meal flour naturally does not ‘keep’ because the germ in it is alive. 4 Germless white flour ‘keeps’ because it is dead, because it is as : dead as Portland cement powder, all its original goodness having — been sifted out of it. Let them ‘keep’ their flour who have no care ~ to keep their health.” IV Let it not be thought from the foregoing that our cooking book is a polemic against the milling business. But to understand what actually has happened to food during the years of “‘refinement,” it is necessary to look carefully into that simple thing; the wheat — berry or the corn kernel, and to understand why it has been treated so unfairly by men who naturally wish (human nature being what it is) to get out of them not the most nourishment but the most profit. Without getting too technical we can say that the wheat berry THE MYSTERY OF THE MILL 9 consists of three sections, (a) the skin or what is commonly known as the bran, which holds the rest of the kernel together, (b) the endosperm, in volume the main part of the berry, consisting mostly of tasteless starch and (c) the germ, embryo, or seed of life from which new life springs if planted, and which gives life-nourishing factors ifeaten. This energizing germ contains most of the vitamins and minerals of the berry, very approximately 90%. Yet this germ, in modern milling, is cast aside as a by-product. That such a paradox could persist these 75 years seems astonishing. Yet it is easy to see that when a process like modern milling engages an investment of billions of dollars and results in millions of dollars of profit yearly, the millers are not likely to change in favor of produc- ing a better product when they can make more money with what they are doing. And it is not because they have been given no opportunity. From a process introduced about 1910, down to the revolutionary milling methods of an engineer named Earle, introduced in England before the last war, the millers have been offered machines by which they could not only include the vital germ of the grain in flour, but they could still grind it as fast as by the roller-mill system. Their argu- ment that, to grind the germ into the flour, they would have to return to the stone mill, does not hold water. The British Countryman, at the beginning of the second World War, started a brave crusade for real wholegrain bread in England, but it was not strong enough to beat down the resistance of en- trenched business. In this country there has been no concerted “movement to oppose the milling trust, and certainly this author is not foolhardy to undertake what would be at best a quixote ad- venture. However, this is not to say that in the United States there is not an increasing number of persons discovering the truth about modern milling. And certainly in our small hill village in Vermont we have seen what can happen when intelligent people catch on. The 150-year-old Buhr stone mill in Weston is now hard at work grinding daily by waterpower several wholegrain products which are distributed to Americans all over the land by mail. This wholegrain “‘revival” is small and will probably never reach more than a million people, because—as authorities have pointed out, there seems to be a perversity in human beings to like things 10 COOKING WITH WHOLEGRAINS that are not good for them! This is due somewhat to the obdurate fact that the milling and baking groups have for fifty or more years kept alive the public’s opinion that refined white flour was refined in more than the technical way, that is, it was socially incorrect to be caught eating dark bread or, as the propagandists now call it, peasant bread. Although millions of people today eat what they assume to be wholewheat bread issued by modern bakers, this is in most cases made of nothing more than patent white flour colored with bran.

AI-modernized reading of the original text

meal flour naturally does not ‘keep’ because the germ in it is alive. Germless white flour ‘keeps’ because it is dead, because it is as : dead as Portland cement powder, all its original goodness having — been sifted out of it. Let them ‘keep’ their flour who have no care ~ to keep their health.” Let it not be thought from the foregoing that our cooking book is a polemic against the milling business. But to understand what actually has happened to food during the years of “‘refinement,” it is necessary to look carefully into that simple thing; the wheat — berry or the corn kernel, and to understand why it has been treated so unfairly by men who naturally wish (human nature being what it is) to get out of them not the most nourishment but the most profit. Without getting too technical we can say that the wheat berry THE MYSTERY OF THE MILL 9 consists of three sections, (a) the skin or what is commonly known as the bran, which holds the rest of the kernel together, (b) the endosperm, in volume the main part of the berry, consisting mostly of tasteless starch and (c) the germ, embryo, or seed of life from which new life springs if planted, and which gives life-nourishing factors ifeaten. This energizing germ contains most of the vitamins and minerals of the berry, very approximately 90%. Yet this germ, in modern milling, is cast aside as a by-product. That such a paradox could persist these 75 years seems astonishing. Yet it is easy to see that when a process like modern milling engages an investment of billions of dollars and results in millions of dollars of profit yearly, the millers are not likely to change in favor of producing a better product when they can make more money with what they are doing. And it is not because they have been given no opportunity. From a process introduced about 1910, down to the revolutionary milling methods of an engineer named Earle, introduced in England before the last war, the millers have been offered machines by which they could not only include the vital germ of the grain in flour, but they could still grind it as fast as by the roller-mill system. Their argument that, to grind the germ into the flour, they would have to return to the stone mill, does not hold water. The British Countryman, at the beginning of the second World War, started a brave crusade for real wholegrain bread in England, but it was not strong enough to beat down the resistance of entrenched business. In this country there has been no concerted “movement to oppose the milling trust, and certainly this author is not foolhardy to undertake what would be at best a quixote adventure. However, this is not to say that in the United States there is not an increasing number of persons discovering the truth about modern milling. And certainly in our small hill village in Vermont we have seen what can happen when intelligent people catch on. The 150-year-old Buhr stone mill in Weston is now hard at work grinding daily by waterpower several wholegrain products which are distributed to Americans all over the land by mail. This wholegrain “‘revival” is small and will probably never reach more than a million people, because—as authorities have pointed out, there seems to be a perversity in human beings to like things that are not good for them! This is due somewhat to the obdurate fact that the milling and baking groups have for fifty or more years kept alive the public’s opinion that refined white flour was refined in more than the technical way, that is, it was socially incorrect to be caught eating dark bread or, as the propagandists now call it, peasant bread. Although millions of people today eat what they assume to be wholewheat bread issued by modern bakers, this is in most cases made of nothing more than patent white flour colored with bran.

Cooking with wholegrains