Soil Fertility and the Human Species

We have often been told that “armies march on their stomachs.” We have not been told that stomachs march according to the fertility of the soil. The fertility of the soil consists of those chemical elements of rock origin that contribute to the construction and body functions of both plants and animals.

Let us, at the outset, deal with soil fertility and the human species on seemingly low levels. We can consider man mainly as a physiological performance. Let us, however, not be limited to an exhibition of digestive processes only, and let us entertain the hope that man, in good nutrition, balanced physiology, and the resultant good health, may manifest his appreciation of, and respect for, life and that he may demonstrate the finer attitude and the nobler spirit. It is along this line that soil fertility operates to determine the nature of the human species.

The human species may be reduced to a very simple basis. Man is about 5 per cent soil, or 5 per cent ash. This represents the soil’s contribution to the construction of the body. The list of elements coming from the soil includes calcium, which makes up 1.6 per cent of the normal body weight. Thus in a body of 150 pounds there is the equivalent in slaked lime required to lay a half dozen bricks. The next element is phosphorus. This makes up 0.9 per cent, or about one third pound per adult. The other elements of soil origin come in the following order: potassium 0.4, sodium 0.3, chlorine 0.3, sulfur 0.2, magnesium 0.05, and iron 0.004 per cent. There are traces of iodine, fluorine, silica, manganese, and others.

Plants require the same elements as animals, except that animals demand two, and possibly a few more, of which the essentiality is still in doubt. Calcium and phosphorus head the list in animals and in plants, except for potassium. Calcium, as a part of the ash, represents increased concentrations from 1, in the soil, to 8, and to 40 in the plant and animal ash, respectively. For phosphorus, the corresponding figures are 1, 140, and 200. These increased concentrations represent a physiological struggle by an animal body to maintain them, or to substitute for them, under the threat of disturbed or perverted body form and functions. In the case of potassium, the animal struggle is apparently not one of sufficient supply, but of elimination, if one dare infer from the high concentrations in plant but the low animal body concentrations; the commonly pronounced excretion in the urine; and the uncertainty as to its exact body functions.

 

Table I–Chemical Analysis of the Human Body in Comparison with That of Plants and of Soils

	Human Body, %	Vegetation, Dry Matter, %	Soil, Dry Matter, %
Oxygen Carbon Hydrogen Nitrogen Calcium Phosphorus Potassium Sodium Chlorine Sulfur Maglteaium Iron Iodine Fluorine Silicon Manganese Water Protein Carbohydrates Fat Salts Other	66.0 17.5 10.2a 2.4a 1.6a 0.9a 0.4a 0.3 0.3 0.2 0.05 0.004  Trace Trace  Trace  Trace  65 15 … 14 5 1	42.9 44.3 6.1a 1.62a 0.62a 0.56a 1.68a 0.43 0.22 0.37 0.38 0.04 Trace Trace 0 to 3.00  Trace … 10 82 3 5	47.3 0.19 0.22a … 3.47a 0.12a 2.46a … 0.06 0.12 2.24 4.50 0.10 27.74 0.08

a Note the increases and decreases in concentration in going from plant to man.

 

An adult body contains but about 7.5 pounds of soil elements. Life without any one of them becomes impossible. In terms of the plant that demands these ten from the soil, the absence of any one prohibits the plant from functioning as the greatest of all chemical industries. Some micronutrients, demanded in only parts per billion, are requisite for this great out of-door manufacturing business, where water as the hydrate from the rainfall, and carbon from the atmosphere, are synthesized by the sun’s energy into carbohydrates, and these in turn, by micro- and macroscopic plants further synthesized into proteins and other complexes.

We Farm the Soil, Not the Weather

The meteorological aspect of plant growth crowds itself to our attention, when carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, coming from air and water and not from the soil, make up almost 95 per cent of plant and animal bulk. Here is basis for the prevalent, but erroneous, belief that weather is in control of crops. We need seriously to consider that growth occurs more according to the soil and less according to the weather. We need to look into the possibility that by supplying fertility to the soil we can mitigate the hazards of the weather.

The small portion of nutrition supplied by the soil puts it in control more than we are wont to believe.

Distribution of mean annual rainfall in the United States

Rainfall-evaporation ratios. When evaporation is balanced against precipitation as suggested by Professor Transeau, it is evident that the higher soil fertility of the less leached prairie soils of the Midwest extends itself as the productivity of the cornbelt.

