351 



town and hamlet in tlie upper Mississippi Valley, we see a 

 vast change in the use of fruit as an article of diet com- 

 pared with the custom of a generation ago. Eight here let 

 me interpose another protest that more of this fruit should 

 be stopped before it leaves the borders of Alabama, for of 

 all peoples that need fruit as a considerable article of diet, 

 those who live in a warm climate need the most, and more 

 fruit could well replace much of the fatty foods that are in 

 common use throughout our State in city, town, and coun- 

 try homes. 



We must, therefore, outgrow the customs of our fathers in 

 regard to our food just as we have replaced the horse of our 

 grandfathers by steam and electricity, and the blaze of the 

 pine knot by the electric light. We owe it especially to the 

 children of the rising generation that we give them the best 

 food that science can discover, and give it to them in that 

 form, that their dispositions, which are none too good by in- 

 heritance, may be improved, their mental capacity, which 

 depends far more than we realize on what they eat, may be 

 largely increased, and their happiness and long life which 

 depend on their state of health and proper nutrition and 

 these in turn on what they eat and how they eat it, may be 

 conserved in the best possible way. 



Since wheat is one of the commonest and most widely 

 used food plants in America, it is strange that the question 

 of its nutritive properties have so long given way to ques- 

 tions of color and appearance. The object among most 

 maufacturers seems to have been to produce the whitest 

 and finest flours possible, regardless of the nutritious qual- 

 ities involved in the food product itself, thus depending for 

 sales on looks rather than on life giving function — another 

 pernicious custom far too prevalent in America. The pur- 

 pose of this bulletin is to call attention to the constituents 

 of wheat flour that have resulted not only from a study of 

 the structure and composition of the wheat kernel itself 

 but from a long series of practical experiments respecting 

 the bread produced from various flours. 



