CONSUMPTION 93 



prices which must be paid for many staple and fancy foods, the 

 advantage with respect to such foods seems to lie with the careful 

 buyer in the large town or city. The small town, with its garden and 

 other opportunities for home production of food products, is, of course, 

 midway between the city and country. Each region has its attrac- 

 tions and its special advantages, but the underlying principles with 

 respect to economical home management are the same in every 

 locality. It is with a view to helping the producer to provide the 

 food supplies which are most needed and the housewife to solve her 

 problems that studies of the kind and amount of food eaten, the rela- 

 tive nutritive value of different foods, the comparative economy of 

 different methods of cooking, and related questions have been under- 

 taken by this department. 



B. The Relation of Public Consumption to the Farmer's 

 Production 



22. "CONSUMPTION OF MEAT ENCOURAGES AGRICULTURE" 1 

 BY ARTHUR YOUNG 



Whatever a people principally consumes for their subsistence must 

 be the great object of the husbandman in his culture : thus in France, 

 where bread, I apprehend, forms nineteen parts in twenty of their 

 food, corn, and especially wheat, is the only great object of cultiva- 

 tion, vines answering to our barley. In England, on the contrary, 

 the quantity of meat, butter, and cheese consumed by all ranks of 

 the people is immense to a much greater value, I should suppose, 

 than that of wheat; hence, cattle to our farmers is an object as 

 important as corn. Thus the husbandmen in France keep scarcely 

 any cattle, addicting themselves almost entirely to corn ; in England 

 vast quantities of cattle are kept. This circumstance, I should appre- 

 hend, would, if everything else was equal, give a prodigious superiority 

 to the English agriculture. 



Let us consider on what principles the farmers of the two countries 

 must necessarily manage their lands. In England they keep such 

 part of their farms in meadow and pasture as are by the nature of the 

 soil so adapted; they throw their arable land into such courses of 

 crops that several are introduced which are either summer or winter 

 food for cattle. Under this system the quantity of dung raised is 



1 Adapted from Political Arithmetic (1774), PP- 158-61, 163. 