 

Plants, like humans, can be said to be–and to behave–according as they are nourished. “How can this be true”, you may well inquire, “when it has been the common concept that climate determines what kind of plant is grown and what kind can be grown?” To give full validity to this newer concept is to emphasize the indirect more than the direct control by weather over life forms. We quickly see our body comfort in relation to the heat and the cold, which two, within the less general limits, are not the complete determiners of plants.

For plants, the nutritional aspect–another significant human comfort–is truly in control. Plants are distributed over the surface of the earth according as they are nourished to provide the particular chemical composition which they, as species, represent. Climate is involved in this nutrition, but more as it is a factor in determining the soil. The soil in turn is determined, not only by the climate, but also by other factors, such as the rock, or the parent material, which is converted into the soil by the climatic forces. Climate alone is not in control of plants directly, but jointly with other forces working through the soil, and therefore indirectly.

Plant Compositions and Plant Species Are Controlled by Soil Fertility

In accordance with the long-held belief that only meteorological conditions determine the plants in any locality and their adaptation to the environment, we have been scouring the world and making transplants with little regard for the soil fertility required to nourish the shifted plants. When alfalfa grows dominantly in Colorado soils; when sugar cane grows abundantly in Louisiana; and when the rubber tree quickly dominates in tropical Brazil; are these merely matters of differences in the degrees of temperature or of the increasing amounts of rainfall? There are, of course, meteorological differences, but are these alone the causes? Can plants be shifted merely by keeping them properly heated or properly moistened?

Alfalfa is a protein-rich, mineral-rich forage of high calcium content. It demands large supplies of mobile nutrients from the soil. It grows well where lesser amounts of rainfall have not depleted the lime and other mineral fertility stores from the surface soil. When planted on a more humid soil it demands particular soil treatment for its successful growth.

Cotton is a deliverer of products that are mainly carbonaceous, represented by its cellulosic fiber, oily seed, and shrublike form. It demands less of those fertility elements requisite for alfalfa. Lime application to the soil is not an absolute requisite for cotton, though the crop is improved by it. Cotton responds more to potassium, the nutrient associated with carbohydrate production in plants. Cotton is not on the list of the vegetations that serve as animal forage. This is because its composition is such that only a limited part has food value for animals and then mainly after processing.

The rubber tree is a woody crop. Its latex is indigestible. Like other forest trees, it uses soil fertility for growth, but each annual supply is dropped almost wholly in its leaf crop. Through decomposition, this fertility supply in the leaves completes its regular cycle as it rotates from the soil up through the tree to the leaves and from the fallen leaves back to the soil. While making this cycle it is building the latex and the wood. Both of these are made mainly of air and water elaborated by sunshine into energy compounds of fuel value only for flames and not for the physiology of animals.

Composition Differences between Species

“A series of plants like alfalfa, cotton, and rubber trees,” it may be thought, “fits well into the climatic variations.” But it is well to note that animals fit into this picture too, but more in terms of nutrition than their body comfort. Then the controlling force is not the climate so much as the soil fertility that determines the composition of plants, and thereby their nutritional services to animals. Alfalfa nourishes animals, but cotton plants and forest trees do not. Evolutionary forces located the plants in correspondence with the soil fertility. Soil fertility is operating over wide geographical areas to give the particular ecological array of plant species in which each species has a chemical composition according to the level of soil fertility. Since the individual is an epitome of the species in many respects, then within each species there is a variation within individual plants in chemical composition, according to the variation in the soils over which that species survives. As the kind of forage is one that falls lower in concentration of nutrients, apparently it is likewise one that tolerates wider fluctuations in chemical composition as Table II illustrates. This is a basic principle of greater importance in terms of our national health than we have been wont to believe.

