Oat Meal: The War Winner

Transcriber’s Note: This text is reproduced with its original printing errors intact, save for minor amendments to punctuation, capitalisation and word spacing. The author was prone to misquoting poetry, the typesetter was apparently not being paid enough to ensure accuracy, and it doesn’t seem a proofreader was asked to participate at all. The best laid schemes o’ “mince” and men have indeed gone aft agley.
OAT MEAL THE War Winner
BY J. R. Grieve, M. D. Acting Assistant Surgeon U. S. Army, 1865
Copyright Applied for. Price Ten Cents.

By J. R. Grieve, M.D.
At the present time when every one is being urged to bend every energy toward the conservation of food supplies, it is surprising to me that so little has been written in behalf of the extraordinary value of oatmeal as a diet on which people can live and continue more healthy than on any other cereal in the world.
I wish to present facts , not theories . I wish to tell of what I know personally on this subject. I have not consulted any of the laboratories of research or taken for granted any data from the many-published statistics of individual food sufficiency for sustaining life, but I have only taken facts and invite my readers to form their own conclusions.
My father was a successful farmer in Perthshire, Scotland, and employed quite a number of ploughmen. His men were always big strapping fellows, weighing on an average from one hundred and fifty to one hundred and seventy pouds and as strong as oxen. None of those men ever saw a two-bushel sack of grain because we never had such sacks. What they were acquainted with and were accustomed to handle were four-bushel sacks of wheat, weighing sixty-four pounds per bushel, barley weighing fifty-six pounds per bushel. These sacks they would carry on their back and load on their carts and, after being hauled to the city, would again shoulder them and carry them up two and sometimes three flights of stairs in the warehouses. There were few elevators in those days.