HOW THE WORLD IS FED 



muscles of meats, the casein of milk, the 

 gluten of flour, and the nitrogenous fats. 

 It may also happen that as a result of 

 the war will come the utilization of other 

 plant products than those now entering 

 into direct use as human food. There 

 are approximately half a million species 

 of plants in the world, and yet only a few 

 thousand of them are used at all for food, 

 while only a few hundred of these are 

 used to any important extent. Some of 

 the plants which we now grow are ex- 

 pensive food - producers, some produce 

 food that is difficult to digest, and some 

 give a small yield per acre. 



DEVELOPING XEW FOODS 



We are constantly developing new 

 foods. It is only little more than half a 

 century since the tomato was a curiosity 

 of the South, known as the "love apple," 

 and used to scare the slaves, who thought 

 it poisonous. Corn came to us from the 

 Indians, and has become one of the lead- 

 ing cereal crops of the world. It is less 

 than a century ago that the lima bean 

 came to us from South America, and the 

 potato was unknown to civilization be- 

 fore the white man went to Peru and 

 Colombia (see page 42). 



Today representatives of all of the 

 leading nations are scouring the remote 

 places of the earth for crops which prom- 

 ise to increase the world's total yield of 

 food, as well as its per-acre production. 

 In our own Department of Agriculture 

 we have a division which has brought 

 perhaps 40,000 different kinds of plants 

 into the United States, many of them to 

 be placed on trial as food-producers. 



The Mission Fathers of our Southwest 

 who brought the olive and the date from 

 the Mediterranean region, gave to Cali- 

 fornia some of the richest olive and date 

 orchards in the world, while a woman 

 missionary, traveling in Brazil, sent us 

 cuttings from which the great orange- 

 growing industry of our country has 

 been developed (see page 71). 



FRUITS AXD VEGETABLES HAVE BEEN 

 WONDERFULLY IMPROVED 



Not only is mankind gradually increas- 

 ing the possible acreage for the growing 

 of foodstuffs — and statistics indicate that 



only the most fertile third of the world's 

 potential food - producing acreage is 

 under cultivation today — but the crops 

 themselves are being constantly improved 

 and their natural per-acre yield increased. 

 It is a far cry from the little old 

 knotted and gnarled apples of a few cen- 

 turies ago to the magnificent Stayman 

 winesaps, York imperials, and Albemarle 

 pippins of today ; and it is also a far cry 

 from the unimproved, small and hard 

 peach of the olden days to the big, lus- 

 cious Alberta of the present; nor is the 

 change that has come over the potato 

 since Burbank begun his experiments any 

 less noted. Both in the animal and in the 

 vegetable world a marked improvement 

 is constantly taking place. Whether there 

 will be further improvements as a result 

 of the war in Europe remains to be seen. 



WHAT OF THE FUTURE D | 



Many men are inclined to sound a pes- 

 simistic note as to the adequacy of the 

 world's food supply for future genera- 

 tions, and, like Malthus a hundred years 

 ago, are inclined to predict that the day 

 has at last come when the human race 

 must cease to expand its numbers, or else 

 face inevitable hunger. 



And when we consider how many 

 mouths there are in this world to feed, 

 and how much food it takes to satisfy 

 them, little room is there to wonder at 

 this note of pessimism. 



The earth's population today reaches a 

 grand total of about 1,700,000,000 souls. 

 If they were all set down at a banquet it 

 would require sixteen tables reaching 

 around the globe to seat them. For every 

 ounce of food they ate, the dinner-giver 

 would have to provide 53,000 tons of pro- 

 visions, and if the dinner were no more 

 than a democratic dollar-a-plate affair, it 

 would cost, in the aggregate, as much as 

 it costs to run the United States govern- 

 ment a year and a half. 



Expressed in terms of annual con- 

 sumption, the world's market basket is 

 one that defies portrayal in weight and 

 size. One is forced to cast around for 

 new units of measurement to give a 

 proper idea of its proportions. Assum- 

 ing that the average inhabitant of the 

 earth uses two pounds of provisions a 