 

Table ll–Range in Fluctuation of Concentrations of Chemical Elements in Forages^a

		Ash %	K2O %	CaO %	MgO %	Fe2O2 %	P2O5 %	SO3 %	SiO2 %
Mixed meadow grasses	Low High Range	2.02 11.40 ——— 9.38	7.60 56.60 ——— 49.00	6.00 40.10 ——— 34.10	1.90 24.40 ——— 22.50	.10 4.90 ——— 4.80	2.00 21.30 ——— 19.30	.70 13.40 ——— 12.70	10.40 63.20 ——— 52.80
Red clover	Low High Range	4.50 9.20 ——— 4.70	8.80 52.00 ——— 43.20	21.90 53.40 ——— 31.50	5.30 26.10 ——— 20.80	.30 5.00 ——— 4.70	4.00 15.00 ——— 11.00	1.20 7.40 ——— 6.20	00.00 20.20 ——— 20.20
Alfalfa	Low High Range	5.40 9.50 ——— 4.10	11.40 41.90 ——— 30.50	24.70 62.90 ——— 38.20	2.80 9.00 ——— 6.20	.50 8.20 ——— 7.70	4.50 19.30 ——— 14.80	3.70 8.60 ——— 4.90	.80 27.90 ——— 27.10

a “Some Relationships of Soil to Plant and Animal Nutrition. The Major Elements”, Browne, C. A., U. S. D. A. Yearbook 1938, p. 781.

 

Nutritious herbages and dense animal populations dominate in regions of lower rainfalls and moderate temperatures because the less weathered soils of higher fertility make for better nutrition. Such domination is not wholly true because of the comforts of climate. Animal populations in the depleted soils with forest vegetation are scant regardless of moderate temperatures, as the few turkeys found by the Pilgrim fathers testified. Soil fertility for vegetation of mainly fuel value, as cotton or forests, does not guarantee rapid animal multiplication. On the prairies in regions of lower rainfall and on more fertile soil, bison were numerous. The plant composition of high nutritive value reflects the higher soil fertility. As the soil fertility declines, the particular plant species in prevalence shift to those making more use of air, water, and sunshine in their body construction. Such plants can possibly support fattening animals, but are of doubtful value for young and growing animals. Beef calves are produced on the mineral-rich, growth promoting soils of the drier range, but are fattened on the feeds of fuel value from the humid soils of the cornbelt.

Fertility Decline and Shifting Health Levels

The soil fertility on an individual farm can be depleted enough through failure to return manure, crop residues, and other fertility forms in a single human generation, to shift that farm from a place of good health to one of deficiency diseases for the farm animals and for the families on it. The same crops, still growing after 50 years of farming, may have shifted from protein-producing, mineral-supplying, health-giving sustenance to vegetation mainly of fuel value, with nutrient deficiencies. The shifts may occur without changes in tonnage output. Here is a national weakness that is being heralded by a loud voice–but apparently going unheard–in the rejection figures, for example, of the Army draftees. We, as higher animals, along with the lower ones, are experiencing increasing nutrient deficiencies because the declining soil fertility is giving us food that is mainly of fuel value. This shift to foods mainly of fuel value is aggravated still further by processing methods in which the starches and sweets are retained and the minerals discarded. The shift is undermining reproduction and other delicate body functions. We are about to appreciate the fact that our soil fertility is the place where we may undergird rather than continue to undermine the national health.

Viewed in simple geochemical fashion, soils are ephemeral. They are rocks in various stages of progress in going from mountain to sea or from solid to solution. Silicic acid is passing out as it bows reverently to the quiet, but persistent, onslaughts by the simple and weak carbonic acid. Soils are the many intermediate products during this change from the silicates of the basic elements to their nitrates, phosphates, sulfates, extensive carbonates, and other simple products.

Reduced to a simple scheme, the processes of soil formation and development, or this march by rock to the sea, may be divided into two stages. The first is mainly construction in which clay and organic matter increase in the soil. There is also an increasing capacity and content of nutrients of service in plant and animal life. This occurs because colloidal adsorption and colloidal exchange of plant nutrients come into more prominence as the soil’s content in clay and humus increases. These two, the humus and more particularly the clay with silica in dominance, are the constituents that carry increasingly larger stores of soil fertility. These stores include calcium, magnesium, potassium, and other elements in adsorbed forms, not leached readily by water, yet exchangeable to plant roots. These are the soils in which calcium dominates over all the other nutrients.

