In serving in the humanitarian ranks in a commonweal campaign one should not need to use the concealment of modesty, nor should he fail to speak with all frankness. What are the motives behind all this energy to reform the eating habits of the people? The question has been so often asked that it is better thus publicly answered.
No one concerned in the campaign has any personal monetary interest in any kind of food, prepared or otherwise. The movement began in a suggestion carried by an accidental word given to the author by a friend, an old-time friend in Japan, and a friendship never to be forgotten, as related in the author’s book “Menticulture.” Pursuit of menticulture led further to the discovery that the best mental results could not be accomplished in a body weakened by any indigestion, any mal-assimilation of nutriment, any excess of the waste of indigestion. Then came the quest for the causes of mal-nutrition, which were soon found, by study of the natural sequences and by going behind the hypotheses of text-book authority, to arise in the careless ingestion of food, its neglect in the mouth, and the consequent glut of unassimilable excess within the body, necessitating enormous expense of brain and body energy to get rid of the excess.
When the secret of the potency for good of a rationally economic alimentation was revealed to the author, was confirmed by several colleagues of different ages and both sexes, and was tested by work and endurance measurement, and also by the test time, it became necessary to have given to it the indorsement of highest authority in order to have the information credited. The new rediscovery was a simple matter, something everybody thought they knew all about because it had been under their nose all their life and was one of the commonplaces of every-day living, but for that very reason it failed to receive credence, and the backbone of the doubt was habit—lifelong habit—and this was hard to break even in those who accepted the theory of economic nutrition as a logical conviction. It was also necessary to prove that it was not personal idiosyncrasy that favoured us, its advocates.
It is in pursuit of the latter desideratum that the officers of the army, the scientists, and the great humanitarian health-restoring institutions have entered upon conclusive investigations, each in their own way, to chart out a law of economy that will be generally applicable and which, it is hoped, can be understood by kindergartners and mothers for the benefit of the present and of coming generations.
It was just stated that no one concerned in the inquiry was interested in any food product or in any personally profitable business concern, and mention of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, so widely known as the pioneer in fostering the pure food and prepared-cereal manufacture, may cast a doubt upon the matter in the minds of those who do not know that the Sanitarium organisation, in its every department, is a philanthropic, humanitarian institution. It is the parent and feeder of the American Medical Missionary Cause, which already has established branches in something over sixty localities situated in or near large cities in different parts of the world, chiefly America. By perpetual charter all the profits revert to the spread of the work and the employees serve for a mere pittance, deriving their major compensation from enjoyment of the altruistic work.
The old prejudice against the human race which declared that “everybody had an axe to grind,” that there was “a nigger in every woodpile,” and such like slanders, must be modified in the light of recent altruistic development. Altruism has always been existent and had a great new birth with the beginning of our era, but it was never before so frankly put upon a business basis as it is now, and this is fast being applied to every department of business activity. It is now done, not in the name of any particular creed or cult, or for future reward, but because it pays—first, last, and all the time.
In the study and pursuit of menticulture the author has found that working for the common good is as necessary to happiness as working for self, and that the retroactivity and reciprocity of the idea multiplies the profits indefinitely.