Wickard's Promise

FOOD

Claude Wickard, Secretary of Agriculture, made a plea and a promise: "Give us half the metal it takes to build one medium freighter and we will save you 900 shiploads across the Atlantic within the next two years."

His plea to WPBoss Donald Nelson was for steel and stainless steel to build new dehydration plants all over the U.S. near supplies of milk, eggs, vegetables, meat. Two years ago seven firms processed most of the nation's five-million-pound annual production of dried vegetables. Now U.S. plants can produce each year 15 million pounds of dried vegetables, 285 million pounds of dried eggs, more than 170 million pounds of dry skim milk, eight million pounds of waterless soup, unmeasured amounts of citrus concentrate. There are 82 egg-drying plants, mostly in the Midwest and Southwest (in 1940 there were 18).

But Wickard, as head of the Food Requirements Committee, is far from satisfied; because of zooming Army and Lend-Lease demands, he wants milk-processing capacity upped 31% more; eggs, 45%; vegetables, 264%.

His reasons: dehydrating cuts shipping space and weight an average of 90% (12 1/2 gallons of vegetable soup, enough for 200 soldiers, can come out of a 2- 1/2 gallon container of dry soup mix); treated paper and cardboard containers suitable for dehydrated goods save tin, can be easily destroyed in emergency so as not to fall into enemy hands; comparatively few workers are needed in dehydration plants; if dried foods had been used in the first year of Lend-Lease shipments, the equivalent of eighty 10,000-ton ships would have been spared for other duties.

Wickard's plea and promise this week seemed on the way to fulfillment. No prophet, practical, dirt-farming Claude Wickard might have made a prophecy, too, about the post-war possibilities contained in row on row of bottles in Department of Agriculture laboratories-test tubes of white, yellow, green, grey, brown powders that, doused with water, again turn into Irish and sweet potatoes, spinach, cabbage, carrots. Thus it may be possible for U.S. housewives to store a 2-3 months' food supply in a kitchen-drawer.

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