Sentiments can bar out progress for a while, but where there is a great economical saving with nothing to lose but sentiment, economy generally wins. How would you, Mr. Home-is-sacred-man, like to thresh or flail the wheat by hand in order that the family might eat pies made of hand threshed wheat as well as to eat mother’s pies made of machine prepared flour?
This game of jollying mothers into playing household flunkies by complimenting their products is getting thin, and a lot of mothers are beginning to see through it.
The coöperative preparation of food will have many indirect effects. A Roadtown ten miles in length could well afford to have its own canning factory, cold storage, and, if the trusts become too dictatorial, also its own packing house. The Pure Food Law in Roadtown will be a dead-letter, for the buyers will be food experts and will have nothing to gain by defrauding the people, or helping to keep them in ignorance. With a double cause for watchfulness, economy and health, it is hardly likely that such a buyer would find it worth while attempting to go in partnership with food adulterators. Certainly the inducement to adulterate is much greater in the world to-day, for every man involved in it, profits by the practice, the consumer alone, woefully ignorant of the whole subject, is the only dupe.
Not only will the Roadtown buyer get pure food, but he will get all food at wholesale rates. The frightful waste, due to the putting up of food in small cans, bottles and cartons, is little appreciated. I recently tested this principle by buying olive oil. The oil was priced me at $1.80 a gallon, but the oil I secured in fifty cent bottles I found cost me $7.00 a gallon. Cotton seed oil was priced at sixty cents a gallon. I purchased a five-cent bottle and found that I had paid at the rate of $2.25 a gallon. These are indisputable facts and they could be multiplied indefinitely. In barrel or car lots the above gallon prices would be greatly reduced.
All Roadtown foods can be bought in bulk direct from the makers at makers’ rates. The vegetables will be crisp and fresh from the Roadtown gardens. The profits of the middlemen, of retailers, of adulterators and advertisers, the cost of bottles and cans, of delivery boys and bad grocery bills will certainly be eliminated with one fell swoop. It will reduce the cost of living, mark you, at such a rate that the unsophisticated will confuse a Roadtown meal with a charitable soup kitchen. But if you don’t believe this, write to your country cousins and find out just what is the producer’s price on the material out of which a meal is made.
CHAPTER VII
THE SERVANT PROBLEM IN ROADTOWN
THERE will be no servant problem in Roadtown, as there will be no need for servants.