DIET AND MARKETS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22029, 8 February 1935, Page 8

DIET AND MARKETS

Lord Galway, the Governor-General-designale, suggested at the New Zealand dinner in London that one way to alleviate the farmers' difficulties would be to counteract the women's slimming fashion by persuading them to eat more. In other words women are to carry more weight in order to ease the farmers' burden. Women may reply that they do not comprise the only sex wishful to retain the slim figure popularly associated with youth. Nor, they might add, does the whole secret consist in eating less. Some people eat enormously and remain thin all their lives. Others eat sparingly and still are fat. Digestion and exercise may form the figure as much as diet. Nevertheless it is undeniable that diet habits do exercise a great influence on markets and that fashions in figures and dress affect prices by directing demand. Lord Galway suggests that women should eat more and it would certainly cause a revolution in the producers' world if mankind ' returned to the enormous meals of heavy foods customary in the 18th and early 19th centuries. At present such a dietary throw-back does not seem likely. "But some little while ago the fashion oracles were said to be looking kindly on the return of "curves." That did not necessarily mean that women were going to eat more to round themselves off. Rather it meant they could eat different things, foodstuffs prohibited in the laws of slimming. It is hard to see how such a change would benefit New Zealand, unless some overseas pastoralists turned their attention to wheat and potatoes. The Dominion's output of meat and dairy produce has not been hit by slimming, for, strange as it may seem, even butterfat is not considered such an offence as the carbohydrates. Possibly the chief beneficiaries from slimming, helped also by all the new knowledge about vitamins and mineral salts, have been the growers of fruit and vegetables. Consider the rise of the apple, and the newer vogues of the orange and tomato. Of more import to New Zealand, through its indirect effect on the supply of butter and cheese, is the increasing emphasis in > North America and Europe by dietitians, doctors and now politicians, of the vital social importance of increasing the milk ration, especially for children, Instances could be multiplied but the sober fact of the influence of habit, fashion, fad and fancy on markets and prices is sufficiently demonstrated. These trends, in dress as well as diet, are so important to the producer that his representatives would do well to find out whether by study they might anticipate the general direction of demand and profitably provide against it.