Use the coffee mill to grind wheat, rye, and corn, that you may enjoy the vitamines, the mineral salts, and other elements often removed by the manufacturer.
Many people prominent in social circles are eliminating all lunches served between regular meals and eaten for merely social purposes. Such lunches impose a burden on the body and the purse. Wealthy and influential women are setting a good example by going to market in person, in order to make intelligent and economical purchases for their tables, and by carrying their supplies home, in order to save the added cost of the delivery system. People are beginning to realize that by such economical methods, they can serve their country, the world, and themselves.
Some have thought it necessary to eat from three to five meals a day. The war is helping them to appreciate a physiological truth taught for years by a few reformers,—that two meals a day are better even than three.
Many countries, for economy's sake, now prohibit the use, for food, of young and undeveloped animals. They discourage the extensive use of immature plant foods. The world war is terrible, yet there is some compensation in the fact that present conditions are making minds more susceptible to the principles of right living. For years, some earnest men and women have been teaching that God intended that man should live on a meatless diet. To-day, not only are nations asking that men eat less meat, but they are having their meatless days. Because of the impossibility of securing flesh foods in some countries, millions of earth's inhabitants have learned that the body can be kept in splendid condition without the use of animal proteins and fats. No strong arguments are necessary to convince people that flesh foods are expensive when it is known that ten pounds of grain suitable for human food are required to produce in the animal one pound of flesh food.
Meat Substitutes
The high cost of flesh foods is turning attention to meat substitutes. Proteins and fats of the vegetable world are not only cheaper, but they are more wholesome than flesh. For example: The soy bean, recently introduced to the American table, contains, pound for pound, and at one fifth the cost, almost twice as much available protein and fat as the best beefsteak. Besides that, it offers the eater a good supply of starch.
"We have got to learn to buy wisely, cook wisely, eat wisely, and waste nothing." The great countries of Europe are utilizing the best talent of their statesmen and scientists in teaching the people these ideas. This should be a most impressive lesson to home, to church, and to school, since these agencies have so far forgotten their mission that it is necessary for this great war to arouse us.
Let religious and educational leaders redeem the time. Let them coöperate with national economists who now are urging the people—