FOOD AS A PRIME FACTOR OF CHARACTER.
What We Eat May Be More Important
Than Where We Live or Who
Our Parents Are.
Food makes the man; not heredity, not environment. Thus speaks John Spargo, socialistic lecturer and author. The badly fed or underfed baby quickly departs from the normal; imbecility, crime, pauperism all are directly or indirectly due to the lack of food or its poor quality during the plastic years.
Without accepting the doctrine that food is the sole factor in evolution, some profit may be drawn from a more extended statement of Mr. Spargo's views given in the New York World:
The nervous, irritable, half-ill children to be found in such large numbers in our public schools represent poor material. They are largely drawn from the homes of poverty, and constitute an overwhelming majority of those children for whom we have found it necessary to make special provision—the dull pupils found year after year in the same grades with much younger children.
In a measure the relation of a child's educability to its physical health and comfort has been recognized by the corelation of physical and mental exercises in most up-to-date schools, but its larger social and economic significance has been almost wholly ignored. And yet it is quite certain that poverty exercises the same retarding influences upon the physical training as upon mental education.
There are certain conditions precedent to successful education, whether physical or mental. Chief of these are a reasonable amount of good, nourishing food and a healthy home. Deprived of these, physical or mental development must necessarily be hindered. And poverty means just that to the child. It denies its victim these very necessaries with the inevitable result—physical and mental weakness and inefficiency.
Important as are the factors of proper housing and sanitary and hygienic conditions—matters which have occupied an ever-increasing amount of attention on the part of public officials as well as philanthropists in recent years—it is now generally confessed by science that, important as they are in themselves, they are relatively unimportant in the early years of child life.
"Sanitary conditions do not make any real difference at all," was the testimony of Dr. Vincent before the British Departmental Committee. "It is food, and food alone." That the evils of underfeeding are intensified when there is a unhygienic environment is true, but it is equally true that defect in the diet is the prime and essential cause of the excessive death-rate among the children of the poor, and of those infantile diseases and ailments which make for defective adults, moral, mental, or physical, should they survive.