Skeletons at the Feast

The U.S. is committed to the impossible task of feeding more people and animals on a better diet than the land can provide.

"The years of 1937 to 1942 were all years of bumper crops. We came to accept these good yields as normal, and erroneously planned our food strategy on the assumption of continued high production. Four thousand years ago in Egypt Joseph was more realistic."

So argued Food ($2.75; Knopf), 239 pages of easy-to-read economics that may jolt the complacent U.S. The authors, Cornell University's crisp economist, Frank A. Pearson, professor of prices and statistics, and his ex-graduate student New York State farmer Don Paarlberg, carefully avoided the best-seller technique of sensational prophecy, a la Louis Bromfield (TIME, Feb. 14). But, with genuine alarm and deep conviction, they point to a coming food crisis.

There was little evidence last week to remind the U.S. that hunger is as much a part of war as death & taxes. Fifty million men in the world have left the fields and factories to fight, but still the U.S. stoutly held to the fiction that a high standard of diet can be preserved in wartime. Restaurants served juicy steaks and thick lamb chops; butcher shops were well stocked with pork roasts; the egg market groaned under such a flood of eggs that the War Food Administration, to support the price, bought eggs by the carload.

Weather Is Whether.... In the midst of all this plenty, Authors Pearson and Paarlberg rose like skeletons at the feast to point a bony finger. Said they: "The food program has been subservient to the inflation program whereas the inflation program should be subservient to the food program." Their point is that "the nation has been trying to prevent visible inflation by fixing low ceiling prices, and in so doing has effectively encouraged consumption of highly prized foods." Result: consumers are doing precisely what their ration books have been unable to prevent--they are eating more and better than in years.

Besides this increased demand 1) men in the armed services eat almost 9% more meat and nearly 2 1/2 more of all foods than they did as civilians; 2) Lend-Lease demand for food is the equivalent of adding 25 million people to the U.S. population; 3) years of rich harvests and low feed costs have encouraged livestock producers to increase their herds to alltime highs. Grain men last week estimated that to supplement the short stocks of feed, 470 million bu. of wheat will be fed to livestock during the crop year 1943-44.

All these demands stack up to more food than U.S. farmers can produce. They are short of labor, of machinery, of fertilizers. They are threatened with a breakdown of highway transportation. Most farm trucks are overage, tires are worn thin, replacements hard to get.

But above everything, farmers are utterly dependent on the weather. "Between spring and fall a fickle weatherman can give us a crop 15-25% below normal or a crop 15-25% above normal." This is one of the most arresting conclusions drawn from Food--that bad weather in 1944 would be an economic disaster of enormous magnitude.

Let Them Eat. Authors Pearson and Paarlberg do not merely groan about a crisis, they present their own solutions. They say: "All we need to do is to change the type of food we eat. If we were willing to eat the type of food eaten by most of the world, we could feed approximately twice our present population." This means eating more cereals, beans and potatoes, and less meat, eggs and milk. The key fact is that livestock consumes an average of 7 Ib. of grain to make 1 Ib. of meat. Therefore Pearson & Paarlberg recommend trimming the number of livestock to the size of the diminishing feed supply.

Last year 120 million high-priced hogs were profitably fed practically the entire crop of low-priced corn. To meet the deficit in livestock feed in non-hog areas, wheat was rushed in. Because of this lavish use, the great U.S. wheat surpluses will have nearly vanished by July 1944. Corn reserves will be less than enough for a month's supply. "This is an expensive and shortsighted policy. If there ever was a time in the nation's history when there should be large stocks of wheat, it is the present.

"Sooner or later the nation will be forced to choose among grain for rubber, grain for alcohol, grain for livestock, grain for Lend-Lease, and grain for civilian consumption. There will not be enough." The Price Lever. Messrs. Pearson & Paarlberg then argue that the necessary adjustment in livestock numbers would be automatic if the price of grains were al lowed to rise. In fact, they recommend higher food prices all across the board.

This type of rationing by price, they say, is more directly understood by consumers than the present "two-money" system, which gives the housewife more dollars than ration points, and frequently more ration points than there are supplies.

To those who fear that higher food prices would start the dizzy spiral of inflation on another merry twirl, Pearson and Paarlberg submit this argument: "If prices of all foods rise, total food consumption changes little and the consumption of nonfood items declines. This is a necessary reduction in war." Many readers may leave the Pearson-Paarlberg thesis at this point, if only for the realistic political objection that any substantial food price rise would inevitably mean irresistible pressure by labor for a higher wage level. But up to this point at least, the authors have stated, better than anyone heretofore, the size of the coming U.S. food crisis.

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