ECONOMICS OF THE FISHERIES 329 



Quantities of Food Eaten. The belief prevails that wide differences exist, even 

 in normal times, in the quantity of food eaten per person in different parts of 

 the world. We visualize the Chinese, Japanese, and Indians as existing on only 

 a fraction of the food we eat. But this is not true.^^ Food consumption on no 

 continent differs more than a few per cent one way or the other from the world 

 average of about 560 pounds, dry weight, per person. 



Why do our ideas on this question differ so much from the facts ? It is partly 

 because famines in areas like China and India have been over-emphasized. The 

 periodic famines which occur in these areas are local and temporary. Some 

 people die, but following the famine, when good crops return, the survivors — 

 who are most of the people, on a proportionate basis — eat enough extra to re- 

 build their bodies to about their former weights. The life-time consumption of 

 the survivors is affected little by the famine. 



The difference between overeating and starvation is an amazingly small 

 amount of food. To illustrate, if an ordinary adult were to reduce the amount of 

 his food intake by only about three per cent, he would lose about 10 pounds of 

 weight in a year's time ; if he were to increase it by three per cent, he would gain 

 about 10 pounds in a year. This change in weight would, of course, be so small 

 as to be unnoticeable day by day, and hardly noticeable week by week. But in 

 10 years' time it would amount to a loss or gain of 100 pounds. This amount of 

 change is conceivable only for a person either seriously overweight or under- 

 weight, as the case may be, before this loss or gain occurred ; it is unthinkable 

 on a continuing basis, on a national scale. 



The record of the consumption of food in the United States, considered in 

 a historical annual series from 1909 to 1948, is presented in detail in a report 

 by the U. S. Department of Agriculture, prepared under the supervision of 

 Gavin and Burk (1949). For each kind of food consumed in each year the 

 amount, expressed in customary retail weights, which was available for con- 

 sumption (i.e., "disappeared") was computed as the sum of ascertained or 

 partly estimated production, stocks on hand at the beginning of the year, and 

 imports, less the sum of exports and stocks on hand at the close of the year. 

 Numerous corrections and adjustments are made (for the details of which 

 see the publication cited), so as to make the record as accurate and as com- 

 parable throughout as possible. Summary serial tables exhibit the quantities 

 by weight of the various classes of foods and of the totals of all foods con- 

 sumed per capita per annum, and also computations of the annual average 

 content per capita per day of food energy in calories, the various nutritive 

 elements in appropriate units, and both of the latter in terms of indexes for 

 comparative purposes. 



15. "Quantity," as used here, refers to the amount of food on a dry basis. To include the full 

 weight of foods with their varying water contents, from cereals with a low water content to 

 lettuce having 95 per cent water, is to use a basis for comparison that is meaningless for this 

 purpose. Perhaps equally satisfactory, and giving essentially the same conclusions as these based 

 on dry weights, would have been comparisons in terms of calories or total digestible nutrients. 



