FORMING NEW FASHIONS IN FOOD 



The Bearing of Taste on One of Our Great Food 



Economies, the Dried Vegetable, Which Is 



Developing Into a Big War Industry 



By David Fairchild 



Agricultural Explorer in Charge of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction, 

 U. S. Department oe Agriculture 



WHEN you brand a food as not 

 fit to eat, how do you arrive at 

 that conclusion ? If it is a food 

 that you have never eaten before, how do 

 you know that you are right ? If it is one 

 with which you are familiar, how do you 

 know that the difficulty does not lie in the 

 manner of its preparation? 



It is a complicated question, this seem- 

 ingly simple one of taste, and it in- 

 volves the whole history of the race ; and, 

 strangely enough, it is one with which our 

 big educational institutions have con- 

 cerned themselves very little. It has re- 

 quired great wars to shake people's con- 

 fidence in their own fixed opinions on this 

 matter of taste in foods. 



These habitudes, these tastes in foods, 

 have been great stumbling blocks in the 

 problem of feeding our Allies. They 

 could not, to begin with, use our corn- 

 meal, because they had never used it 

 and were not accustomed to making it 

 into corn-bread. With Madagascar and 

 Cochin China producing great quanti- 

 ties of rice, the resistance to its use in cer- 

 tain sections of these countries has seri- 

 ously interfered with the full utilization 

 of this source of food among the Allies. 



our limited range oe foods 



It appears to be instinctive to ridicule 

 a new flavor of any kind, especially if it 

 is widely different from those to which 

 one is accustomed. During the Civil War 

 we learned to can fruits and vegetables. 

 Does any one imagine that there were 

 not many thousands who scorned to touch 

 the canned stuff ? It has a different taste 

 from the fresh, and to condemn it as not 



fit to eat was the fashionable and the easy 

 thing to do. 



But how have we become accustomed 

 to certain flavored foods and why are we 

 unfamiliar with others? We eat three 

 meals a day and in the course of our lives 

 we sit down to the table, say, 75,000 

 times, and yet the range of foods with 

 which we become familiar we can most 

 of us count on the fingers of our hands. 

 Why is it ? 



The cook-books are filled with recipes, 

 and they are ponderous volumes, too, but 

 they are recipes for the cooking of a few 

 staple foods in an endless variety of 

 ways. 



The importance of possessing a wide 

 taste in foods has never appealed to us 

 as strongly as it should have, although 

 Americans have made greater progress 

 in this field of dietetics than most other 

 peoples. We have not seen any particular 

 advantage in it, and we have spent more 

 money in the education of our children 

 in art and music than in their instruction 

 in the nutritive value of different foods. 



WHY DO WE EAT VEGETABLES? 



But food has come to have a new mean- 

 ing, and one of the lines which this war 

 has made plain is the dried vegetable, an 

 old product which now has a new in- 

 terest. 



Why do we eat vegetables at all ? They 

 are expensive to transport on our rail- 

 ways, the^ are bulky things to handle in 

 our kitchens, they rot easily and fill our 

 garbage cans, and many of them require 

 a great deal of labor to grow. 



Our showmen have exhibited to mil- 



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