?3 
things In a letter. The whole great problem 
of food is being investigated from every angle 
and particularly from the actual value in cal- 
ories of the food itself. Every investigation 
which I make in different food dietaries of the 
Orientals convinces rae that they have learned 
to live on extremely cheat) foods, whereas we 
are living on the most expensive foods the world 
has ever knovm. What I think you could do while 
you are over there which would be of very great 
interest to us here is to get the dietaries of 
the different peoples, photograph what their 
meals consist of, and give us an idea through 
photographs, for example, of the physical con- 
dition of these people who live on these cheap 
foods, and then an idea of the prices, in terms 
of American money, of the food which they eat. 
I learned the other day that a small office hold- 
er in Japan could get good Japanese board for 
|4.00 a month. This $4.00 a month represents 
the wages of a farm worker in America for a day 
and a half, and this farm worker v/ould spend 
for his day's food at least a quarter or perhaps 
a half of what the Japanese office holder would 
spend for his whole month's board. It is these 
striking contrasts that we must have to awaken 
us to this food problem. V/e grow in this country 
over three billion bushels of corn or one hundred 
and sixty-eight billion pounds. One pound of corn 
has one thousand six hundred and fifty-three cal- 
ories. The average office holder can get along 
easily on three thousand calories per day, or 
about two pounds of corn-meal would supply all 
of these calories, and yet we are short of food. 
You see, the difficulty is v/e make our corn-meal 
into pork and then eat the pork, or we make our 
skimmed milk into pork, taking a hundred pounds 
of milk, which has nine pounds of dried protein 
in it, which is perfectly good food, into one 
pound of pork. It is this kind of process going 
on all over this country which we simply must 
study out and understand. I am going to send you 
a copy of the book by Graham Lusk on "Food in ¥^ar 
Tines", which I think will interest you and give 
you one of the lines of study upon which you can 
throv? a great deal of light during your stay there 
in China. I am also sending you a copy of the 
paper which I read before the Franklin Institute 
in Philadelphia, on the "Palate of Civilized Man 
and its Influence on Agriculture", together with 
September 21, 191B. 