The second stage in soil development is destructive. Increasing climatic forces, in forms of heavier rainfall and higher temperatures, give the soils a higher clay content. This clay gives up its adsorbed calcium, very rapidly while its magnesium and other bases are less rapidly exchanged for hydrogen, through leaching and removal by plant growth, to become an acid soil. Under still higher temperatures and more rainfall, the clay itself increases in quantity but is also changed in chemical nature through reduced dominance by silica. As a consequence, such clay no longer retains plant nutrients or bases readily in the adsorbed forms. It no longer holds hydrogen to make the soil significantly acid. It is then neither acid nor loaded with elements of soil fertility, but is chemically inert. This inclination of the more highly leached clay toward neutrality–or what is more properly a chemical indifference because the clay does not hold even hydrogen–has been interpreted by many to mean that the soil has no need for calcium. Quite the contrary, such soils are decidedly deficient in this element.

Soils of the United States

The United States is divided according to this plan of soil development into two main areas. Starting in the western and states and coming eastward and northward, soils illustrating the process of increasing construction and of increasing content of clay and organic matter are met. The maximum of this organic matter and of dark color, so commonly associated with high fertility, is reached in the territory of the Red River Valley in the Dakotas and Minnesota. From this point southeastward to Florida one moves through soils with increasingly weathered conditions to meet, first, the acid soils, those depleted of their fertility by cropping and weathering to give hydrogen substitution for the nutrients, and then, the more reddish soils where the clay has taken on a different chemical nature giving less acidity.

The different soils in the United States reflect their correspondence with differences in rainfall. As different nutritional levels for plants, it has been effectively demonstrated that soils, much more than variations in climate, control plant composition.

 

This different nature of the clay is responsible for the properties of the southern soils that underlie economic and social conditions of the people living on them. These conditions cannot be remedied by means of legislative enactments or political practices and procedures. The problems of the South tell us that the South needs soil fertility.

Botanists and soils men think of plants as getting their chemical nutrients from solutions. We know that the nutrients in true solution, or in the common ionic forms, are of such low amounts within the soil that limiting a crop to this supply would barely start the plants. Nutrients in the soil serving for crop growth are not in true solution, but are adsorbed on the colloidal clay and the humus. They are taken by the crop only as the plants can offer something in exchange or in trade. This offering by the healthy, luxuriantly growing plant is mainly the hydrogen ions. The composition of the clay according to the degree of climatic development of the soil, and in terms of the concept that the plant is a system of chemical equilibrium between root and clay in contact, to be shifted by exchange from the clay to the plant and vice versa, explains much more clearly the chemical composition of the crop in relation to the climatic region producing it.

The clay alone serves as an intermediary merely passing on what it gets. It cannot continue to produce crops indefinitely. This exchangeable nutrient supply on the clay and the humus, commonly spoken of as the colloidal complex, is readily exhausted by one, two, or three crops. There must be activities, therefore, in the soil to renew the exchangeable supplies if crop production is to continue. This renewal is brought about through organic matter decay and through mineral breakdown. Such breakdown occurs because the hydrogen put on the clay by the plant serves to exchange itself for other cations of nutrient value in the mineral crystals and rock fragments of the soil. 

Crop differences which have often been ascribed to differences in rainfall above the soil are in reality due rather to the lime and fertility differences within the soil.

 

Acid Soils Suffer from Fertility Deficiency

These advances in our knowledge about soil processes carry with them the concept that soil acidity is not detrimental to crop production because of the incidence of the acidity, or the hydrogen ion. Rather, the detriment by soil acidity results because of the exit from the soil of the fertility ions replaced by the hydrogen. Excessive soil acidity is merely a pronounced depletion of the plant nutrient supply from the clay. It represents an extensive exchange by hydrogen in the carbonic acid from the roots, or from percolating waters, for the plant nutrients on the colloidal part of the soil. It indicates, too, a deficiency in mineral nutrient reserves that would buffer this excessive clay depletion. As acidity increases, or more specifically as the fertility declines, through hydrogen exchange for it, the growing crops shift as to species of differing composition and chemical composition within the single species. This shift in their chemical composition is from the more proteinaceous products of high mineral content to those which represent more purely carbonaceous products, or a shift from alfalfa to cotton and to rubber trees and other forest vegetation on highly developed soils.

If an agricultural crop cannot starvingly accommodate itself far enough to meet this change in chemical composition and fails to grow, a different crop species is substituted. If that makes tons where its predecessor failed, it must have more of the carbonaceous makeup. Thus the nutritional bases for our plants have been slipping to lower levels. The plants, in turn, are giving forages of lower nutritional values to animals. The human species, likewise, is moving to lower levels, though with significant lag in the process.

