SOCIAL ASPECTS OF NUTRITION 



early development of this country, there was an opportunity to obtain 

 food by hunting, fishing, and farming. Today, it is worse 

 than useless; it is cruel to tell a malnourished man that he 

 needs better food when his lack of food is due to his inability to buy it, 

 or when the food is not available in his locality. A few years ago we 

 were destroying so-called food surpluses although many thousands of 

 people in this country had deficiency diseases. The trouble was not 

 overproduction in terms of adequate food for everyone but a failure 

 in distribution. Much food had to be destroyed because there was 

 no market for it, the producer was threatened with economic ruin, 

 and there was no mechanism by which the food could be made avail- 

 able to those who needed it for better nutrition. 



This anomaly of want in the midst of plenty was partly due to 

 the fact that scientists were working independently on narrow aspects 

 of the problem and there was no organization for putting all the 

 knowledge together into a unified plan. The existing knowledge had 

 not been made available either to the public or to those responsible 

 for handling the food supply. This defect has been remedied to some 

 extent by action taken as a result of the National Nutrition Conference 

 in 1941, and by the establishment of the Food and Nutrition Board of 

 the National Research Council, which has played a useful part during 

 the war and which should continue to render valuable service to the 

 nation, by making scientific knowledge more readily available, by 

 enabling scientists to see nutritional problems as a whole, and by 

 giving them an opportunity to participate in the application of their 

 knowledge to human welfare. Had we, as a nation, recognized and 

 met our obligation to make adequate nutrition available to everyone 

 who needed it, the so-called surpluses never would have existed. No 

 nation has ever produced enough of the right kinds of food to meet 

 the needs of adequate nutrition for its entire population. 



It is only within the past few years that research in nutrition and 

 biochemistry has brought our knowledge to the point at which we 

 could with some assurance formulate a dietary we know is adequate 

 for health. Such a dietary has been set forth in the recommended 

 dietary allowances of the National Research Council (4). With this 

 basic and essential information, the scientist is now ready to ask society 

 if it is willing to accept as a principle of democracy that everyone is 

 entitled to an opportunitv to secure a diet adequate for health. This 



