Dr. J. H. Kellogg, Battle Creek, Michigan
It is evident that the live stock industry is shriveling up. The livestock inhabitants of the country—the pigs, sheep and cattle—are much smaller in population at the present time than they were twenty-five or thirty years ago, and are getting smaller all the time. The price of meat is high and is going to continue to climb. It is away out of reach of the average laboring man even at the present time. I heard Dr. Charley Mayo say at a clinic not long ago that meat is so high he could not afford to eat it and he didn't see how anybody could; and as a matter of fact, he didn't need it anyhow, and so we could easily get along without it. As a matter of fact, as Mr. Bill said some years ago it is not really so much the high cost of living as it is the cost of high living; and the use of meat is such an extravagant and expensive thing it is very important that people should know how to get along without meat.
The experimenters of the agricultural experiment stations have shown us that it takes thirty-three pounds of dry digestible food substance to make one pound of beef—31 or 32 pounds to make a pound of beef, and 33 or 34 pounds to make a pound of mutton. Seven pounds of digestible food substance will make a pound of dry milk. So we can readily see that there is an enormous waste of foodstuff. Only about ten per cent of the corn raised is used for feeding human beings. The rest is fed to animals and a large part of it is wasted.
So it is exceedingly important, it seems to me, that this nut industry should be encouraged in every way. A half million acres of nut trees well advanced and producing would produce all of the fat and more digestible fat, and all the protein and more digestible protein, than we are now using in the entire country. We are producing more than enough food in corn and other foodstuffs to feed nearly three times our present population, and most of it is wasted in the energy which the hog, the steer and other animals use up in running around and keeping warm. That is where the great loss comes. In nuts we have a choice foodstuff as digestible as any other foodstuff, and Prof. Torrey and Prof. Mendel and others who have recently made experiments have shown that the protein of the nut and the protein of vegetables in general is not so putrescible as the protein of meats. There are good reasons for it. It does not undergo putrefaction so readily any way, and besides meat carries along with it the bacteria which produce putrefaction.
Meat is the filthiest thing that goes upon our tables. If the number of bacteria in milk was as great as the number of bacteria in meat, nobody would think of eating it. If the bacteria in water were as numerous as in milk, no one would be willing to drink the water. It is a very curious thing that we permit in milk and in meat a condition of things we would not tolerate in air or water for a moment. Every morsel of meat a person eats contains some billions of the bacteria of the very worst sort. Bacteria found in meat are those which produce colitis, appendicitis, abscesses of the teeth and diseased conditions of the tonsils. They predispose to a good many infectious diseases of the intestine, and no doubt predispose to cancer. It is pretty well established at the present time that cancer is a disease of meat eating men and animals. About one cow in fifty has cancer, whereas every seventh dog taken to a hospital sick is found to have cancer. Dr. Mayo recently gathered some statistics on this matter, and he told me and some other doctors that dogs under eight years of age, every fourth one has cancer; every third one of dogs ten years of age has cancer, and half of all the dogs over twelve years of age have cancer and would die of it if left to themselves. These statements were based on laboratory animals that were killed when they were well and not sick, so the observation ought to be fairly reliable.
I was to say particularly a few words about the soy bean. I am not going to try to tell you very much about it, because I do not know very much about it. If you want to learn all about it, you can easily do so by writing to Mr. W. J. Morse, of the Bureau of Plant Industry, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D. C. Farmers' Bulletin 973, one of the very best on this subject, tells all about the culture of this exceedingly useful legume. The soy bean is really the beefsteak of China and Japan. In those oriental countries, soy beans have been used for centuries. It is more nearly like a nut than a bean. Perhaps I better show you the pictures first, and then have the curtains raised so we can get a better inspection of the beans.
The composition of the soy bean is very remarkably different from that of the ordinary bean. It contains forty per cent of fat, on the average and about forty per cent of protein—sometimes more than forty per cent. The protein is sixty per cent more than in our best ordinary foods; and the fat is five or six times as much as that found in the ordinary bean.
