titians or others responsible for the menus in hospitals, sanatoriums, convalescent homes, restaurants in industrial plants, should develop something of this sort, wherever the racial constitution of their people requires it. The diet lists used by medical institutions, such as hospitals and dispensaries, should be adapted to the people as well as to the diseases which are treated. The habitual foods of the nationality or race dealt with must be in the mind of the person who prepares the diet list, if it is to be of real service. This means that the dietitians, visiting nurses, or social workers who handle the dietary problems of the patients should have some knowledge of foreign as well as of characteristic American diet. The average visiting nurse or medical social-service worker is not expert in dietetics and so must depend upon the advisory dietitian or the visiting housekeeper. Dispensary and visiting-nursing associations should provide themselves, directly or through the co-operation of some other organization, with at least the advisory services of such a dietitian. FOOD CLINICS INDISPENSABLE Food clinics, in which dietitians can be consulted by nurses or general workers, and to which patients can be sent when necessary, are needed in large dispensaries and in connection with the Health Centers which are now being established so rapidly throughout the country. It is not desirable that these clinics should be confined to the restricted field of child nutrition. A dietitian has never been so honored, in college or out, as she will be by these foreign-born people when they realize her knowledge of their familiar foods. An Armenian storekeeper found a fellow countryman, a chef in an Armenian restaurant, suffering from indigestion. He said to him: "You come with me. I take you to the smartest woman you ever knew. She knows our foods, she tell you what to eat you feel better." |