HOW THE WORLD IS FED 



19 



production of meat, omitting horse and 

 goat meat, of 85.7 pounds per capita 

 among the Central Powers. The Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture gives the average 

 German consumption as 113 pounds, and 

 the average Austria-Hungarian consump- 

 tion as 64 pounds. It is probable that 

 Bulgarian and Turkish consumption ap- 

 ■ proximates that of the Russian, which is 

 50 pounds. 



WE ARE EATING EESS MEAT 



In the past few years the United States 

 has shown a tendency to reduce the vol- 

 ume of meat it consumes per capita. The 

 high cost of butchers' meats has forced 

 Americans to find substitutes, and it is 

 not improbable that in the course of an- 

 other generation meat eating in this coun- 

 try will fall far below the mark it has 

 hitherto held. 



Not only has our home consumption of 

 meat fallen off, but our exports of ani- 

 mal products have declined immensely in 

 ten years. If it were not for our enor- 

 mous exports of lard, we would be in 

 danger of having our foreign meat trade 

 become a negligible quantity. 



But in spite of the slowing up of per 

 capita home consumption and of our de- 

 clining meat export trade, the meat-pack- 

 ing industry today still takes first rank 

 among all the manufacturing industries 

 of the United States in the value of its 

 products. Under the 1910 census the 

 products of the meat-packing industry 

 were valued at $1,370,000,000, as com- 

 pared with $1,228,000,000 for foundry 

 and machine-shop products, their closest 

 rival (see pages 18 and 20). 



More than 100,000 people are engaged 

 in the slaughtering and meat-packing in- 

 dustry. During a recent year the on-the- 

 hoof production of meats on the Ameri- 

 can farm was: 8,265,000,000 pounds of 

 beef, 409,000,000 pounds of veal, 987,- 

 000,000 pounds of mutton and lamb, and 

 6,856,000,000 pounds of pork. 



THE IMPORTANCE OE LARD 



Lard is one of the principal items of 

 animal products exported from the 

 United States today. Our total produc- 

 tion of this commodity annually amounts 

 to approximately 1,500,000,000 pounds, 



of which more than 500,000,000 pounds 

 go to other countries. Germany hereto- 

 fore has taken the bulk of the lard we 

 have exported, and the cutting off of this 

 supply has been one of the hardships the 

 Central Powers have had to face (see 

 pages 21 and 22). 



We use more than 10 pounds per capita 

 in the United States, and it is generally 

 believed that the German demand for this 

 product is larger per capita than our own. 

 If the 41,000,000 hogs slaughtered within 

 the confines of the Central Powers an- 

 nually produce as much dard per animal 

 as ours, the per capita supply of the Cen- 

 tral Powers will approximate a little less 

 than 8 pounds. 



While many substitutes for lard have 

 been found, among them cotton-seed oil 

 and olive oil, there is no prospect that the 

 world will ever be able to do without a 

 very large supply of this product of the 

 hog. The necessity of some fat or oil in 

 the human diet is borne witness to no 

 less by the experts in dietetics than by the 

 universality of the use of fats and oils in 

 cooking throughout the world. 



One cannot go far enough afield — even 

 in the remotest corners of the earth — to 

 get beyond the reign of vegetable oils and 

 animal fats in the human dietary. Fats 

 are the greatest of all of the heat and 

 energy producers with which nature pro- 

 vides mankind. The man fed on a diet 

 from which all fats and oils are excluded 

 very soon has serious disturbances of his 

 digestive processes. 



THE EVOLUTION OF THE PACKING-HOUSE 



The meat-packing business is the de- 

 velopment of the present generation. 

 Where once there were slaughter-houses 

 in every community, and the business of 

 slaughtering live stock for food was 

 widely scattered, today the industry is 

 narroAvly concentrated, and a half dozen 

 packing towns do perhaps three-fourths 

 of all of the butchering business of the 

 country. 



When Gustavus Swift first conceived 

 the idea of doing the butchering near the 

 centers of animal production and ship- 

 ping the dressed meat to the centers of 

 consumption, he saved to the American 

 consumer one of the heaviest freight bills 