A thousand different varieties of the soy bean have been gathered by the Bureau of Plant Industry of the Department of Agriculture at Washington. Five hundred of these varieties have been tested, and thirty or forty of them have been found to be adapted to this country, and very useful. You can see in this picture the great mass of pods to be found growing on the plant. This slide shows how unusually well they grow in the field. You can see the pods scattered all through the plant. A large part of the foliage is made up of pods. This is one of our own fields of the beans that we raised this year. It is rather difficult to raise the bean in this latitude, because it requires a long time to mature. It requires about 110 days for some varieties. We have, however, a variety we raised here that we got from the agricultural department of Ontario. We found it matured very well indeed in 120 days. We planted the bean here the first week in May and harvested it the first week in September; so its season was about 120 days. I found this particular bean was new to the agricultural department at Washington, and have sent them some of the seed, and I think they are going to make some trial of it.
This is a view of a field of the Hahto variety which is a particularly fine variety for use as a shelled bean. In China the soy bean is very little used as we use beans. They do not cook the bean and eat it as we do; but instead they make it into a cheese which they call tofu, and this cheese is made by soaking the beans, grinding them into a pulp, then boiling for ten or fifteen minutes with about five volumes of water; then the milky mass is precipitated with sulphate of magnesia or citric acid, a very small amount because they use it as a curd. I have here a sample of the curd which I will pass around in a moment for you to see. This picture shows this curd pressed in large cakes. The soy bean curd is stored on wooden trays in a dark room. It is also stored in large earthen jars. They cure it and make cheese out of it which very closely resembles our American milk cheese. They also use the beans for sprouting.
The bean lacks only two things. It lacks lime and the fat-soluble vitamines. It contains a considerable amount of the fat-soluble vitamines. It is one of the very few seeds that is found to contain a sufficient amount of the fat-soluble vitamine to promote growth, so that animals will grow and develop normally on the bean alone without any other sort of fat-soluble vitamine. If the bean is sprouted, a large amount of this fat-soluble vitamine is produced by the plant itself. This is also found to be a valuable means of preventing scurvy—by sprouting the beans in this way and using the sprouts as a salad. The sprouts are used as a green vegetable. It is an easy way of getting green vegetables at any season of the year. It takes the place of ordinary greens.
Here is a courtyard full of pots in which the fermented soy beans are placed. This is a very interesting scheme they have for making a substitute for meat extract. By this means they prepare an extract which closely resembles extract of beef. In fact, it is rather a finer flavored product than meat extracts. It is made by first cooking the beans, spreading them out in the yard on trays and allowing a fungus to grow, and after two or three weeks the whole mass is put into pots of brine in the yard and allowed to remain there for a year or more, and at the end of that time the brine has become soy sauce.
This shows a mass of soy roots. It has been suggested it might be very useful to nut growers as a means of fertilizing the soil, a crop which will fertilize the soil for the trees and at the same time give a valuable return for the labor and expense. The little nodules on the roots are very numerous and show well here. They produce nitrogen, concentrated nitrogen from the air as do the nodules on the roots of alfalfa. The Scientific American recently stated that the soy bean is one of the most promising of vegetables. It provides food for man and beast. Given enough soy beans and granted the art of preparing them so that they might be served as food having sufficient diversity and palatableness, neither meat nor fish nor fat would be needed. In this respect the Germans did not prepare for war. If they had had the soy bean industry well developed it might have helped them through, and the map of the world might have been seriously changed from what it now is.
I think one of the finest of the soy beans is the Hahto variety. They grow one or two in a pod. I saw some of these beans in the market in Jerusalem forty years ago. When about three quarters grown and used as shelled beans they are exceedingly palatable. If at the dinner table today you will call for a soy bean omelet, you will be quite surprised. Dr. Morris tried it this morning and was kind enough to say it was the finest he ever ate.
The soy bean is the best of a large part of the cookery of the orient. We have been introducing it here the last few months, and it is very palatable, very digestible, and our patients like it very much. If you are interested in the soy bean, write, to W. J. Morse, or to the Agricultural Department, Bureau of Plant Industry, and they will give you a lot of interesting information about it. In starting the planting of the bean, it is necessary to inoculate the soil as in the starting of a planting of alfalfa.
President Reed: Mr. Bixby has prepared a paper on "Judging Nuts" which there is not now time for him to read. It will be inserted in the proceedings at this point.