506 SYMPOSIUM ON FOOD PROBLEMS 



real results in the education of the people of a democracy so that 

 they would stand for the necessities of compulsory rationing when 

 it came. It has now come, and it will go sometime after the end of 

 the war, probably not before. 



The actual food saving results for the first months, are, I fear, 

 too nearly indicated by the action of a certain railroad which in 

 April of this year on its dining car bill of fare flamboyantly adver- 

 tised itself as cooperating with the United States Food Administra- 

 tion, announced that luncheon was a wheatless meal, and then a few 

 lines below offered for luncheon the following: 



Rye bread and butter, lo cents. 



Graham bread and butter, lo cents. 



Boston brown bread, 15 cents. 



Dry or buttered toast, rye or graham, 15 cents. 



Virginia corn mufiins, 10 cents. 



Mashed potatoes, 20 cents. 



It refused to sell to any person a second order of Virginia corn 

 muffins, and meanwhile charged 20 cents for a portion of mashed 

 potatoes, when it is well known that the potato is the most important 

 substitute for wheat and its near equals rye and barley. Further- 

 more, potatoes were at that moment a drug on the market, as the 

 Food Administration had announced. If that railroad had been sci- 

 entifically trying to help the Food Administration save wheat rather 

 than indulging in some pious self-advertising, it would have sold 

 mashed potatoes for 5 cents or at most 10 cents, and corn bread for 

 10 cents, allowing a repeat order, and charged 20 cents' or 25 cents 

 for wheat or rye bread, thereby automatically reducing the amount 

 sold to a fraction of actual sales. Similar examples could be ad- 

 duced indefinitely. 



It has also been a great misfortune that the people have been 

 unable to secure adequate quantities of substitute cereals at reason- 

 able prices. A week ago to-day corn flour was quoted to me, four 

 blocks from here, at 10 cents a pound, and wheat flour at 8 cents a 

 pound. This indicates a deplorable condition in a country short of 

 wheat and actually producing more than three times as much corn 

 as wheat, and with a government that has begun to substitute statute 

 law for the law of supply and demand. 



