The Importance of Raising Part of Your Food
March/April 1970
By the Mother Earth News editors
WHY do we put so much emphasis on home food production? In the first place, the health of millions of Americans would be far better if every family raised part of the food it eats.
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And when we say every family, we really mean every family. No man, no matter who he is, can break the rules of health and escape suffering the consequences. Even the Presidents of the United States, we honestly believe, would be healthier individuals if they tended their own gardens and milked a family cow. Let us explain.
There are two basic reasons for raising part of your own food. First, only by so doing can you be perfectly fed. Secondly, physical contact with the good earth and livestock are the best known antidotes to the mad, hustle and bustle of our present work-a-day world.
There are many lesser reasons for owning your own home and raising part of your own food. There is the basic security of this way of life, an opportunity for the productive use of your spare time, cooperation of the family and the greater enjoyment of family life, the benefits of fresh air, sunshine, outdoor exercise, an opportunity to be creative, the independence and responsibility of land ownership, all in addition to the direct economic benefits.
3 Square Meals and Starve!
A doctor friend who read our Plan said, "Ed, you don't make clear in your Plan how important living-in-the-country and raising-your-food is from the health standpoint."
"Well, we meant to - we sure believe that country living can be healthier. . ." I replied.
"What I mean," he explained, "is the belief of so many physicians today that too much time is being spent diagnosing illness and patching up the sick without doing much about the cause. We're finding that basically much disease is caused by the food we didn't eat - and because the food we did eat lacked vital elements."
He spoke of how a millionaire in Manhattan could suffer from hunger as much as a share cropper. This hunger he talked about he called a "hidden hunger" - a lack of minerals and vitamins in food. Of course, he went on, we all know how a lack of iron causes anemia, a lack of calcium causes rickets, goiter is caused by insufficient iodine, night blindness by insufficient Vitamin A, tooth decay by a lack of fluorine, calcium and phosphorus. The thing, he said, doctors now worried about was how many more diseases of civilization were caused by year-in-year-out deficiencies in the food we eat. The unfortunate aspect of all this is the fact that vitamin and mineral deficient spinach looks about the same as spinach right out of a good garden!
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