1920s Archives - The Skittish Library

Some vegetable-based advice from 1929 here, but it’s a bit harsh on the poor old radish, which is declared to have no food value.

The Southern Reporter, 24th October, 1929

It’s also really wrong. The radish is a good source of vitamins and minerals, particularly vitamin C and antioxidants, especially one called sulforaphane which might help fight cancer cells. In your face, 1929!

I’m fascinated by nutrition knowledge and advice though, the way it changes, and how we’re still finding out things all the time about how the body works. Doing Weight Watchers some years ago, I saw a slimming tip from an old issue of Jackie magazine promoting cheese as a dieting snack. On the Weight Watchers points system, cheese was one of the first things to be, very sadly, ditched, as you can probably use up a days worth of points on one small block. So this seemed absolutely ridiculous to me. But then the Atkins diet came in, advocating avoiding starchy foods and promoting protein and fats, and it suddenly didn’t seem so crazy after all.

And it will all change again, I expect. Maybe like Woody Allen predicted in Sleeper:

This is my copy of The Children’s Newspaper from June 10th, 1922. I confess to mainly buying it as that date is also my birthday. The June 10th bit anyway, not the 1922 part.

The Children's Newspaper, 10th June 1922 — The Children’s Newspaper, 10th June 1922

A couple of interesting, on-the-brink-of-discovery, articles in this. Firstly this one, which talks of the difficulties before nuclear energy becomes possible:

But this one I find fascinating, given just how near it lurks to a reality-altering discovery.

A very distant star cluster, N.G.C. 7006, had been observed by astronomers, and was thought to be 220,000 light years from Earth (it’s now measured as being 135,000 light years away). The Children’s Newspaper wonders if this, possibly the most distant thing yet seen, is actually on the edge of the universe. In a way they were right, given that the Milky Way was then actually the known universe – this star cluster is on the outskirts of our own galaxy. The concept of other galaxies was still undiscovered. But not for long. In fact, it was the very next year, 1923, that Edwin Hubble, one of my all-time heroes, concluded that the extremely distant Andromeda star cluster was actually the Andromeda galaxy. One of those shifts in perception that fundamentally change the way we view the universe as a whole, and an incredible mental feat.

He expanded our idea of what the universe is, and then followed that up in 1929 with the discovery that the universe was actually expanding to boot. Whaddaguy.