Editor MNH: (6-5-04)
After a long trip from Krumbach/Bavaria to Marshfield/Wisconsin my mother was tired and thirsty and wanted a pick-me-up, a coke. Since pop is never on my shopping list (except when we have company) she and I made a special trip to Karaus and bought a cold coke from the refrigerator. At home she took one sip, indignantly said “phew” and poured the can down the kitchen sink. Coke is not coke. The Coca-Cola Co. tailors the sugar content of its product to fit the taste of the nation where it is sold. Call me paranoid. But after the tobacco companies deliberately spiked their cigarettes with added nicotine in order to hasten addiction to their product I believe that the sugar companies had a hand in the writing of American recipe books, in order to make the Americans into sugar junkies. If the recipe calls for a cup of sugar I use two tbl. spoons. My children therefore could not stomach the desserts served at the school lunches. They were too cloyingly sweet. On the other hand a fellow physician being posted to Germany at the same time my husband had to serve, complained that the German cakes and cookies were not sweet enough.
The schools have a tremendous obligation not only to fight the smoking habit, but every home economics teacher should be enlisted to counter the dictates of our recipe books.
Coming back to nicotine addiction. The ravages of smoking on the body were already known in the thirties. The National Socialists (Nazis) campaigned against smoking. The newly built Reichschancellery in Berlin finished 1/9/1939 was smoke free.