw mental bricks at the laundry. In a way
every new habit, or every new interference with the thought and method
of the plain people must run the gauntlet and submit to just such
violent changes.
Now the future of the nut business, which contains the importance of the
industry, depends upon our ability to make the plain, common people
understand that in the future we must cut our beef steak and our chops
off a nut tree. We have made some of the brainy people understand this
already, but the hound is still chasing the hare, and he is several
jumps behind. You may say what you will, or think as highly as you like
of your own place in society, but the world is not run or pushed on by
the brainy people. They may steer it for a while and master it, but
only at the permission of what I may call the stomach people, who always
sooner or later rise up and dominate things. A gild-edged, red line
edition of nut knowledge will get the few or select class, but in order
to make the industry truly important we must make a homely appeal to the
plain people. It seems to me that one of the most effective nut
documents yet issued is that bulletin by George Carver, a colored man at
the Tuskegee Institute. Carver simply makes his appeal to the Southern
farmer, and he gives him 45 ways of cooking and eating peanuts. I rather
think that Carver's work in trying to get the Southern negroes to eat
more peanuts and more cow-peas has done about as much for the race as
the academic instruction given in the college.
On the principle that "Like begets like," I feel sure that the continued
practice of cracking the shell to get at the sweet meat inside will tend
to put more phosphorus and less lime into the skull of the race. I once
explained the nut proposition to an energetic man and he said:
"Fine--the theory is perfect--now hire a man who lives on rare beef to
get out and fight for your proposition and you will put it over!"
Last year I went up into New York State with a prominent public man, who
was to make a speech. This man was delayed, and in order to get there he
had to jump on the last platform of the last car. He had eaten no lunch,
and only a light breakfast. He said he should surely fail in his speech
because he was faint from lack of food. I asked him what he would eat if
he had the chance. He said soup, half a chicken, potatoes and asparagus,
and apple pie. I told the train boy to bring samples of everything he
had, and we finally selected an apple from Oregon, a banana from Mexico,
a box of figs from California, some pop corn from Massachusetts,
chocolate from Venezuela, and salted nuts from Louisiana. The air and
the sunshine and the water seemed to be produced in New York, but
nothing else. A great dinner for a New York man, but to his surprise it
satisfied him, took the place of the chicken, and carried him through
his speech with a strong punch. It seems to me that one trouble with our
nut propaganda is that we go at it in such a way that the pupils regard
us somewhat as "nuts," and why should the man who becomes a specialist
on any subject, and airs it on all occasions, be called a nut? We shall
have to admit that men are called such names. I think it is because we
let our brains work somewhat like the oyster or clam, and secrete a hard
shell of formal knowledge around the sweet meat of condensed human
nature, for that is what all useful knowledge is. We must crack our
shell of formal knowledge and grind it up finer before we can put it
into the think works of the plain people.
While I was working up the Apple Consumers' League some years ago, I ran
upon the fact that Corbett, the prize-fighter, consumed 3 dishes of
apple sauce every day while training. Now, I had used the statement that
J. P. Morgan always had a baked apple for his lunch, but I got small
results from that story. Few people ever expected to make millions, and
Morgan was out of their class. Every man carried a punch, which he
wanted to enlarge and make effective. If Corbett used apple sauce to oil
his arm for a knock-out blow, every man with red blood wanted apples.
Now we must work our nut campaign in some such popular way, if we expect
to put a nut on the wheel of progress. The fact that Prof. Johnson, or
Dr. Jackson, or the Rev. Thompson, or Judge Dixon, or Senator Harrison,
find strength and comfort from eating nuts, is very important and very
pleasant, but 99 per cent of our people never expect to enter the
learned profession, and they must not get the idea that these
professions stand around the full use of nuts like a barbed wire fence.
Most men must live and work in the rough and tumble of life, and at
present they think red meat is the sustaining power for that sort of
stuff. We must change their point of view. Let us find athletes,
baseball men, wrestlers, fighters, runners, men who stand well in
popular sports and who will publicly state that they substitute nuts for
meat in part at least. We must put this thing into the popular
imagination of the plain people if it is to be of full importance. When
some fellow with a new brand of cigarettes wants to develop a trade
among young men, he gets some noted ball player to write a letter
stating his love for that brand. I think we should follow that plan
somewhat in putting our nut campaign before the people. Two years ago
the Oregon Agricultural College sent a football team East. The college
was almost unknown here, but I asked one or two football men about it.
