The Family Scrapbook

FOOD AND AMIABILITY

The housewife controls the food, the food con­trols digestion, digestion controls amiability, and amiability controls, to a very large extent, the happiness of the home.

THE KITCHEN RUT

All people, especially women, are gamblers; cer­tainty is stale and uninteresting; chance or uncertainty is fascinating; it has made civilization. Don't drop into a kitchen rut. Take a chance every meal with some new simple combination of natural food and watch the effects on daddy and the children. Fortify yourself with the reasons why, then take a chance on abolishing conventionalities.

GIVE A CHILD A CHANCE

The mind of a child is merely a receptacle that re­ceives impressions from its surroundings. Nearly all impressions are made and put into this receptacle by what the child sees and hears. Many a child is made cowardly and cringing by suppression—made to think that it is in some way inferior, by making it act ac­cording to other people's wishes instead of its own.

All government, outside of love, is merely an exhi­bition of brute force. The child soon learns this, and it is not elevated a bit by the discovery.

Give a child a chance, let its imagination run riot, let the snake it saw, be as long as a fence rail and as big around as "this." Imagination, which is merely a form of exaggeration, is the parent of poetry, music, art, and nearly all the beautiful things in the world.

The child's big snake is a Brooklyn bridge, or a fly­ing machine in embryo. Teach your child integrity, but let its mind have reign.
All children are little savages. They take a kind of primitive delight in punishing things. They will kill bugs, ants, birds, rabbits and even punish kittens and puppies, until this desire is overcome by affection for these animals. Love, therefore, is the great civilizer. The first heart throb of affection marks in a child the boundary line between instinctive savagery and human civilization. The child should be trained as early as possible to love something, as natural cruelty disap­pears at the same ratio that love and mercy are de­veloped.

THE FAULT-FINDING MOTHER

Many a home is made unhappy, and the family finally scattered forth with but few tender memories, by a fussy, fault-finding wife or mother.

Most women, in their limited environment, take things too seriously. They drop into the habit of worrying over everything. Their worry finds expres­sion in language criticising others. This makes them disagreeable. All people who find fault lay the blame on someone else, and if the "someone else" be a grown­up, they fight back and find some fault themselves. If they are children and afraid to talk back, fear, anger and injustice chills natural affection, makes the mother whom they would worship, under favorable con­ditions, seem unjust and, by comparison, inferior to other mothers. Under these continued influences, chil­dren begin to seek their pleasures away from home, and the family becomes scattered, dissipated and broken up, all on account of mere trifles.

In every so-called disagreeable thing some good can be found if we will search for it. When it is raining and gloomy the countless mil­lions of atoms of dust are laid and the air is purer than on a beautiful day. Every flash of lightning burns miasma and poisonous gases that float in the air.

When the wind is filling your eyes with dust, it is taking the lighter atoms into space, and the reflection of the sun upon these billions of floating motes makes the blue sky, otherwise the void above would be a black abyss.

The child whose body and brain is most active, who is into everything, who gives the mother most trouble, as a rule, gives back more comfort when it is grown, for the childish mischief is merely a bubbling over of surplus energy that makes civilization and history in later years.

HOW TO SELECT A HUSBAND

If you were trying to decide, some leap year, between two men, as to their amiability and morality, and all the evidence were in, except their habits of eating, and you found that one, took ham and hot coffee for breakfast, beef and beer for luncheon, and pork, pota­toes and pie for dinner, while the other chap fed upon golden grains, vegetables, crisp salads, nuts from the land of the orange blossom, milk, eggs, honey and luscious fruits whose color and perfume "turns the fancy lightly to thoughts of love," which one would impress you as making the best husband?

DEMOCRACY OF THE DINING TABLE

Democracy of the dining table should be a family pride. The table is a place to assemble, a place of good cheer, a place to cultivate good manners, to cul­tivate hospitality, unselfishness, a place to forget the worries of the day, a place to compare notes, to tell all that has happened to each and every one; pride and instinct bid us be at our best at the family board.

For all the grown folks to exercise their rights and privileges in these things, and "don't" and suppress the child, is to inoculate its mind with the poison of rebel­lion, injustice and brute force.

Every child in the beginning is a little savage. It may scratch, fight, bite and throw things around for awhile, but it will soon begin to imitate those around it; the example, therefore, should be the best. This is what we call civilization.

POOH, POOH!

Don't "pooh, pooh" a thing because it is new. Re­member all great inventions have been "pooh, poohed" by the alleged wise ones. Morse's telegraph was "pooh, poohed" on the floor of that "most dignified body on earth." Great men said, over their official signatures, when the first railroad was proposed, that an engine running through space at a greater velocity than 18 miles an hour would kill every living thing for a mile on both sides of the road.

If you have a new idea yourself, thank the Lord, and go to work on it. If someone else hands you a new idea, thank him.

If somebody says that foods can be so administered as to cure disease, don't pucker up your mouth.

THREE LAWS OF HEALTH

The natural laws of health demand three things, viz.: a certain amount of fresh oxygen, a certain amount of exercise and a certain amount of nutrition every day. If we violate any of these laws, there is a time coming when we will have to pay the penalty.

The first thing, after arising every morning, one should throw up their window and exercise vigorously, filling the lungs to their utmost capacity every third or fourth breath. From three to four minutes should be devoted to this exercise night and morning.

Ten minutes a day devoted to obeying two primary laws of health are very little out of each 24 hours, and no person can afford to be in such a hurry as to disre­gard these rules.

THE SPEED LIMIT PENALTY

From the cradle to the coffin is very much like any ordinary journey, the faster you go, the quicker you get there.

