REPORT OF THE SECRETARY. 223 



the student. The demand for the technical bulletins and nutrition 

 charts has exceeded the supply, while the demand for popular bulle- 

 tins has grown very greatly, particularly during the last 10 years, and 

 has been so large that over 12,000,000 copies of Farmers' Bulletins on 

 bread, meat, milk, fish, eggs, and other foodstuffs, and their care, 

 preparation, and use in the home, and a correspondingly large num- 

 ber of other popular nutrition documents, have been required to meet 

 it; and the demand is still growing. 



This widespread distribution of information pertaining to home 

 problems is equivalent to an increase in the available food supply, 

 since it makes possible a better and more economical use of available 

 resources, and shows how needless waste and loss may be avoided. 



Farmers and housekeepers have come to realize that the Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture devotes its energies to questions which are funda- 

 mental to their interests and that it can and is ready to help them 

 solve their problems. As a result, they turn to the department for 

 help in increasing numbers. This is strikingly the case in all that 

 pertains to food and nutrition. Thousands of letters are received 

 each year from housekeepers, home makers, teachers, students, and 

 others, and, in so far as it can be done, the desired information is 

 supplied, either in printed documents or more directly by letter. The 

 department has been called " the people's university," and as a dis- 

 seminator of knowledge of farm and home topics it well deserves this 

 name. 



METHODS FOE STUDYING NUTBITION PROBLEMS. 



The dcA'elopment and standardization of methods for studying 

 nutrition problems and the devising of ways in which information 

 that has been accumulated may be best made available to housekeepers 

 and students have been an important part of the nutrition work. 

 What has been accomplished in this way is applicable not only to 

 nutrition, but also to related topics — clothing and shelter — which 

 with nutrition make up the subject of home economics. In this work 

 the department has done something which was recognized by agri- 

 cultural experts as a public need even before the Department of 

 Agriculture was established. It is evident that those who worked 

 for the founding of the Department of Agriculture had in mind the 

 desirability of studying home problems along with those of the farm, 

 for the first report of the first commissioner of the United States 

 Department of Agriculture, published in 18G2, quotes with approval 

 a statement made some 20 years earlier of the objects of a great 

 national Department of Agriculture, which includes household econ- 

 omy as a division of agriculture in its widest acceptance, together with 

 cultivation of the soil, orcharding, gardening, " rural embellishment, 

 and the veterinary art." This is logical, for all food products, most 



