DO PLANTS HAVE QUALITY? 25 



We have seen that plants do have quality variations, and had them 

 prior to the coming of the human bungler. Plants act as the inter- 

 mediary between the physical universe and man. Plants transmit to 

 man (and to all other animals), in proper or improper proportions, 

 those elements of which he is constructed and the energy by which 

 his body and mind operate. Since the earth 's surface is not uniform, 

 man is not likely to be uniform. If you have the ill fortune to live 

 in an area where the parent rock of the existing soils was never of 

 high fertility potential (sandstone for example) where climate has 

 not produced a good topsoil, or the sun is obscured during a large 

 part of the time, that is not too bad. Man with his science and his in- 

 tricate and speedy transportation system should be able to bring to 

 you what you lack : fertilizing materials for your feeble soils so plants 

 can do a good job of feeding you, food plants themselves from areas 

 where the environment is good, sunlamps to give the ultra-violet and 

 the vitamin D, vitamins from laboratories. 



Such remedies are possibilities. If we or our children live a hun- 

 dred years or so, maybe it will all be worked out in fine shape. Or, 

 maybe the United States will follow in the footsteps of Rome, where 

 it was not worked out. Let's see what needs to be done in the matter 

 of minerals and vitamins. How do we stand? 



Mineral and Vitamin Deficiencies. As mentioned under the topic 

 Loss of Vitamins, the acts of processing, preserving, and preparing 

 food may nullify much of nature's work in presenting us with a crop 

 or animal rich in nutrients. This is somebody's business the press, 

 the home economics teacher, the health, hygiene and physical develop- 

 ment teachers, all the science teachers, all the social science teachers. 

 It is also the government's business, because it is the business of all 

 of us. 



But, minerals are lost in other ways, too. 



By simple arithmetic and not so simple chemistry we can deter- 

 mine the amounts of minerals in the vegetation harvested from a 

 field. We can also measure the soil loss in a year by erosion on 

 that field, and then, by chemical analysis, determine the mineral 

 losses. We can compare the two losses, from harvest and from 

 erosion, and find, for instance, that on one moderately steep corn 

 field, erosion took away 21 times as much mineral nutrients as went 

 into the corn crop. For the country as a whole the ratio of minerals 

 lost by erosion to minerals harvested is 6 to 1. Is there anything 

 amazing about the fact that millions upon millions of acres of our 

 sloping, eroding cropland are not providing us with body growing, 

 health maintaining foods? This is somebody's business, too. 



Let's take three groups of lambs. 4 We feed one group on forage 

 from an ordinary, much-farmed, untreated field. These lambs gain 

 9 pounds in two months. The second group gets forage from a near- 



4 Data from University of Missouri, College of Agriculture, reported in Chemi- 

 cil and Engineering News, American Chemical Society, Vol. 21 (1943) p. 221. 



...-r c,>unni; LIBRARY 



