TALKING NONSENSE.

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 85, 20 October 1928, Page 15

TALKING NONSENSE.

Someone has been- talking nonsense in an English newspaper. They have paid that children should be allowed to "eat "what they like." That sounds delightful, of course. But it would be exceedingly uncomfortable for everyone if it came to p ass — a nd the chief sufferers would certainly be the children. The desire to say a startling thing often leads us to talk nonsense. That may be harmless in private conversation, where the mental weight of the speaker is: known, but serious results may-follow when the nonsense finds its wayinto-a newspaper. • ... Doctors, nurses, and wise- parents will realise the dangerous folly of one j »uch' statement":"" Children should lie allowed to select,, what tliejj like for ■their own plates,1'" It is just because children are permitted to chooseand to e'St'the things that appeal to their untried judgment that we have, deaths'/every year from the eating of poisonous: berries, fungus, and so on. . Adult's mako mistakes in. their •diet, ■ aud siiftfr; from 'eating.tlie'.:.things they should;;avoid, and from omitting things essential; to their health; arc children wiser :.. r tliah their parents? ; We^irhave a good deal of instinctive wisdom; but reason iind experience are the sure guides of life. Tho savage who finds his food in the forest recognises value in substances of which the tendorfoot white man would be afraid, but savages have an ancestry, and that ancestry has made experiments, prospered.from success in trials of diet and died of failures; and the knowledge so gained has passed down from generation to generation. Animals feed instinctively upon what suits' them, we say, and we imagine that instinct is a; guide which never fails/ But tha:t is false. Every year we lose valuable animals which have been prompted by instinct to eat the food which kills them. The" security of our diet and health Las been paid for by countless tragedies. Men have bravely given their lives in the laboratory in investigating disease in order that posterity might escape or know a cure; experts are constantly testing new foods to uM toour comfort and well-being, risking teats' upon themselves to the end that' advantage may' be.secured by millions. If precautions are necessary among the wise and learned, to whom death is sometimes the penalty of knowledge, liow can tho ignorant and tho child know, as'by the light of Xti'mi-p. what *s good and what is ill?

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