Food crisis

“ Most of this loss occurs in the commercial food chain, as food travels from farms to wholesale markets, manufacturers, supermarkets, company cafeterias, and restaurants, and much of it is recoverable. Whether it be day-old bread at a bakery or an extra pan of lasagna not served by a restaurant or cafeteria, a significant amount of this food is perfectly edible and wholesome. Throwing away such food is an intolerable loss, because it both denies hungry Americans a vital source of nourishment and wastes precious resources. ”

“ It was also feared that, in case of a failure of the crops, a serious famine might happen to the people, owing to the want of the accustomed stores which are usually laid up by the government, in the paternal spirit of providing the poor with food at a moderate price, in the event of such a contingency. ”

“ Food supplies have increased substantially, but constraints on access to food and continuing inadequacy of household and national incomes to purchase food, instability of supply and demand, as well as natural and man-made disasters, prevent basic food needs from being fulfilled. ”

“ It is an odd thing that last spring, by a queer oversight, we never thought, any of us, of this process of increasing the supply. If every patriotic man would simply take a large basket and go to the market every day and buy all that he could carry away there need be no further fear of a food famine. ”

“ If famine threatened any part of the world, word of it could come in the twinkling of an eye, and millions on millions of tons of food-stuffs, speedily transported to the scene, would stave off the straitness and render the calamity impossible. ”

“ The miserable creatures will pick up chicken-weed, nettles, sorrell, bug-loss, preshagh, and sea-weed, which they will boil and eat with the voracity of persons writhing under the united agonies of hunger and death! Yet the very country thus groaning under such a terrible sweep of famine is actually pouring from all her ports a profusion of food, day after day ”

“ But, great as this evil is, it has, by the circumstances and nature of things, a tendency to increase the very cause in which it originates. Though the highness of price diminishes the consumption of victuals in general, it diminishes the consumption of vegetable food, or bread, more than it does that of animal food. Though all sorts of eatables rise in price, in times of scarcity, yet bread, being the article that excites the greatest anxiety, rises higher in proportion than the others. This affords an encouragement to gratify the propensity for eating animal food ”

“ This disadvantage, apart from the fact that the eating-rooms provide for people more than hand-to-hand distribution, has its compensation in this, that by the introduction of new, cheap, and wholesome articles of diet, such as lentils, pease in various forms, oat-kisel, beets, Indian meal kasha, sunflower and hemp oils, the quantity of bread used may be diminished and the food itself improved. ”

“ As it is at present, provision dealers of all kinds, meal-mongers, forestallers, butchers, bakers, and hucksters, combine together, and sustain such a general monopoly in food, as is at variance with the spirit of all law and humanity, and constitutes a kind of artificial famine in the country ”

“ But in the face of a growing emergency for our Nation's farmers, we must do more to ensure that American farmers can continue to provide, for years to come, the safest and least expensive food in the world. ”

“ But we are not exempt from famine. In the year 1816, known as the year of “eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death,” the crops failed throughout America because of freezing weather all summer long. Little or no food was raised and the Americans would have perished from famine had it not been for the wild meat in the woods. The people lived on deer and bear that winter. To-day if our food supply fails we can not live on venison. No country is by natural law exempt from famine. Our famine will come when we fill this country as thickly as men can stand; China and India have so filled themselves. ”

“ Up to three hundred years ago even the most highly civilized countries of Europe were subject to periodic attacks of famine; our armies and navies were swept and decimated with scurvy, from bad and rotten food-supplies; almost every winter saw epidemics breaking out from the use of half-putrid salted and cured foods ”

“ There is imperative need for saving of food materials; at best there will not be enough to go around, and all the world, ourselves included, will suffer in proportion as we neglect the duty of food conservation. To be economical in the use of food materials according to the program of the Food Administration may, probably will, demand the spending of more money, time, and thought upon food. If we have the money and time to spend, well and good; but if we have not, how shall we do our share in sending more “wheat, meat, sugar and fats to our soldiers, sailors and allies”? ”

“ It became economically unsound for so great a percentage of food producers to spend their time in producing meats and staples, only part of which could be consumed by themselves and their near neighbors, the rest going to waste. The great waste of the surplus products set the minds of men of genius to devising ways to preserve the foods of abundant harvests for the seasons of scarcity. The result is before us in the form of modern cold-storage plants, refrigerator cars, volume-curing and pickling of meat products, and volume-canning of fish, meats, fruits, and vegetables ”

“ To assert that the working classes should maintain the cruel and wasteful practice of flesh-eating merely to "keep up wages" is pure nonsense, for the same reasoning would justify the maintenance of drink, or any other extravagant and useless habit.
What is true for the individual and the class is true also for the community, and unless flesh food can be shown to be necessary for human progress, the continuance of pastoralism, to the detriment and neglect of agriculture, is a criminal waste of the national resources. ”

“ In the third place, the distribution of flour among poor families, even among those that still have means of their own, does not attain the purpose of forefending men from famine diseases, because in a family where strong men easily get along with poor food, the weak, the young, and the old contract disease from want and the poor quality of food.
In all famine-stricken places all families, both rich and poor, eat miserable bread made with lebeda-weed. ”

“ Old people yet can tell of the hard famine of that year. The harvest of the autumn before had failed; the war and the corn laws had brought the price of corn up to a famine rate; and much of what came into the market was unsound, and consequently unfit for food, yet hungry creatures bought it eagerly, and tried to cheat disease by mixing the damp, sweet, clammy flour with rice or potato meal. ”

