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presented to the Truman Senate Committee indicated that 

 one fifth of all the food entering the army mess halls ended 

 in the garbage cans. One third of the cereals, one half of the 

 soups, and one fifth of the meat was wasted. No doubt a part 

 of the situation will be corrected as experience is gained. A 

 part of the waste may be due to the fact that young folks 

 do not take to cereals and are not ravenous soup-consumers. 

 They detest and will not eat the kale that the nutritionists 

 recommend. 



Large amounts of shipped food are lost in transit. Other 

 shipments may reach their destination, but there may not 

 be adequate terminal facilities to take care of all of them. 

 Tons of butter and thousands of cans of fruit spoiled in 

 Alaska because of inadequate storage facilities. With the un- 

 certainties of war, it is inevitable that large amounts of food 

 will be lost in transportation, in storage dumps, or even in 

 its final stages of preparation. If this loss were as much as 

 ten per cent of the consumption of ten million soldiers, 

 the losses would be equivalent to the addition of over one 

 million persons to our dinner table. This is not a formidable 

 amount, but it does add to the problem. This is one of the 

 inevitable wastes of war, and little can be done about it. 



The Government a Big Hoarder 



In time of scarcity, the government tells the consumer that 

 it is unpatriotic to hoard, but fixes low prices on food prod- 

 ucts and so encourages him to hoard. The net result is some 

 increase in the amount of food carried on civilian shelves. 

 Relative to normal household stocks, the increase is not 

 large. The typical consumer is not equipped to increase his 

 stocks of food because he has no place to store it. Whatever 

 changes occur, they contribute only to the apparent shortage. 



In time of war the government becomes the greatest 

 hoarder. On April 1, 1943 the government commandeered 



