Still Rolling

Every good advertising man has enough Irish to know that a pat phrase should be hit hard with a mike. Super-Salesman Chuck Luckman, who has that kind of Irish, and has rounded up the nation's sharpest advertising talent to help sell his food-conservation campaign, last week was still plugging his favorite theme. He crowed jubilantly: "We are rolling. The people are picking this up." And he added a flat prediction. Around Jan. 1, he said, the Save-Food program for Europe will reach its 100-million-bushel goal.

The committee's busy statisticians counted nearly 25 million bushels already in the bag. Of this amount they figured 12 million bushels saved through the distillers' shutdown, 3,000,000 more from the brewers, 9,000,000 from the bakers. Between them, the Army & Navy expected to save another quarter of a million bushels of wheat within the next six months.

Salesman Luckman was heartened by the response to his advertising. Some 1,500 letters a day poured into his Washington headquarters. At first they were evenly divided for & against the program; by last week they had switched to 90% in favor. He noted an even more significant point: the average weight of butchered hogs had dropped from 276 lbs. to 248 lbs.* His next major target was the meat packers. One possibility: asking packers to slap an embargo on overstuffed hogs and cattle (for an estimated saving of 60 million bushels of grain a year).

*According to Department of Agriculture estimates, 7,000,000 bushels of grain would be saved each year if all hogs normally slaughtered went to market weighing one pound less.

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