Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting: Battle Creek, Michigan, September 10 and 11, 1934
Science
Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting: Battle Creek, Michigan, September 10 and 11, 1934
Northern Nut Growers Association -- Periodicals; Nut trees -- Periodicals; Nuts -- Periodicals
Nuts, which supply the finest edible fats and proteins which science has
discovered, occupy the smallest place in the nation's food budget of any
of our substantial native foods. This is a remarkable situation well
worthy of consideration in view of the fact that, according to Prof.
Elliot of Oxford University and the eminent Prof. Ami of Montreal, and
many other paleontologists, nuts were the chief diet of the earliest
representatives of the race who appeared in the Eocene period of
geologic time. At that time, according to Prof. Elliot, the regions
inhabited by man bore great forests of walnut, hickory, and other nut
trees, the fossil relics of which are found in great abundance in
association with the remains of prehistoric man. It is significant,
also, that man's nearest relatives, the gorilla, orangutan, and
chimpanzee still stick to the original bill of fare. I once made an ape
so angry by offering him a bit of meat that he threatened to attack me
and finally, as I persisted in offering him the meat, seized it and
flung it as far away as possible, then scrubbed his soiled hand with
dust and wiped it on the grass to get rid of the taint of the meat. He
gave every evidence of feeling deeply insulted. Biology classifies man
as a primate along with the great apes and, according to the great
Cuvier, assigns to him along with other primates, a diet consisting of
nuts, fruits, soft grains, tender shoots and succulent roots.
The great ice sheet which crept down over the greater part of the
northern hemisphere during the glacial period destroyed the nut forests.
The greater part of the primate family, including man, moved South and
survive today in Central Africa, where, along with their furry cousins,
the gorilla and the chimpanzee, they still adhere to a dietary almost
wholly of plant foods. Those who remained behind were compelled to
resort to a flesh diet to avoid starvation. Flesh eating naturally led
to cannibalism, and the historians tell us that only a few thousand
years ago, the survivors of the glacial terrors who roamed the British
Isles, from which the ancestors of most Americans emigrated, roamed the
forests clad in the skins of animals and feasted upon their enemies.
When the grain-eating Romans conquered and civilized our barbarian
ancestors and taught them agriculture, plant foods again became the
chief sources of nutriment, but a meat appetite had been developed and
is still characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race, while most of the rest
of the world are almost exclusively plant feeders. Four hundred millions
of Chinese eat so little meat that it is, in the case of south China,
not even mentioned in the national food budget. Sixty millions of
Japanese eat an average of 4 pounds per capita. Two hundred millions of
East Indians never taste meat. As a matter of fact, only Americans,
English, Germans and Scandinavians are large meat eaters.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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