Back to my daughter’s teeth.  Yes, I innocently fed her less than ideally nutritious food, but at that time I couldn’t buy ideal food even had I known what I wanted, nor did I have any scientific idea of how to produce ideal food, nor actually, could I have done so on the impoverished, leached-out clay soil at Great Oaks School even had I known how.  The Organic doctrine says that you can build a Garden of ’Eatin with large quantities of compost until any old clay pit or gravel heap produces highly nutritious food.  This idea is not really true.  Sadly, what is true about organic matter in soil is that when it is increased very much above the natural level one finds in untilled soil in the climate you’re working with, the nutritional content of the food begins to drop markedly.  I know this assertion is shocking and perhaps threatening to those who believe in the Organic system; I am sorry.

But there is another reason my daughter’s teeth were not perfect, probably could not have been perfect no matter what we fed her, and why she will probably have at least some health problems as she ages no matter how perfectly she may choose to eat from here on.  My daughters had what Dr. G.T.  Wrench called “a poor start.”  Not as poor as it could have been by any means, but certainly less than ideal.

You see, the father has very little to do with the health of the child, unless he happens to carry some particularly undesirable gene.  It is the mother who has the job of constructing the fetus out of prepartum nourishment and her own body’s nutritional reserves.  The female body knows from trillenia of instinctual experience that adequate nutrition from the current food supply during pregnancy can not always be assured, so the female body stores up very large quantities of minerals and vitamins and enzymes against that very possibility.  When forming a fetus these reserves are drawn down and depleted.  It is virtually impossible during the pregnancy itself for a mother to extract sufficient nutrition from current food to build a totally healthy fetus, no matter how nourishing the food she is eating may be.  Thus a mother-to-be needs to be spending her entire childhood and her adolescence (and have adequate time between babies), building and rebuilding her reserves.

A mother-to-be also started out at her own birth with a vitally important stock of nutritional reserves, reserves put there during her own fetal development.  If that “start” was less than ideal, the mother-to-be (as fetus) got “pinched” and nutritionally shortchanged in certain, predictable ways.  Even minor mineral fetal deficiencies degrade the bone structure:  the fetus knows it needs nutritional reserves more than it needs to have a full-sized jaw bone or a wide pelvic girdle, and when deprived of maximum fetal nourishment, these non-vital bones become somewhat smaller.  Permanently.  If mineral deficiencies continue into infancy and childhood, these same bones continue to be shortchanged, and the child