June 20, 19 18] 



NATURE 



j^o 



scientific men rather than on the political 

 exigencies of the moment. Thus the United 

 Kingfdom, alone among- the European Allies, has 

 been able to maintain a distribution of bread free 

 from any restriction, at a time when all the others 

 felt themselves constrained to limit the consump- 

 tion of this, the most essential of all foods, by a 

 system of rationing. This policy does not mean, 

 as is so often thought, that the shortage of bread- 

 stuffs in this country was less than that of the 

 other Allies. But Lord Rhondda adopted the 

 scientific policy of economising cereals at the 

 expense of animals, instead of the more obvious 

 expedient of diminishing directly the supply of 

 bread to man. . . 



When the pooling of supplies was decided upon 

 by the Allies meeting in conference, a satisfactory 

 distribution was found practically impossible in 

 the absence of precise knowledge both as to the 

 resources and as to the needs of each nation. Tlie 

 needs of a country depend on physiological 

 facts, and can Ije deduced from a knowledge of 

 the nutritional requirements of its inhabitants of 

 varying age and sex, and the distribution of these 

 classes of individuals among the population. The 

 question is, therefore, fundamentally a physio- 

 logical one. The resources of a country can be 

 gathered from the statistical information at the 

 disposal of the Government with regard to 

 agricultural production and trade returns, etc., 

 but the value of these resources as human food is 

 also a question which can be determined only by 

 physiologists. On this account, the Inter-Allied 

 Congress, sitting at Versailles in the autumn of 

 1917, decided to establish an Inter-Allied Scientific 

 Food Commission, consisting of two representa- 

 tives of each of the Allied countries, France, Italy, 

 the United Kingdom, and the United States, which 

 should perform towards the Allies as a whole some- 

 what similar functions to those which had been 

 discharged for the United Kingdom by the Food 

 Committee of the Royal Society. The task of this 

 Commission was, therefore, to examine the re- 

 sources of each of the Allied countries, to make a 

 forecast of their production for the year 1918-ig, 

 and to report on the imports which should be 

 allotted to each country in order that it should 

 be supplied with suflRcient food to maintain its 

 population in health and efficiency. 



The Commission has held three meetings^at 

 Paris, Rome, and London. In the first two meet- 

 ings the Commission was mainly employed in 

 establishing certain principles which should serve 

 as a basis for its recommendations as to the 

 imports necessary to meet the deficit of each 

 country. It was of importance in the first place 

 that all countries should make use of the same 

 units of measurement, and base their cal- 

 culations of food values on the same sets of figures 

 for calorie value and composition of the chief food- 

 stuffs. Thus it was agreed to use the metric ton as 

 the unit of weight, the hectare as the unit of area. 

 A list of the average calorie values of foods,' based 

 chiefly on the results of Atwater, was drawn up 

 NO. 2538, VOL. lOl] 



for use by all Allied countries. As regards the 

 food requirements of the ' average man,' and the 

 relation thereto of women and children of various 

 ages, the Commission accepted the figures given 

 by Lusk. Uniform milling values were arranged, 

 and all countries accepted the principle that the 

 maximum possible amount of cereals, with the 

 exception of oats, should be assigned to human 

 food. It was also agreed that, whereas it is im- 

 possible to fix any minimum requirement for meat, 

 it is desirable that the ration of fat should at no 

 time fall below 75 grams per ' average man ' 

 per day. The question of a minimum protein 

 ration presented no difficulty, since a sufficient 

 amount of this foodstuff is contained in a mixed 

 diet of adequate calorie value. The Commission 

 thus accepted Bayliss's dictum : "Take care of the 

 calories and the protein will take care of itself." 

 The Commission also laid down the form in which 

 the statistics of production in pre-war years and 

 the forecast of production in the coming vear 

 should be presented by each delegation from infor- 

 mation supplied by its Government. 



We understand that the examination of these 

 balance-sheets for each country has been the work 

 of the Commission during its meeting in 

 London, which has just terminated, and that the 

 Commission will shortly present to the Allied 

 Governments for the use of the Inter-Allied 

 Executives, on whom devolves the task of procur- 

 ing and apportioning the foods available for 

 import from abroad, a report in which is laid down 

 the relative share in these imports due to each 

 Allied country. It must not be imagined, however, 

 that it is the office of such a scientific commission 

 to effect a rigorous suMivision of the hundred- 

 and-one articles which may enter the AUied 

 countries as food. All it can do is to indicate the 

 principles of such a division and the limits within 

 which it must be carried out. The total food to 

 be imported will be given by the number of food 

 calories due to each country. Some indication as 

 to the distribution of these calories among staple 

 foods, such as meat and cereals, is afforded by 

 the agreement that 75 grams of fat per day 

 should be provided in each country for every 

 * average man. ' In this way a rough subdivision 

 of imports is achieved, but the final division must 

 l>e left to the Executives, who will be guided by 

 the three controlling factors, viz. supplies, 

 tonnage, and finance. 



But this, after all, is the proper limitation of the 

 function of science in public affairs. Science 

 should be the eyes, the informative organ of the 

 State, rather than the organ of volition. The 

 responsibility of action lies with the administration, 

 but the success of the measures adopted will be in 

 direct proportion to the degree in which they are 

 based on the broad principles taught by the body 

 of human experience, which is science. 



The members of the Inter-Allied Scientific Food 

 Commission are as follows : — France, Profs. Gley and 

 Langlois ; Italv, Profs. Bottazzi and Pagliani ; 

 Belgium, Prof. Rulot; United States, Profs. Chitten- 



