The Peaceable Kingdom

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John and Marlene Stauffer opened Body and Soul last year on the first floor of their old brick house. What a switch from the sterile, clinical atmosphere of so many "health food" stores! Mobiles, books, African bracelets, bells . . . bottles and sunlight in the windows . . . community bulletin board . . . free samples of dates, sunflower seeds, snacks and such on the black marble fireplace mantle . . . and, of course, whole foods. The Stauffers aren't trying to "make money" . . . just a living. Their markup is low. In fact, their prices on some whole foods are the lowest I've found.

John and Marlene bought a little of our lettuce, peppers and beets when we had garden surplus. Even selling in small amounts and irregularly helps us to pay for the seeds, and—just as important, we think—makes real food available to those who are hungry for it. Greens seem to be especially popular, since they go so well with the grains and pulses that more and more of us now appreciate.

Grains and pulses, seeds and nuts are more than ever full of possibility for us now that we have a copy of DIET FOR A SMALL PLANET by Frances Moore Lappe. We're eating our way through book one, most of the time. Our copy is out on the kitchen desk.

DIET is all about getting off the top of the food chain by substituting vegetable protein for some of the animal protein we ordinarily consume. It's a brand new idea for us . . . that combining two or more of these whole food protein sources increases the usable protein in both. Rice and beans, for example, if eaten together in the proportion suggested by the author's studies, have 43% more usable protein than when eaten separately. And to think of the times when, as a visiting nurse, I tried to persuade my Puerto Rican families to replace their rice and beans with other protein sources! Folk wisdom wins again! The recipes in DIET are good and the idea of complementarity is so well worked out and based on such solid facts . . . it's an important, human book. The first. few meals prepared from it more than paid for our copy of DIET.

But I didn't complete the answer, did I? Will we be too busy with fork and cart, seeds and string to savor the spring? The answer doesn't come as yes or no, but rather as a trend . . . coming to see purpose in work, joy in swinging the shovel, here-and-now in a forkful of earth, the day in the seed. Becoming available. Becoming. And that's spring.

*From "Packing a Photograph From Firenze" by William H. Matchett, in NEW WORLD WRITING, Mentor, 1953, p. 175

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