Sprouts, in short, are so fantastically great that if
General Mills or the President's Commission On Poverty had
developed them—they would most certainly be
ballyhooed as The Complete, Transcending Nutritional
Miracle Of All Time. Neither God nor Mother Nature ever
hired a press agent, however, so most residents of the
United States eat sprouts only occasionally and only by
accident when they happen to dine in a chinese
restaurant.
RELATED CONTENT
WE ARE WHAT WE EAT
And more's the pity. Because a mere twenty or twenty-five
million dollars (pin money in the current federal budget)
well invested one time in sprouting containers and
instructions distributed to the residents of tenant-farm
shacks and crumbling tenements across this fair land . . .
could conceivably wipe out malnutrition in the U.S....
completely.
That's a sweeping statement, but look at it this way: we
think we're pretty smart here in the U.S. of A. because
"with the world's most technically advanced agribusiness",
we successfully raise enough food (even though we don't
distribute it) to feed our 200 million people and
have some left over to export. Of course we're rapidly
poisoning all our potable water with nitrates and
pesticides, we're "farming out" the top soil in the midwest
and we're silting and salting away hundreds of thousands of
acres in the irrigated southwest . . . but, as they say,
"that's the price we have to pay".
Now consider creaky old, backward, underdeveloped China.
With less really fertile farm land, almost no chemical
fertilizers and hardly any modern farm machinery, China
also exports grain . . . and feeds nearly one
billion citizens. One billion! A thousand million.
Have you any idea what a tremendous accomplishment that is
. . . and how impossible it would be for our "modern"
agricultural system? Pretty clever, these Chinese. How do
they do it?
Well one of China's secrets is sprouts. Matter of fact, the
earliest recorded mention of the tremendous food value of
germinated seeds occurs in a book attributed to the Emperor
of China about 2939 B.C. . . . and it probably wasn't a new
idea even then. Now, five thousand years later, Chinese
cuisine—among the most delicious and nutritious in
the world—still puts special emphasis on sprouts. If
that doesn't make the little beasties "time tested",
nothing will!
Now, if you will, reflect a moment on the fantastic dif
ference in life style that the lowly sprout can wield.
Sprouts are home-grown by nearly every Chinese family, thus
assuring each living unit of a steady supply of
high-energy, low-cost food and automatically eliminating
much of the wasteful transportation, processing, packaging
and retailing costs of our "more highly developed" food
production system. The Chinese thus wisely avoid the
equivalent of giant trucks belching diesel fumes as they
haul frozen lettuce from California to Chicago, vast
networks of concrete creeping in upon the last open spaces
and sprawling supermarkets selling plastic produce, which
is to say that we are what we eat in far more ways than
one.
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