VICTORY HENS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 137, 12 June 1941, Page 6

VICTORY HENS

DRIVE IN AMERICA

FOOD FOR GREAT BRITAIN

(Bv THOMAS R. HENRYS

WASHINGTON, May 20.

Tine American hen promises to play a big part in winning the war for Britain.

Dried eggs are about the most concentrated form in which proteins

can be shipped across the Atlantic. All the water is taken out —the white of an egg contains about 87 per cent water and the yolk nearly 50 per cent —leaving an egg powder which requires no refrigeration and will keep for at least a year. A case of thirty dozen eggs dries down to about 101b of dry material.

In England it is necessary only to add water to restore the egg for cooking purposes.

The surplus marketing administration of the Department of Agriculture has purchased 500,000 cases of 30 dozen eggs each in the open market during the last month. The greatest part of this purchase is for England. The precise amount cannot be stated because of the military secrecy pertaining to food shipments.

The Department of Agriculture also has launched a nation-wide drive to increase the egg production of the United States about 6 per cent— or approximately 10,000,000 cases— in the last fifteen months. A relatively small amount of this increase is intended for domestic consumption. Some will be supplied to the Red Cross to feed distressed areas in Europe.

Shipping Space Saved

To obtain this increase, says Secretary of Agriculture Claude R. Wickard, who is directing the programme, "flock owners will need to feed heavily to get every possible egg froni laying hens on hand this spring and summer. They will need to save over every good layer for next autumn and winter egg production. They' should hatch or buy enough chicks this spring, and save enough pullets, to fill the laying houses of America to capacity for next spring's production."

The drive is concentrated especially on the centre of the American egg-drying industry—Texas, Oklahoma. Missouri. Nebraska and Illinois. For the last ten years production has dropped off steadily in that region, due to the reduction of poultry feed because of the drought. There is now a surplus of feed.

The major advantage lies in the small shipping space required for dried eggs, but almost equal in importance is the fact that the hen is the most efficient converter of bulky grain, composed largely of starches and sugars, into proteins and vitamins. Her only rival is the pig, -whose end products are more bulky and cannot be preserved so well without refrigeration. A Xear Perfect Diet

Eggs are far from a perfect diet. but they approach it about as closelv as any food substance known to man. They contain six of the essential vitamins and are one of the riche-t sources known for riboflavin, deficiency in which causes a disease similar to pellagra. They are a fair source of vitamin A, lack of which causes night blindness and increases susceptibility to infections; and vitamin D, essential to preventing rickets in children. Lack of the former was reported recently as quite serious in the British Isles. The rainy climate always has made vitamin D especially essential. Eggs also contain a fair amount of vitamin B-l, the nerve vitamin upon a sufficiency of which Great Britain lays special stress They possess small quantities of K, the blood-clotting vitamin. Why Eggs Is Eggs j

But even more essential than thf vitamins are the amino acids, the chemical substances into which proteins are converted by digestion, and which are essential to life and growth. Every known one of these acids considered necessary is contained in the egg—nature's own exclusive diet for the unhatched chicken. Eggs, for example, contain larger quantities of a substance known as lethycin, which is the primary food of nerves.

Eggs are especially rich in iron, and possess in addition to calcium, magnesium, potassium. sodium aluminium, manganese, zinc, copper lead, silicon, phosphorus, sulphur chlorine, iodine and fluorine. Minute amounts of all these are essential to human health. There are slight traces of arsenic, boron, titanium and vanadium, for all of which the human body is believed to have a need. Under recent techniques developed by Department of Agriculture and State experiment station scientists the hen is turned into an egg-produc-ing machine, far different from the spasmodically-laying bird of a generation ago.—"Auckland Star" and N.A.N.A.