458 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



limiting actual consumption. According to recent government inves- 

 tigations the waste in families in the United States with incomes less 

 than $800 per annum amounts to 3 per cent to 4 per cent, while in 

 the case of families with- incomes between $1,000 to $3,000 the waste 

 frequently amounts to 10 per cent to 25 per cent. Not less, perhaps, 

 is the waste in the marketing of produce not to speak of the waste 

 in harvesting, or of the waste which occurs through overeating. To 

 take a single illustration, it is estimated that the loss by breakage 

 and wastage in the marketing of eggs in the United States amounts to 

 $50,000,000 annually. 



It is easy to overestimate the amount of actual saving from such 

 sources that may occur in tunes of straitened purchasing power, yet 

 it can hardly be doubted that there is considerably less rigidity of 

 demand with reference to the food supply of a people with a generous 

 and even wasteful standard of living like our own than in the case of 

 the peoples of Asiatic countries or, perhaps, even in Europe. 



There is substantial proof of large increase in consumption of 

 certain special articles of food, such as sugar, tea, raisins, tobacco, 

 and some kinds of fruit. On the other hand, to offset these increases 

 there is the decrease hi consumption in more important articles of 

 food. Meat is supposed to have constituted about one-half of the 

 dietary of the people of this country in 1840, while by 1900 it had 

 declined about one-third and has probably declined appreciably since. 

 The consumption of corn as human food has also largely decreased in 

 this country since early days especially in New England and in the 

 South and wheat bread has been largely substituted for rye bread 

 in Europe. 



On the whole, therefore, such statistics as are available bear out 

 the a priori conclusion that the consumption of food on the part of 

 the human animal is relatively fixed in amount and that the demand 

 for food as a whole is relatively rigid and inelastic. 



This, however, does not prove that the demand for all agricultural 

 products is practically fixed. The farmer is not engaged solely in the 

 production of foodstuffs but to an important extent also in the pro- 

 duction of textile fibers not to speak of still other products of less 

 importance. The demand for the textile fibers depends, of course, 

 upon the demand for clothing; and the demand for clothing- -espe- 

 cially in a country like our own is decidedly elastic in character. In 

 periods of high prices or of straitened purchasing power clothing can 



