Production of food and food-preparation are among the oldest occupations of human life. They are still most essential to human well-being. Cultivation and cooking of food have come down the ages into complex activities highly specialized and associated with concentrated commercial interests. Together these are coming under the direction of science and the regulation of the community.

Occupation with the needs created by living, is a common human pursuit, practiced with or without purpose or plan. Any continuation of life necessitates work. Advancing life requires intelligent work that includes the study of how to live constructively. That this may be, the study of food in school is now generally advised by all prepared to see its bearing upon both wholesome life and efficient work, and also how the understanding cooperation of humanity is needed in supplying and selecting what is of use for growth and health.

Civilization, in whatever stage it is at the time, is the environment into which each generation comes. But what the environment becomes in its supplies and practices is determined by humanity as it lives. Experience served as a guide to action until Science was born. Together Experience and Science inform humanity and can be forming to its environment, upon which its physical nurture depends.

The learner responds to the active aspects of learning with understanding. Personal experience in activity carries one not only into seeing facts but also into knowing their meaning. Cookery in its actual practice in choosing, combining, preparing food makes food-knowledge center in nourishment, in which its real significance lies.

But where cookery has not become a school course, while that subject is being ushered in - speed the day - or is being pursued only in its mechanical aspects, a study of food - diet - nutrition is needed. Such a school need for girls and also boys is met in this presentation of Food - What it is and does.

No community is longer wholly indifferent to youth's entering upon its mature functions and responsibilities, devoid of knowledge of what sustains and makes possible intelligent maintenance of abiding health and enduring energy. Even habits that secure healthful functioning of the body need the supplement of an intelligent, interested attitude toward information that has forming power for race-growth.

Edith Greer

New York.