What We Eat May Be More Important
Than Where We Live or Who
Our Parents Are.
Food makes the man; not heredity, not environment. Thus speaks John
Spargo, socialistic lecturer and author. The badly fed or underfed baby
quickly departs from the normal; imbecility, crime, pauperism all are
directly or indirectly due to the lack of food or its poor quality during
the plastic years.
Without accepting the doctrine that food is the sole factor in evolution,
some profit may be drawn from a more extended statement of Mr. Spargo's
views given in the New York _World_:
The nervous, irritable, half-ill children to be found in
such large numbers in our public schools represent poor
material. They are largely drawn from the homes of poverty,
and constitute an overwhelming majority of those children
for whom we have found it necessary to make special
provision--the dull pupils found year after year in the same
grades with much younger children.
In a measure the relation of a child's educability to its
physical health and comfort has been recognized by the
corelation of physical and mental exercises in most
up-to-date schools, but its larger social and economic
significance has been almost wholly ignored. And yet it is
quite certain that poverty exercises the same retarding
influences upon the physical training as upon mental
education.
There are certain conditions precedent to successful
education, whether physical or mental. Chief of these are a
reasonable amount of good, nourishing food and a healthy
home. Deprived of these, physical or mental development must
necessarily be hindered. And poverty means just that to the
child. It denies its victim these very necessaries with the
inevitable result--physical and mental weakness and
inefficiency.
Important as are the factors of proper housing and sanitary
and hygienic conditions--matters which have occupied an
ever-increasing amount of attention on the part of public
officials as well as philanthropists in recent years--it is
now generally confessed by science that, important as they
are in themselves, they are relatively unimportant in the
early years of child life.
"Sanitary conditions do not make any real difference at
all," was the testimony of Dr. Vincent before the British
Departmental Committee. "It is food, and food alone." That
the evils of underfeeding are intensified when there is a
unhygienic environment is true, but it is equally true that
defect in the diet is the prime and essential cause of the
excessive death-rate among the children of the poor, and of
those infantile diseases and ailments which make for
defective adults, moral, mental, or physical, should they
survive.