Food for Buoyant Health 217 



not have enough money to spend for a liberal diet even if the 

 food were available in the markets; second, dislocations and 

 inadequacies in transportation, farm labor, and factory help 

 can be severe enough to cause failure to care for the crops. 



Urgent Need of Food Education 



As a nation we are probably better fed now than before the 

 war. For we are being educated. 



We are being educated to think in terms of conserving our 

 food supply. The Food Distribution Administration has given 

 us some appalling figures on the waste of our food supply. 

 According to them, the food wasted in American homes in 

 1942 was sufficient to feed the entire population and the 

 armed forces, too, for eight weeks. 



The armed forces and Lend-Lease took 1 3 per cent of our 

 total food supply. American homes wasted 15 per cent of the 

 total food supply. The total wastage of food, from the farm 

 to the garbage pail, was 40 per cent. In other words, we 

 wasted three times as much food as it took to feed our Army 

 and to provide all the food sent abroad in Lend-Lease. 



We are being educated to stop this waste. And we are be- 

 ing educated to think in terms of buying health when we buy 

 food. Until the present emergency made the health of the 

 nation a matter of acute concern, our interest in a really suf- 

 ficient diet was moderate, to say the least. When enriched 

 bread was first put on the market, many storekeepers intro- 

 duced it and then stopped handling it. There was not enough 

 consumer demand for the added value to enable the store- 

 keeper to stock it. People went right on buying the same 

 wrapper they had bought before, and the enriched bread lay 

 on the shelf. Education is changing that situation. 



However, education still has a long way to go in changing 

 the habits of the American public. It has long been a favorite 



