As Dr. Kellogg points out, it takes two acres two years to produce a steer weighing 600 pounds; an average of 150 pounds per year per acre. The same acre planted to walnut trees would, he states, produce 100 pounds per tree per year for the first twenty years; which means 4,000 pounds of nuts from an acre of 40 trees. The food value of the 150 pounds of steer cannot exceed 150,000 calories or food units; while the nut meat from the same acre equals 3,000,000 calories in food value. As Dr. Kellogg concludes, “Twenty times as much food from the nut trees as from the fattened steer, and food of the same general character, but of superior quality.”
As Dr. Kellogg previously pointed out: “A pound of pecans is worth more in nutritive value than two pounds of pork chops, three pounds of salmon, two and a half pounds of turkey or five pounds of veal.”
While the price of nuts is by some considered high, Dr. Kellogg directs attention to the fact that “even at present prices the choicest varieties of nuts are cheaper than meats if equivalent food values are compared.”
Nuts as a Substitute for milk and eggs
Experiments by Dr. Hoobler, Detroit, and at Battle Creek Sanitarium, prove that nuts “Possess such superior qualities as supplementary or accessory food that they are able to replace not only meats, but even eggs and milk.”
Nut Meat The Real Meat
Nuts imported 1917, nearly ten times as great as in 1900
It must be remembered that the period in which the use of nut meat grew over fifteen times as quickly as the population increased was before the war conditions made every man consider food values more carefully. Right up till 1914, the year in which the war in Europe started, there was a steady increase each year in the production of nuts and the importation of nuts, yet prices kept soaring on all the better varieties because the greatly increasing supply failed to keep pace with the increase in demand.
Though the importation of nuts in 1910 had been valued at over thirteen million dollars, and this was nearly four times as great as in 1900—it kept increasing until in 1917 it amounted to nearly thirty-three million dollars. The importation of nuts in 1917 was nearly ten times as great as imports for 1900, yet these imports and the increasing American production failed to meet the demand.
Pecan nut meat a year-round necessity