Food Guide for War Service at Home / Prepared under the direction of the United States Food Administration in co-operation with the United States Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Education, with a preface by Herbert Hoover

by United States Food Administration; Katharine Blunt; Florence Powdermaker; Frances Lucy Swain

OUR MILK ABROAD

It is our supply of milk that is helping to meet the milk shortage abroad. Before the war we exported very little. By 1917 our export of evaporated, condensed, and dried milk had gone up twentyfold. In the spring of 1918 we sent over the equivalent in whole milk of almost 50,000,000 pounds a month, and should probably have sent much more were it not for the lack of ships. After the war, when ships are released, the demand for it will be enormous. It will take years to build up the dairy-herds of Europe again, so we shall continue to be their main source of supply.

Learn and teach the unique value and economy of milk. Do everything to prevent in this country the tragic results which are following the cutting down of milk consumption abroad.

CHAPTER VIII

VEGETABLES AND FRUITS

Vegetables and fruits represent a different and happier phase of the food situation than our short supplies of wheat and meat. The vegetables especially are a great potential reserve of food, for they can be produced in quantity in three or four months on unused land by labor that otherwise might not be used.

Abroad every resource for vegetable-raising is being utilized to the utmost. France and Belgium have long made the most of all their land. Now England has made it compulsory to leave no ground uncultivated. Golf-courses are now potato-patches. Parks and every bit of back yard all grow their quota of vegetables. The boys in the old English public schools work with the hoe where before they played football.

We in America have no more than touched our capacity for raising gardens. What we have done is merely a beginning. As the war goes on we shall realize more and more the necessity for seizing every opportunity for active service. The accomplishments of the summer of 1917 showed the possibilities of the work, and placed it beyond the purely experimental stage. They have given experience and emphasized the value of expert advice and the economy of community efforts.

Not only is the "plant a garden" a civilian movement, but it has taken hold in the armies as well. The American Army Garden service is planning truck-gardens in France to supply our troops. The Woman's Auxiliary Army Corps of England plants gardens back of the British lines. Last summer the French fed 20,000 of their men from similar gardens.

Every pound of food grown in these home and community gardens relieves the railroad congestion and gives more space for transporting munitions and coal. Every pound of food grown releases staples for Europe. Extra production of food of any kind, anywhere, takes on a new significance in the presence of half a world hungry.

If you cannot grow vegetables, use them in abundance anyway. They are too perishable to ship abroad and too bulky, containing so much water that it would be an uneconomical use of shipping to export them. But the more America eats of almost any kind of vegetable or fruit, the less of the more durable, concentrated foods will she require. The products are so varied in kind and composition that they can be used to serve almost any purpose—beans and peas to save meat; potatoes and others to save wheat; sweet fruits to save sugar; jams, even, when spread on bread, to save fat. All will improve the health and therefore increase human energies for winning the war.