CONSERVATION OF FOOD

Ohinemuri Gazette, Volume XXVIII, Issue 3853, 3 December 1917, Page 2

CONSERVATION OF FOOD

Commenting on the conservation of food, the New York Medical Journal says : "It has become proverbial that an American family wastes enough for a French family to live upon. Whether this is true or not, the French undoubtedly have not needed the lessons of the war to teach them frugality. It has been otherwise, however, with the English. The English working man does not take kindly to interference with his private life, and hence their economies have been rather ungracefully accepted. Among them are the bread order, the tea order, the price of milk order, and many others. That these restrictions ars real and not nominal is clearly evident in a recent case where- an English householder was prosecuted because scraps of bread were found in the dust-bin. To the typical' American, extravagant and taking little heed of domestic details, this will seem a case of economy carried to the point of absurdity. To the before the war Briton it would have seemed an unwarranted meddling with his private affairs. Looking at it in a more reasonable light, however, we can find! no fault in it. A nation at war to defend its very existence, must be united in every respect. Nowadays great wars are apt to be decided in less spectacular ways than in the thunder of artillery and' the charge of cavalry. The nation which can so husband its own r&sources that its people have enough to eat andi at the same time harass the enemy's source of supply so that his people feel the pinch of want, stands a good chance of winning on that ground alone, for a people who feel privation are apt to bring pressure to bear upon their rulers to end a war whict is causing their misery, even if it cannot be ended gloriously. Each citizen, then, who is making the most <tf his food supply, living on as little as possible and wasting nothing, is doing his part to win the war. The citizen who wastes the food supply ever so little is a traitor. It makes no difference that he himself can affford'to do it. Each such instance of waste detracts so much from the country's resources. Multiply one case by a hundred, a thousand, or a million, anid you have a real wakening of the nation. It; would be as if a prizefighter tried to go on in a ring with a little venal bleeding away somewhere in his body exhausting his vitality. Looked at in that way, a prosecution for wasting bread does not seem an absurdity; it is the hieght' of economy, indeed, but it sets a gocd example, an example which if follow--ed throughout the land will go far toward winning the war."