They laughed at these Pacific Coast athletes. Here was a college they
said which had issued a bulletin advising the people to send their
children to school with nut sandwiches instead of meat. This man said
that such training could only result in puny, half grown men, and he
doubted if this team would last half way across the country. Those
Oregon boys lined up a team of giants. They simply wiped the earth with
most teams of their class, and left behind the cracked shells of a long
line of reputation, with the sweet meat well picked out.
Personally I believe that within 25 years, 50 at the latest, our people
will be absolutely forced to accept a diet of nuts in place of our
present proportion of meat. As I see it, the time is coming when
increased population and shortage of available land will make prime,
beef nearly as scarce as turkey and venison are today. Not only so, but
I think knowledge will slowly but surely lead men to change their diet
from choice. My children will live to see the time when the acre nut
orchard on the average farm will be considered just as useful and as
much of a necessity, and far more profitable, than the present chicken
yard. In that day I think the nut industry will rank in food importance
second only to that of corn, and I believe that the greatest change will
be found here in New England, for I believe that nut culture is to
change history, and readjust population and industry to some extent.
Frankly, I expect my children to live to see the time when the hickory
nut in New England will rank far above the walnut industry in California
or in France. I think this nut culture will, in time, bring a greater
income to the New England States than all its fruits and grain combined
today. Out in the wild woods on some New England hillside there are
growing today strains or varieties of nuts which will do far more for
this section than the Baldwin apple, or the Bartlett pear have ever
done. They will be found, tamed and propagated.
You may, if you like, call me a dreamer, or what is the same thing, a
"nut." I can stand that, for have I not in my short span of life seen
dreams come true. Suppose the wandering hunter, or the farmer's boy, who
discovered the Baldwin apple in the woods of Massachusetts, had gone
back to his home and stated that the time would come when this beautiful
red fruit would grow wherever it found a suitable climate, that it would
revolutionize horticulture, bring millions of dollars to New England,
and find its way throughout the world wherever the sails of commerce are
blown. They might have hung him as a witch or dreamer, and yet, his
dream would be no more improbable than what I say of nut culture in New
England. I have seen the telephone, the flying machine, the gasoline
engine, all grow from the vain dream of a crazy inventor to public
necessities, and as surely as fate the nut industry is to bring back to
the old hillsides of New England much of the profit and the glory of old
days.
THE PROPER PLACE OF NUT TREES IN THE PLANTING PROGRAM.
BY C. A. REED, NUT CULTURIST,
U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE.
In the planting of trees for most purposes, it is now possible to
exercise practically the same degree of choice with regard to special
fitness as is employed in the selection of men for positions or tools
for a piece of work. The fruit grower in every part of the country has
his special species and pomological varieties from which to choose. The
foresters and landscape gardeners have their species and botanical
varieties or improved strains to pick from.
Among the important purposes for which trees are planted the production
of native nuts is singularly behind. The leading species of native
nut-bearing trees include the hickories, the walnuts, the chestnuts, the
pines, and the beech. Of these, one of the hickories, the pecan, is the
only species which has so far been developed by cultivation as to become
of importance for the production of an orchard product.
The timber of the pecan is less valuable than is that of most other
hickories, and is in commercial use only as second-class material.
However, it is the most important species of nut-bearing tree in the
United States. Its native and introduced range includes the fertile
lands of the plains of practically the entire southeastern quarter of
the country. It is neither an upland nor a wet land tree. In the United
States it is not found in the mountainous sections, nor, to any
important extent, south of Middle Florida. In Mexico, it is occasionally
found on mountain sides at considerable elevations and by some is
supposed to be there indigenous. However, according to "Pomological
Possibilities of Texas," written by Gilbert Onderdonk, of Nursery,
Texas, and published by the State Department of Agriculture in 1911, its
success at those altitudes is vitally dependent upon the water supply.
In each case investigated by Mr. Onderdonk, while upon official trips
made for the United States Department of Agriculture, he found the pecan
trees to be adjacent to some stream, either natural or artificial. "At
Bustamente," says Mr. Onderdonk, "one hundred and seven miles beyond
Laredo, are pecan trees two hundred years old that have been watered all
their lives and have continued productive. From these trees, grown from
Texas pecans, pecan culture has been extended until there are now
thousands of thrifty pecan trees under irrigation. One owner of a small
lot sold his water right when his trees were about seventy-five years
old, and when the writer visited his grounds fourteen years later, every
one of his trees was either dead or dying."