Page:The Road to Wellville (1926).djvu/60

 So do not try to wear grandmother’s hoop skirts under your tubular one-piece dress. It can’t be done! We who step from home or office to elevator, motor, or street car (whereas she jolted in a springless wagon over pioneer roads) cannot compare our life with hers. Civilization takes the physical stress and exercise out of life and substitutes for it nervous strain—hardly a compensating exchange.

Refrigerator cars, cold storage, transportation facilities, cables and telegraph wires have bound the nations so closely together that fresh fruits and vegetables from many lands are with us the seasons round. Our garden patch is the world—an advantage that we should make the most of, not begrudging the investment, for it pays big health dividends. All foods are more abundant, more available, more sanitary, better kept—the package cereals working a big advantage here. We must make use of all these compensating advantages as we exchange old ways for new ones.

In return for our greater leisure and shifting the weight of many household burdens to other shoulders, we must put more thought upon what we need and why, in order to choose from these modified foods.

If we eat refined grains, white flour that has lost the bran and germ, with their vitalizing minerals, vitamins and the “roughage” of the outer branny coats, then we need more of the bran itself in such appetizing forms as Post’s Bran Flakes and Grape-Nuts, and also