To End Blundering?

To do a job long left undone, Food Czar Claude Wickard last week put the Department of Agriculture on a wartime basis and picked two energetic lieutenants to help him. The job: to end doodling over a food situation that is rapidly getting out of hand. The men: big, shaggy, 38-year-old Roy Frederick Hendrickson, who became Director of Food Distribution; tall, sober, 47-year-old Herbert William ("Parse") Parisius, the new Director of Food Production.

Both men have had wider Departmental and executive experience than their boss. Roy Hendrickson (Iowa-born, Minnesota-educated and Associated Press-trained) in his nine years with the Department has been director of personnel, head of the Surplus Marketing Administration and chief of the Agricultural Marketing Administration. As AMAdministrator he has bought as much as 550 million pounds of foodstuffs a month worth $114 million for Lend-Lease, Red Cross, domestic distribution and reserve stockpiles.

Parse Parisius was reared on a Wisconsin farm, taught in Northwestern (Wis.) College, was a Lutheran pastor in Rice Lake, Wis., directed Farm Security work in Wisconsin, before becoming assistant to the Secretary of Agriculture. He got to be associate director of Agricultural War Relations last June, when Claude Wickard set up the ineffectual Food Requirements Committee.

The Job. Claude Wickard's Departmental reorganization was his second attempt to streamline his sprawling bureaus. Now, in generalities, he told of the work ahead: The Department is obligated to assure an adequate supply and efficient distribution of food to meet war and essential civilian needs. Waste must be curbed. The U.S. will continue to be the best-fed country in the world. The task is mostly a matter of managing huge U.S. food reserves and keeping housewives informed so they will keep in the program, said he.

But well do Roy Hendrickson and Parse Parisius know that the 1943 food problem will not be solved by exhortation and lament, but by painfully undoing the blunders which have reduced the "best-fed nation" to conditions in some places bordering on a food panic. Evidence of how badly someone had blundered:

> In Los Angeles food scarcities and labor shortages forced 900 restaurants and 100 butcher shops to close. Slaughtering quotas were used up 20 days ahead of schedule. Canned-milk supply was only 50 to 75% of normal. Butter was unobtainable for many wholesale outlets. Hospitals ran short of some foods. Not a single bid was received to supply food for the 40,000 inmates of California State institutions.

> Because of a meat shortage, a Boston wholesaler started selling horse meat at 25-c- to 50-c- a Ib.

> Chicago was almost out of butter and lard. Also short were prepared flour, vegetable shortenings, macaroni, canned meat.

> San Diego residents swarmed across the Mexico line to buy all the food they could.

> Philadelphia stores had had next to no beef or veal in a fortnight. Food dealers preferred to mention items in ample supply: cereals, dried beans & peas, fats, turkeys. Grocery chains were rationing canned goods against hoarding.

> In Portland the supply of meat averaged out to only 8 oz. of meat per person, instead of the 2 1/2 lb. a week the Government set as a voluntary ration. Six Portland packing plants had to stop operations for lack of supply.

> In New York, beef stocks were 35% of normal, may be exhausted by year's end. Beef for bologna, a big item in New York, was 20% of normal; pork, 50%; lamb, 40%. Butter sales were restricted, sometimes to a quarter-pound per customer. Canned fruits and vegetables generally were limited to two cans per customer. Canned milk was almost impossible to get, but Mayor LaGuardia announced that arrangements were made to honor physicians' prescriptions ordering milk for babies and whipped cream for the ailing.

>In Detroit, canned fish, spaghetti, beans and soups were hard to get. The city faced an almost meatless Christmas, because quotas had been set on the basis of 1941 population, took no account of the new 336,000 population increase (TIME, Dec. 14). Butter dealers got 20% of their orders. Seventeen of Detroit's 18 packing houses closed for lack of meat.

Such shortages added up to one thing: bad planning. Farmers, looking ahead to 1943, hoped for better planning of manpower, transportation, fertilizer supplies, storage facilities, machinery. Even more, city folk and farmers hoped at last for realism in managing food.

* Director of Food Distribution Hendrickson, Director of Food Production Parisius.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.