Protein content of Kansas wheat increases from east to west as lime horizon in soil is thicker and nearer surface soil and plant roots.

 

More Soil Fertility in Spring–More Nutritious Vegetation

There is evidence that the soil offers relatively much more soil fertility to the plant growing in the spring. Plants at that time deliver calcium, phosphorus, and other minerals in the forage at higher concentrations. This is because the lower temperatures and the less intense sunshine are giving lower rates of carbohydrate production, while there is a high mineral intake from the soil.

Crop Juggling No Substitute For Soil Fertility

In our crop “juggling” the so-called new and imported crops have been hailed as successes. This has rested on their ability to take less from the soil but more from the air, water, and sunshine above the soil, and to hide more cleverly their lower value as forage feeds than the crops they have replaced.

Our soil exhaustion, or our fertility depletion, not only has encouraged our extensive shifts in kinds of crops, it has moved us from emphasis on grain crops to emphasis on forage values. Grains are more nearly constant in nutrient composition and reflect declining fertility by declining yields as bushels per acre. Forages tolerate extreme ranges in composition responsible for many animal irregularities. Nurse crops have almost disappeared. We now use sequences of crops in the same year instead of nurse crops, as in barley and lespedeza when barley grows in the fall and the lespedeza follows the next summer. The fertility delivery rate is too low to support the nurse crop and start the legume crop simultaneously. “Plant diseases” have increased. In reality they ought to be called “symptoms of plant starvation.” Seed germinations are lower because we have never believed that soil fertility played a role so early in the plant’s life.

What is called plant “disease” must be deficient plant nutrition if mere increase of calcium carrying clay in the sand (left to right) prevents fungus attack resembling “damping off.”

 

Deficient Soils Bring Deficiencies in Animals and Man

Animal ailments are also on the increase because of the declining soil fertility. But as yet no one has tabulated them by localities according to soils of different degrees of exhaustion. Acetonemia in pregnant milk cows, milk fever after calving, pregnancy diseases in sheep, contagious abortion in cattle, rickets in young animals, and numerous other ailments still baffling as to physiological explanation do not occur in June when the animals have had opportunity to get from young grass the more concentrated forms and larger amounts of what we call soil fertility. Calcium gluconate as venous injections in the cases of milk fever and acetonemia cannot be substituted by the corresponding sodium compound. Calcium and phosphorus in particular are concerned in these irregularities. It should not be an impossible stretch of the imagination to connect these chemical elements so common as soil treatments for better plant growth with the physiology of foetus building or the production of milk.

Animals have been pushed to the dangerous precipice until decreased reproduction, increased diseases, more body malformations, and other irregularities have compelled us to market these animals early. What the use of this meat has been doing to human health has not yet been given consideration.

Where do humans fit into this soil fertility picture? Keen minds among the doctors of medicine and of dentistry, with greater desires to serve in prevention than in giving only relief, have seen degeneration in bodies, minds, and souls taking place at the highest rates among our peoples claiming the maximum of knowledge, invention, and standards of living. There is an increasing number of those who, with Earnest A. Hooton, of Harvard University, believe that we should be “finding out what man is like biologically when he does not need a doctor, in order to further ascertain what he should be like after the doctor has finished with him. It is a very myopic medical science which works backward from the morgue rather than forward from the cradle.” To supplement this quotation, we should be working forward not only from the cradle but even from conception and preconception to give maximum of health to individuals.

Feed grown on soil of low fertility brought on rickets. This calf “went down” because of spinal column break at the pelvic joint and accompanying paralysis of hind legs.

 

Studies by such men as Dr. Price of Ohio, Dr. Pottenger of California, and Dr. Forman of Ohio, make it possible to see human deformities associated with nutrition, and this nutrition going back to the crop, the season, and the soil itself. It has now become hopeful to link man, in spite of his nomadic wanderings or his nourishment from far-flung food resources, to the soil and to soil fertility.

Calcium and phosphorus play no small role in the skeleton, and in the functions through which the skeleton acts as a contributor to shortages or as a depository for reserves. Probably other nutrient elements will fit into the picture. Unfortunately, national attention has not been developed to the point of recognizing the possibilities in putting these fertility items back into the soil and setting in motion the prevention of degeneration.