“ The search for food is the oldest of instincts. It is the master-motive of evolution. It has reared empires up and thrown them down. As Buckle has shown, where the national food is cheap and plentiful, population increases more rapidly. And as Sir James Crichton-Browne, in a recent book on "Parcimony in Nutrition," maintains, the lack of food is a prolific cause of war, disease, and social misery in its various forms. "Nothing is more demoralizing," he says, "than chronic hunger."
"For lack of bread the French Revolution failed," said Prince Krapotkin. ”

“ And just this year, bad peanut products led to hundreds of illnesses and cost nine people their lives – a painful reminder of how tragic the consequences can be when food producers act irresponsibly and government is unable to do its job. ”

“ Yet, at the very time it was written, President Polk's message to Congress, delivered in Washington on the 8th of December, arrived in England, containing the following passage: "The home market alone is inadequate to enable them [the farmers] to dispose of the immense supplies of food which they are capable of producing, even at the most reduced prices, for the manifest reason that they cannot be consumed in the country. The United States can, from their immense surplus, supply not only the home demand, but the deficiency of food required by the whole world." ”

“ The artificial causes of famine have mostly ceased to be operative on any large scale. Chief among them is war, which may cause a shortage of food-supplies, either by its direct ravages or by depleting the supply of agricultural labour. ”

“ The nation does not like to see the bread rations of 70,000 men in France cut down 14while the Drink Trade is destroying every week bread enough to last these men a year. It does not like to see the Government sending letters out to managers of factory canteens, begging them to be careful of bread, while food flows through our beer canteens like a river running to waste. ”

“ Until the beginning of the nineteenth century economic crises were really due to actual scarcity of foodstuffs, and people went hungry as much because there was not enough food to go round as because they had no money with which to buy their share of what there was. ”

“ The supply of such material is very large and the starchy food that in this way may become available destroys at once all possibility of future famine and all necessity of raising wheat, oats, barley, potatoes or other starchy foods. ”

“ Without entering into the ethics of war, we can look back and review the lessons of the recent struggle, when interference with nature was rampant. First consider food shortage apart from political and economic causes; it was deemed necessary to encourage internal resources; we strove to increase our food supply, especially of wheat, potatoes, and vegetables. We sowed wheat everywhere, but we did not always reap the harvest; in certain soils for long unsuited to or at least unused to this crop, the wheat bulb-fly appeared and worked its wicked will. ”

“ Moreover, the constantly increasing demand of the new age upon bodily and nervous energies will call for nourishment suited to their supply. This, and the wastefulness of second-hand food, will banish all flesh from the bill of fare. Fish will be eaten longer than meat. But more than anything else, the need for economy will reform our dinner-tables, and eventually all food will have to be obtained directly from the soil, if we are to have food enough to nourish our overgrown population at all. ”

“ America's special relation to the world's war food problem was primarily that of a provider of the Allies, but in order to insure that this provision should be sufficient to keep the Allied soldiers and war workers up to full fighting and working strength and their families in full health, it was necessary for America to stimulate its own production, repress considerably its consumption and cut out all possible waste in food handling. ”

“ Indeed, the daily press is full of signs that the food problem is an acute one, for the current joke about food prices, the accounts of boycotts by housekeepers, popular articles on nutrition and pure foods, and the records of state and national legislation, all show that as a nation we are awake and seeking a way out of our present difficulties.
Doubtless, the housekeeper has always found the task of supplying food to her family one of the most perplexing, but modern conditions have made the difficulties manifold when contrasted with olden times. ”

“ This being so, let us recur to the point to which Sir Henry Thompson brought us. If flesh-food be, as he admits, entirely unnecessary, will not this additional consideration of economy turn the balance when we make our choice of diet? Will a nation whose food supply is becoming a matter of more and more anxiety persist in spending six times as much money as it is obliged to spend. ”

“ It hardly takes one forward stride where manufacture takes a hundred.... Experience teaches us that man's labour as a general thing can nowhere be employed in a more lucrative way than in agriculture. If a man should work over his field with the shovel and spade instead of the plough, he would find that a plot of ground of incredibly small size would be sufficient to support him."
There is yet another peril that would be lessened in proportion to the increase of vegetarianism—the dependence of this country on the importation of food from abroad. ”

“ Let it be objected, that the agriculture of the country is, by the overbalance of commerce, and by various and complex causes, in such a state, that the country hangs as a pensioner for bread on its neighbours, and a bad season uniformly threatens us with famine, this (it is replied) is owing to our prosperity—all prosperous nations are in great distress for food. ”

“ Thus dependence on the outside world persists, and the blockade continues to do its deadly work of spreading hunger, demoralization and despair.
The food question is intimately bound up with the question of industry. There is a vicious circle, for not only does the absence of manufactured goods cause a food shortage in the towns, but the food shortage, in turn, diminishes the strength of the workers and makes them less able to produce goods. ”

“ Any catastrophe which may happen to already congested lines of transportation, will precipitate a famine. Then prices would go up with a bound. The constant menace of such a possibility, always serves to keep food-prices above the natural level of a fair profit. On the other hand, in countries where progress in agriculture and manufacture goes hand in hand; a constantly increasing home market for manufactured products is steadily maintained. ”

“ Our supply of food is only so much—and now five or six other countries are depending on us to feed them that they may live and fight. The authorities merely request that you eat— ONE POUND LESS OF WHEAT FLOUR A WEEK— which means one hundred and thirty-three million bushels of wheat more annually for emergency or two thousand million loaves of bread ”

“ Particular attention should be given to those who cannot produce or procure enough food for an adequate diet, including those affected by war, civil strife, natural disaster or climate related ecological changes. ”