Medicine: What Grandfather Ate

Professor Richard Osborn Cummings of Lawrence College in Appleton, Wis. once wrote a Harvard thesis on refrigeration. After that he went inside the icebox. Last week Professor Cummings published The American and His Food (University of Chicago Press; $2.50), an important social study of diet and health since 1789. In effect the book is a history of the struggle of meat and potatoes v. vitamins.

Pre-Vitamin Days. Many a thoughtful man wonders how his ancestors got along without knowing about vitamins. Answer: They did not get along very well. Professor Cummings points out that although they ate huge quantities of pork, corn and a sprinkling of game, they were, on the average, smaller and frailer than the average U. S. citizen today. The death rate among the young was very high. Those who survived “benefited from a vigorous life with plenty of sunshine and fresh air.” Also to their benefit, they ate nutritious, unrefined sugars and molasses, bread made from vitamin-rich whole meal. And they had many little safeguards: for example, spruce beer, a popular drink, was rich in vitamin C.

Until the latter half of the 19th Century, fruits and vegetables were generally abhorred by U. S. citizens, especially raw. Since cholera raged most fiercely in the delta of the Ganges, and since the Hindus lived largely on fruits and vegetables, some doctors told their patients they could escape the disease by eating only meat and potatoes.

The influence of fashionable restaurants in the big cities, the greater distribution of unseasonable vegetables by railroads, the later dietetic crusades of ladies’ magazines, development of the icebox to keep fresh foods finally won the battle for greens.

Scientific Eating. Early crusader for fruits and vegetables was Sylvester Graham, advocate of wholemeal Graham bread. In Manhattan a Graham boardinghouse was founded, and middle-class intellectuals eagerly took up vegetable diets along with bloomers and female suffrage. (At this time some zealots founded a “Society for the Suppression of Eating.”)

Next great food crusader was Wilbur Olin Atwater, who in the 1870s, following European methods, figured out the number of calories different occupational groups should consume. No vitamin faddist, Atwater urged U. S. workmen to fill their calory quotas with greater “energy-yielders”—meat, potatoes and bread—instead of watery stuff low in calories.

In the early 1900s, Henry Clapp Sherman, now a professor at Columbia, discovered the value of minerals—iron, calcium, phosphorus. Then came the researches on vitamins, beginning with the discovery of a “vitamine” (B) by a Pole, Casimir Funk, in 1911.

Depression Diet. Despite hard times, U. S. diets have grown more nutritious in the past ten years. Reasons: 1) more home canning; 2) more truck farming; 3) wide Government distribution of such vitamin-rich foods as oranges, grapefruit, milk, celery.

In spite of all this, the average U. S. diet has plenty of room for improvement, especially in some southern rural districts where the people still live mainly on hog and corn. In a survey made from 1934 to 1937, says Dr. Cummings, “out of every hundred families throughout the country, only 23 enjoyed diets which, from the nutritional standpoint, were good; 51 had diets which were fair; and 26 followed poor diets.”