Now the future of the nut business, which contains the importance of the industry, depends upon our ability to make the plain, common people understand that in the future we must cut our beef steak and our chops off a nut tree. We have made some of the brainy people understand this already, but the hound is still chasing the hare, and he is several jumps behind. You may say what you will, or think as highly as you like of your own place in society, but the world is not run or pushed on by the brainy people. They may steer it for a while and master it, but only at the permission of what I may call the stomach people, who always sooner or later rise up and dominate things. A gild-edged, red line edition of nut knowledge will get the few or select class, but in order to make the industry truly important we must make a homely appeal to the plain people. It seems to me that one of the most effective nut documents yet issued is that bulletin by George Carver, a colored man at the Tuskegee Institute. Carver simply makes his appeal to the Southern farmer, and he gives him 45 ways of cooking and eating peanuts. I rather think that Carver's work in trying to get the Southern negroes to eat more peanuts and more cow-peas has done about as much for the race as the academic instruction given in the college.
On the principle that "Like begets like," I feel sure that the continued practice of cracking the shell to get at the sweet meat inside will tend to put more phosphorus and less lime into the skull of the race. I once explained the nut proposition to an energetic man and he said: "Fine--the theory is perfect--now hire a man who lives on rare beef to get out and fight for your proposition and you will put it over!"
Last year I went up into New York State with a prominent public man, who was to make a speech. This man was delayed, and in order to get there he had to jump on the last platform of the last car. He had eaten no lunch, and only a light breakfast. He said he should surely fail in his speech because he was faint from lack of food. I asked him what he would eat if he had the chance. He said soup, half a chicken, potatoes and asparagus, and apple pie. I told the train boy to bring samples of everything he had, and we finally selected an apple from Oregon, a banana from Mexico, a box of figs from California, some pop corn from Massachusetts, chocolate from Venezuela, and salted nuts from Louisiana. The air and the sunshine and the water seemed to be produced in New York, but nothing else. A great dinner for a New York man, but to his surprise it satisfied him, took the place of the chicken, and carried him through his speech with a strong punch. It seems to me that one trouble with our nut propaganda is that we go at it in such a way that the pupils regard us somewhat as "nuts," and why should the man who becomes a specialist on any subject, and airs it on all occasions, be called a nut? We shall have to admit that men are called such names. I think it is because we let our brains work somewhat like the oyster or clam, and secrete a hard shell of formal knowledge around the sweet meat of condensed human nature, for that is what all useful knowledge is. We must crack our shell of formal knowledge and grind it up finer before we can put it into the think works of the plain people.