August 17, 1917] 



SCIENCE 



161 



Eoast pig, to those who like it, is not only a 

 delicacy but a valuable article of diet, but 

 nevertheless, as the Chinese presumably came 

 to realize, it is possible to pay too high a price 

 for it, and while a proposal to restrict rather 

 than to promote meat production in the 

 present crisis may appear both irrational and 

 unpatriotic it may nevertheless be in the in- 

 terest of true food economy. 



This is because of one cardinal fact which 

 the advocates of the multiplication of farm 

 live stock, the prohibition of the slaughter 

 of yoimg animals, etc., overlook. That fact 

 is that not only must the meat or milk pro- 

 ducing animal be fed (and even this appears 

 to be forgotten at times) but that the con- 

 version of feed into animal products is a proc- 

 ess of relatively low efficiency. 



Man needs food primarily as fuel to supply 

 the energy for his activities and secondarily 

 to furnish the repair material (protein) for 

 the bodily machinery. An active adult re- 

 quires daily some 4,000 calories of energy, 

 the amount varying more or less according 

 to the amount of physical work done. He 

 can get this energy from either vegetable or 

 animal products. He may make his wheat 

 or corn into bread and use that bread as body 

 fuel, or he may feed them to animals and 

 consume the resulting meat or milk. The 

 latter are excellent body fuels and are de- 

 sirable ingredients of the dietary but their 

 production from grains is a very wasteful 

 process. It may be roughly estimated that 

 about 24 per cent, of the energy of grain is 

 recovered for human consumption in pork, 

 about 18 per cent, in milk and only about 3.5 

 per cent, in beef and mutton. In other words, 

 the farmer who feeds bread grains to his 

 stock is unconsciously imitating the Chinese 

 method and is burning up 75 to 97 per cent, 

 of them in order to produce for us a small 

 residue of roast pig, and so is diminishing 

 the total stock of human food. 



Now most of us like roast pig and its pro- 

 duction in this way has doubtless been eco- 

 nomically justifiable in years past when our 

 food supply was vastly in excess of our needs. 

 To-day the case is different. No longer can 



we continue to take the children's bread 

 and cast it to the brutes. If our meat supply 

 is to be maintained or increased it must be 

 in some other way. All the edible products 

 which the farmer's acres can yield are needed 

 for human consumption. The task of the stock 

 feeder must be to utilize through his skill 

 and knowledge the inedible products of the 

 farm and factory such as hay, corn stalks, 

 straw, bran, brewers' and distillers' grains, 

 gluten feed, and the like, and to make at least 

 a fraction of them available for man's use. In 

 so doing he will be really adding to the food sup- 

 ply and will be rendering a great public sevice. 

 Eather than seek to stimulate live stock hus- 

 bandry the ideal should be to adjust it to the 

 limits set by the available supply of forage 

 crops and by-product feeding stuffs while, on 

 the other hand, utilizing these to the greatest 

 practicable extent, because in this way we save 

 some of what would otherwise be a total loss. 

 In particular the recommendation to raise 

 more hogs seems to call for some qualification. 

 It is indeed true, as several have pointed out, 

 that the hog can make more pounds of edible 

 meat from a given amount of concentrated 

 feed than any other class of live stock. The 

 point is that with the present demand for 

 bread grains we can not afford the cost of the 

 conversion. So far as hogs can be raised on 

 forage and by-products the recommendation 

 is sound, and this animal can play an impor- 

 tant part in utilizing domestic and other 

 wastes, but the hog is the great competitor 

 of man for the higher grades of food and in 

 swine husbandry as ordinarily conducted we 

 are in danger of paying too much for our 

 roast pig. Cattle and sheep, on the other 

 hand, although less efficient as converters, can 

 utilize products which man can not use and 

 save some of their potential value as human 

 food. From this point of view, as well as on 

 account of the importance of milk to infants 

 and invalids, the high economy of food pro- 

 duction by the dairy cow deserves careful con- 

 sideration, although of coiu-se the large labor 

 requirement is a counter-balancing factor. 



At any rate, it is clear that at the present 

 time enthusiastic but ill considered " boom- 



