Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 October 1874 — Now Eat Grapes. [ARTICLE]

Now Eat Grapes.

Gentle reader, do you know the value of the grape? We are not speaking of the juice, nor of the wine, which may become a “ mocker,” nor of the brandy, which (still worse) may come to be a fatality; but our topic is the fresh, luscious, health-giving grape. For the elderly or the young people there is no more healthful fruit. No fruit now in market is cheaper; none is ever in finer condition at any season of the year than the ripe grapes of autumn. The various small fruits, such as strawberries, cherries, raspberries and blackberries, often get stale before they reach the hands of manjl of our city consumers. Grapes keep well for days and days. During many coming weeks they will he ahundant and cheap. Flour and meat we think we must have; but for the bilious, for persons troubled with the various difficulties of the stomach, the liver and the kidneys, grapes are a grateful fruit, and at the same time a valuable medicine. For children, for the delicate and for the robust, also, what autumnal food is equal to nice, fresh, ripe grapes? And emphatically we say that grapes are strong food; that in them we have not only the most healthful and the only naturally-adapted sugar, called by the chemist grape-sugar (infinitely superior to that chiefly exotic product, cane sugar—being more digestible, more natural and more healthful, especially for sedentary persons in temperate climates), but we have also the healthful acids and a notable amount of those nitrogenous essentials which are blood-makers, not to sp§ak of the various salts which have also become necessary constituents of the blood. We say again, now eat grapes. In the country the writer of these paragraphs has a few grape-vines; one, an entirely wild and natural vine, which bears grapes as large as small plums. But he does not raise one-fourth so many grapes as the mouths dependent upon him gladly consume; probably not one-tenth so many as they ought for their health, and for a true domestic economy, to consume. We write this to promote a double interest. Our city people could eat twenty times as many grapes as they do; our country friends could find forty times the encouragement which they now have to send grapes to market; and both classes would be a great deal better for it.— N. Y. Evening Post.