178 Eating for Good Health
➤ Do not be
discouraged if an
experiment does not
work. Perhaps you
can try again with
certain changes.You
can learn as much
from your failures as
from your successes.
Trying a new idea
Not all the suggestions in this chapter are likely to work in
your area. Perhaps some will work if they are changed for your
particular community and the resources at hand. Often you can
only know whether something will work or not by trying it—
that is, by experiment.
When you try out a new idea, always start small. If you
start small and the experiment fails, or something has to be
done differently, you will not lose much. If it works, people
will see that it works and can begin to use it in a bigger way.
Here is an example of experimenting with a new idea:
You learn that a certain kind of bean, such as soya, is an
excellent body-building food. But will it grow in your area? And
if it grows, will people eat it?
Start by planting a small patch—or 2 or 3 small
patches under different kinds of conditions
(for example, with different kinds of soil
or using different amounts of
water). If the beans do well, try
cooking them in various ways,
and see if people will eat them.
If so, try planting more beans
using the conditions in which
they grew best.
You can also try out even more conditions (for example,
adding fertilizer or using different kinds of seed) in more small
patches to see if you can get an even better crop. To best
understand what helps and what does not, try to change only
one condition at a time and keep the rest the same.
Here is an example of adding animal fertilizer (manure) to see if it helps beans
grow. This person planted several small bean patches side-by-side, under the same
conditions of water and sunlight, and using the same seed. Before planting, each
patch of soil was mixed with a different amount of manure, something like this:
no manure
1 shovel
manure
2 shovels
manure
3 shovels
manure
4 shovels
manure
5 shovels
manure
This experiment shows that a certain amount of manure helps, but that too
much can harm the plants. This is only an example. Your experiments may give
different results. Try for yourself !
Where Women Have No Doctor 2012