BATHING

Hydrotherapy has never received the attention it de­serves. It should be made one of the health sciences. A person in normal health should take a cleansing bath, with very little soap, from two to three times a week, according to vocation and temperature of the atmos­phere, and a cold shower or a sponge bath every morn­ing after exercising, followed by a vigorous rub down.

The hot bath may be useful as a remedy, but to the person in normal health it is devitalizing.

CARE OF THE EYES

Immerse the face in cool clean water. Open the eyes, turning them in every direction as far as pos­sible. Keep them under water as long as the breath can be comfortably held. Then place the thumb beneath and the forefinger above the eyeball, pressing gently and giving the eyeball a rotary massage.

This massage should be given every morning just after arising and every night just before retiring.

This system of treatment has a tendency to round out and prevent the flattening of the eyeball, which causes impaired vision.
The writer is personally acquainted with a man well up in the seventies, who says he has practiced this system of sight culture for forty-five years, and his vision is as keen and his eye as clear as when he was a youth.

WOMEN SMOKING

The desire for stimulation comes along with idleness. The woman who has nothing to do and for the life of her, can't find any useful way to employ her time, thereby acknowledges that she is useless to the world, is very liable to take to cigarettes, perhaps liqueurs and so forth.

No habit with which the twentieth century woman is liable to become afflicted is quite so demoralizing as smoking. It tells not only of her gradual moral retro­gression, but of her mental and physical decline.

KITCHEN ECONOMY

The kitchen is the greatest avenue for leakage or waste there is in the average home. The cook is usually not interested in paying the bills, and there is something in human nature that bids us all spend other people's money with reckless extrava­gance.
With good management there need be no waste in the kitchen.

Tender peas should be cooked and served in the pod. The pod contains more nourishment than the pea. Left-over or soured cream can be whipped into butter with an ordinary Dover Egg Beater in two minutes.

Left-over milk can be "set" aside to clabber or thicken and whipped into buttermilk. The majority of vegetables and potatoes can be thoroughly cleansed and scraped instead of removing a thick peeling. These are merely hints. The one who pays the bills should look the kitchen food supply over three times a day.

HOW TO SELECT FRUIT

Fruit should be selected according to its Quality, not its appearance.

Its quality should be determined:

First, by its comparative size, whether or not it ma­tured on the tree or in a sub-cellar equipped for the purpose of ripening immature fruit.
Second, its state of ripeness. Fruit is at its best when it is "dead ripe." When in this condition the natural fruit sugar is thoroughly developed, and it is both food and a digester of other foods.

DOCTORS, DISEASE AND BACTERIA

Every now and then the doctors give the public warning of the danger from bacteria that lurks in un­cooked food.

The question of bacteria, or micro-organism, as the cause of disease, is disputed by many of the world's ablest scientists. They claim that these forms of life are the results, not the cause, of disease, with which theory the writer is inclined to agree. However, be this as it may, we know that the highest physical specimens of anthropoidal life have been built up from natural food without the use of fire.

The doctors know, or should know, that all the di­gestive juices, or solvents of the body, are highly germicidal. The saliva is an alkaloid, the gastric juice is an acid, the bile is an alkaloid, the pancreatic juice is an acid, and so on.

The doctors know; or ought to know, that if we select, combine and proportion our food properly, and eat it correctly, that no form of bacteria could live in the stomach one minute. If they are so much con­cerned about our health, why don't they tell us these secrets. Is it possible that the doctor is willing to see us perish for want of simple information that he has snugly tucked away in his healthorium encyclopedium.

Now, let us be fair but honest, the doctors don't know anything about these things. Their books, schools, colleges and clinics don't teach them. They teach drugs, bugs, bacteria, and disease, instead of health, life and laughter; and again, why should the doctor be warning us against things that make us ill? His warning does not ring true because he thrives upon disease.

THE BOSS

The head of the family, the boss, very often means the bear. Men inherit the heliocentric idea. It is as easy for them to believe that everything about the home should be made to conform to their requirements as it was for the ancients to believe that the sun, moon and stars were made for their special accommodation.

THE EFFECT OF STIMULANTS

Tea, coffee, liquor, beer, tobacco and the various sedative drugs all have a common effect upon the human body. They stimulate, that is to say, they poison, or to be more explicit, the whole system is excited and thrown into unnatural activity, in its effort to expel these poisons. This false heart action releases energy that has been stored up in the cell. The energy store house is thereby robbed, and when the excitement is over the physical pendulum swings to the other ex­treme, and in the language of the day, we are depleted, "dopey, down and out."

People who defend the use of stimulants often point to aged people who have taken some of these poisons for many years. They forget to remember or count the dead ones.

OVER-TALKING

There is one human habit which civilization has not yet overcome, and that is the disposition of people to talk about themselves. Bragging about their accom­plishments, soliciting sympathy by telling their troubles.

To burden our friends with a recitation of our woes, especially our physical ills, displays mental weakness, a childish bid for sympathy, coarse manners and bad breeding. In addition to this it augments our own troubles, fills the very atmosphere as well as the mind of our companions with disease-breeding thought.

Talk health, think health, act health, study health, and obey health laws, and you will be healthy, besides you will radiate health and help others to be healthy.

Forget self for awhile. Do something for others. In the final analysis of human affairs all happiness must come from the esteem in which our fellows hold us. You cannot be unhappy or unhealthy if you are loved by many people.

You cannot be loved by people unless you earn their esteem. You cannot draw happiness from a world bank in which you have made no deposit.

THE AUTHOR'S LUNCHEON OF UNCOOKED FOODS

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