Living The Good Life With Helen And Scott Nearing

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Oranges we did not juice, but cut in sixths, longways, and ate like watermelons, down to the peel. Gourmets amongst us dipped whole bananas in honey and then in wheat germ. Quarter sections of apples were dipped the same way, or spread with peanut butter. Nuts were often cracked and eaten with the apples. Berries were served with maple syrup or honey, or eaten dry. Breakfast was rounded out by a handful of sunflower seeds, herb tea sweetened with honey, or a tablespoon of blackstrap molasses in hot water.

Another fruit-derived breakfast item which deserves more than passing mention is rose-hip or rose-apple extract, which we often added to our molasses or our mint tea. Rose hips are an important source of vitamin C, containing on the average thirty times as much as fresh orange juice. "Some species," says Adelle Davis, "have been found to contain 96 times the vitamin C content of citrus juices." Her cookbook gives methods (which we used) of drying and preserving the rose fruit. Our attention was first called to rose-hip juice when a neighbor, Lois Smith, prepared a supply one autumn and fed a tablespoon per day to Marshall and the youngsters. It cleared up their colds like magic.

People may feel that such a "light" breakfast would not stand by a working man or woman till noon. That is largely a matter of habit. We have gone for months at a time with no breakfast at all and maintained health and suffered no discomfort though carrying on a full program of work. For ten years we have eaten fruit for our first meal of the day, and yet put in four solid hours at hard physical or mental work until lunch. We felt better, worked better, and lived better on it than after a stuffy starch- and protein-rich breakfast.

Lunch was ever the same and ever different: a soup and some sort of cereal. The soup was always vegetable but the ingredients varied from day to day, one vegetable usually predominating: potatoes, cabbage , carrots, tomatoes, onion, parsley, celery, beans, peas, beets, or corn. We added dried herbs and sea salt for seasoning. Occasionally barley, soybean meal, oats, or rice were included. At this mealtime we ate all the cereal for the day: wheat seed, buckwheat, or millet. These we bought in bulk (anywhere up to a hundred-pound bag from local feed stores) and stored in tin ashcans. We soaked a few handfuls of seeds overnight, and the next day either baked them in the oven with occasional basting of water, or cooked them slowly on top of the stove in a double boiler. The grains swelled to double their original size and were delicious and nutty eaten either hot or cold, with oil or butter and vegetable salt, with homemade jam or syrup, or with a peanut-butter-honey emulsion. Two bowls of soup and all the whole grain one wanted was a man's meal and lasted well till suppertime.

Raised bread we never baked and seldom bought. We got the same or better nourishment (and far cheaper) from the whole seed grain unprocessed. Occasionally we made corncob shaped "journey cakes" with coarsely ground whole grains, cornmeal, rolled wheat and oats, sweetened with maple syrup or molasses and moistened with soup stock and peanut butter or oil. After making carrot juice, the remaining pulp sometimes formed the base for these tiny loaves, which were baked to a brown crustiness and eaten with our noon meal or taken on trips.

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