Declining supplies of calcium, phosphorus, and other items to handicap the crops are at the basis of our degeneration. Diseases are astoundingly on the increase. They are also on the relative increase. Hay fever, unknown to the Indian, has doubled its percentage of the population in 25 years. Heart disease, according to the New York City Health Department, took 203 per 100,000 in 1907, but 327 in 1936, a 60 per cent increase in almost 20 years. Arthritis is on the increase. Cancer is on the increase. Dental caries, an ailment of the exposed or visible part of the skeleton, is on the increase.

That the hidden part of the skeleton should be undergoing decay corresponding to that of the teeth is possible. Dr. Hooton of Harvard says:

“… degeneration tendencies have manifested themselves in modern man to such an extent that our jaws are too small for the teeth they are supposed to accommodate. Let us go to the ignorant savage, consider his ways of eating and be wise. Let us cease pretending that toothbrushes and tooth paste are any more important than shoe brushes and shoe polish. It is store food that has given us store teeth.”

Animals choose fodder according to soil fertility. They disregarded three of the four banks of prairie hay in a single field and preferred to consume one which contained a certain amount of hay grown on soil treated five years previously.

Soil may be rejuvenated despite erosion. Right to left. Uneroded, untreated soil; eroded, untreated soil; and eroded soil treated with lime, phosphate, and green manure.

 

Primitive People Provide Suggestions 

Dr. Price, in his study of the teeth of savages in relation to diet, has made extensive chemical analyses of their foods to support his numerous oral examinations among primitives showing their almost perfect teeth. He reaches the conclusion that our narrowed and shortened lower jaws and narrowed upper jaws with displaced teeth, represent a compress on the lower brain to bring pressure on the pituitary and to set in motion a chain of mental and physiological disturbances. Narrowed faces, narrowed bodies in that “slim trim boyish figure,” link themselves with our tendencies to refine foods “to make them sources of energy without normal body building and repairing qualities.” 

Recent studies about the soil in which the effects of the soil treatment were measured in terms of different growth responses by animals consuming the forages grown on them, bring forth the possibility of feeding our animals by treating the soil. Calcium and phosphorus, the more common deficiencies in soil fertility, supplied to the soil, served to make each acre from 50 to 100 per cent more efficient in growing animals. Balancing the soil fertility as diet for the plants increased the plant growth and the acreage yield. Each unit weight of crop was of distinctly higher value as balanced diet for the growing animals.

Gains by lambs fed soybean and lespedeza hays from soils given no treatment, phosphate, and lime plus phosphate. All received same supplement of wheat bran and shelled oats.

 

Improved physiology of the animal was also manifested and body functions operated more efficiently. Skeletal consumption and depletion processes centering particularly about the calcium and the phosphorus level came into prominence. Rickets was induced by feeds from untreated soils but was prevented by feeds from treated soils. Supplementing feed from the untreated soil by means of calcium and phosphorus as minerals was not the equivalent of using feeds grown on treated soil. This fact suggests that calcium and phosphorus coming by way of the plant growth processes do more for animal nutrition than merely deliver themselves to the animal’s digestive system.

Hope Lies Ahead in the Soil 

When only a preliminary trial of two of the major fertility elements, calcium and phosphorus, as soil treatments offers so much in improved body functions, and when other fertility elements are equally as simple or more so, there should be significant optimism ahead. When chemical attention to a more refined degree goes to the soil and plants, and when the information by the soil chemist and the plant physiologist as plant nutrition interrelates itself with the mass of information by the nutritionist, the manifold ramifications of soil fertility into the behaviors of the human species will be revealed as a great service by way of attention to the soil. 

Let us hope that knowledge of our soil will arrive before human nutrition goes so low through neglect of soil fertility as to reduce thinking capacities to the point where we cannot save ourselves by saving our soils.

The field at left, starved by lack of plant food, has only scant vegetation, and rains have eroded soil. The field at right, however, a mixture of rye and vetch nourished on phosphate and lime, is making good growth.

Editor’s note: Since the era in which this article was written, society’s understanding of respectful terminology when referring to ethnic and cultural groups has evolved, and some readers may be offended by references to “primitive” people and other out-of-date terminology. However, this article has been archived as a historical document, and so we have chosen to use Albrecht’s exact words in the interest of authenticity.  No disrespect to any cultural or ethnic group is intended.