KEYWORDS: education, food, health, morality

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

This is an educational guide for parents that promotes a vegan diet. As stated in the Preface, the book grows out of Kellogg's experiences at the Haskell Home for Orphan Children, which she co-founded, and her teaching at the Haskell Home Training-School for Missionary Mothers (4). Her aim is to gather, in one place, “such thoughts and methods as have proved most helpful in cultivating and developing the essential elements of true character” (5). Interspersed with poetry, the book contains chapters on such topics as trust, obedience, self-control, self-respect, patience, punishment, and spiritual and physical education.

Kellogg thinks dietetics is central to both physical and spiritual well-being and development, because “[t]he real purpose of food should ever be that to make our bodies healthy and strong, that we may thereby the better glorify the Creator” (139). “So interdependent are body, mind, and spirit,” she writes, “that the whole triune nature of the child is influenced in a greater or less [sic] degree by what he eats and drinks” (129). However, eating habits in the US are conducive from an early age to “a disordered digestion and a morbid condition of the stomach,” with children “constantly craving the pleasurable sensation produced by eating and drinking” (130) and this inflated appetite “casting its influence over the child's entire life” (131). Thus, “an avenue” is opened, “through which, if unguarded, the whole train of evils – gluttony, intemperance, impurity – may enter later on in life” (131). Accordingly, “the training of the sense of taste, the education of appetite in a right direction, is one of the fundamental steps in character building” (135).

This training includes attention to both the quantity and the quality of food, in accordance with actual physical needs. Kellogg provides dietetic suggestions for the different phases of childhood and young adult life. She recommends that “[t]he simplest wholesome food, well-cooked, and varied from day-to-day, should be the rule” (139). Only an “unstimulating dietary,” with no “stimulating foods” should be provided (119, 118, 152). Kellogg tells the story of a boy who was resistant to “reform” until his diet of “flesh food, pie, and cake at meals, and a lunch between meals” was changed to “a simple, wholesome fare” (118). As this story indicates, “rich and highly seasoned viands, sweetmeats, and epicurean dishes” are to be avoided (138).