The Press SATURDAY, JUNE 21, 1941. War Diet

Press, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23361, 21 June 1941, Page 8

The Press SATURDAY, JUNE 21, 1941. War Diet

According to a London message this week, Professor, V. H. Mottram has reported the appearance of scurvy in Britain. He attributed it, of course, to shortages (or to bad distribution) of foods containing vitamin C during the winter. If the disease were widespread, the report would be a very disturbing one, as evidence of failure to maintain the nation’s war diet at a standard adequate for health • and efficiency. But it seems more than probable that Professor Mottram has used the appearance of comparatively few cases as a warning illustration of the need to see that the nation s health is protected by care to provide qualitative as well as quantitative sufficiency, which is as much a problem of distribution as of total supply. It is also a problem of instruction and persuasion, because full success is impossible without more change in feeding habits and cooking practice than rationing and market shortages make compulsory. No factor in the total problem has been neglected. The lessons of the war of 1914-18 and of nutritional research since have been too clear to be ignored; and the Ministry of Food, aided by Professor Drummond as scientific adviser, by the Medical Research Council on Nutrition, by 12 or 13 research stations, and by widespread and continuous official, propaganda, has worked steadily to apply them. The British Government has been spending more than £100,000,000 a year on food subsidies in order to keep food cheap enough for small incomes. But not all the obstacles have been overcome. Last summer, for example, although the country had responded vigorously to official calls and vegetables were grown in abundance on innumerable allotments, the distribution of these supplies was lamentably imperfect. Tinned fruit aqd tinned vegetables, which ought to have gone into reserve, were used in vast quantities, while fresh glutted the markets and went to waste. Growers who had planned to supply military camps, free, had their produce rejected because army cooks preferred the tinned stuff in the .stores. They managed better in Scotland. But the major difficulty, and one that the rationing scale, the law of averages, and price subsidies have failed to meet, is that while the income of one poor family may buy enough, the same income will not buy enough for the larger family next door. In the House of Lords, three months ago, Lord Samuel said that there were 1,250,000 children, in famines larger than the average, who had to be fed from average incomes, and therefore were underfed or wrongly fed.

When some five or six hungry children in a. large 'family - are' sitting round a table ana clamouring for more to eat, it is no answer to say that, on . the average, there is a sufficiency for everyone, that in the next-door house there may be no children and the same wage going in and that if you take the average of the whole street thertf is sufficient food for everyone.

Lord Stamp based on this evidence, which was not contested, a suggestion that in meeting any claim for wage advances, in adjustment to the cost of living, the Government should adopt the principle of allowances, for the "heeds of “the additional children.” in families larger than the base-average of two. Professor Mottram’s proposal, that adults’ rations should be cut down and'children’s increased, is directed,to the sathe ehd but is probably connected with a scheme of much more elaborately controlled rationing'and distribution.