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THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 



Shipping Board brought ships from 

 all over the world, from the remote 

 trade routes in the Pacific, and put 

 them to work on the short line between 

 Europe and America. The ships were 

 no longer under orders from their 

 owners, but an interallied board of men 

 of genius and capacity directed whether 

 a ship should go here or there in ac- 

 cordance with the situation. England, 

 who owned most of the ships, did not 

 have the deciding voice if Italy's need 

 was at the moment predominant. Here, 

 indeed, was interallied government con- 

 trol which could be effective only through 

 the renunciation of many national rights 

 in the interest of world welfare. The 

 working out of such a scheme is pro- 

 phetic of the success of a League of 

 ISTations. It was the same way with the 

 food question. Theoretically at least, 

 we were all pledged to eat at a common 

 table in the interests of a common vic- 

 tory over the war lords of Berlin. 



The beginning of the present year 

 witnessed an effective propaganda on 

 the part of Mr. Hoover's Food Admin- 

 istration for the saving of wheat on 

 the part of the people of the United 

 States. Our usual surplus carry-over 

 of the summer before had all been ex- 

 ported, and our crop of 1917 was only 

 Just equal to the necessities of our own 

 people, which amounts to an annual 

 per capita consumption of five bushels 

 or 500,000,000 for the whole country. 

 Our own people had never worked so 

 hard, they had never been so well paid, 

 and the natural tendency was toward 

 a larger consumption of all food ma- 

 terials. The response to the appeal 

 was whole-hearted. Several of the 

 southern states pledged themselves to 

 eat no wheat until the next crop was 

 harvested, and corn bread became the 

 bread of every patriotic citizen. The 

 supply of corn meal for this purpose is 

 practically unlimited in America, since 

 Indian corn is always our greatest crop, 

 reaching in 1917 more than 3,000,000,- 

 000 bushels. Under ordinarv circum- 



stances only 6 per cent of the corn crop 

 is used for human food. The rest is 

 used as fodder for cattle. The number 

 of pigs raised is quite proportional to 

 the size of the corn crop, and in the 

 spring of this year Mr. Hoover was 

 able to offer to the Allies in one lot 

 450,000 tons of pork products. This 

 single offer was sufficient to give an 

 ounce of pork apiece to the 43,000,000 

 of the civilian population of Great 

 Britain daily for a year and to provide 

 about 20 per cent of its total re- 

 quirement of fat. Such results were 

 obtained by transforming the corn of 

 our western states into fat pork, and 

 by the fact that we gave up eating 

 bacon and pork in order to save the 

 material for our Allies. 



At the beginning of the year, as we 

 have seen, the Allies were threatened, 

 first, by the submarine warfare; second, 

 by our wheat crop shortage; and third, 

 by the possible contingency of a second 

 crop shortage which might eventuate 

 in 1918. For that reason an Inter- 

 allied Scientific Food Commission, 

 whicli had been instituted by the In- 

 terallied Council at Versailles at the 

 suggestion of Dr. Alonzo E. Taylor, 

 was called together. Professor Chitten- 

 den and I sailing for Europe on Feb- 

 ruary G to attend the meetings of the 

 Commission. 



It seemed strangely interesting to 

 transfer one's thought from the be- 

 havior of food in individual dogs and 

 sometimes in individual men. as I had 

 been doing, to the consideration of the 

 proper nutrition of 230,000,000 people 

 in Great Britain, France, Italy, and 

 the United States. 



The Interallied Scientific Food Com- 

 mission met in Paris the end of March: 

 in Rome, the first of May ; and in Lon- 

 don, early in June. It was made up 

 of two men from each country: Pro- 

 fessors Gley and Langlois, of France ; 

 Starling and Wood, of Great Britain: 

 Bottazzi and Pagliani, of Italy; and 

 Chittenden and Lusk, of the United 



