The Iron Ration: Three Years in Warring Central Europe

by George Abel Schreiner

A third substitute came in the market. Its principal ingredients were carrots and yellow turnips.

To find substitutes for tea was not difficult. The bloom of the linden-tree, mixed with beech buds, makes an excellent beverage, and those who dote on "oolong" can meet their taste somewhat by adding to this a few tips of pine. If too much of the pine bud is used a very efficacious emetic will result, however.

The mysteries of cocoa substitutions are a little above me. I can say, however, that roasted peas and oats have much to do with it. Some of the materials employed were supplied by coal-tar and synthetic chemistry.

It was really remarkable what this coal-tar would do for the Germans and their allies. It provided them with the base for their explosives, made their dyes, and from it were made at one period of the war, by actual enumeration, four hundred and forty-six distinct and separate chemical products used in medicine, sanitation, and food substitution. If there be such a thing as an elixir of life, coal-tar may be expected to furnish it.

But the net gain in this casting about for substitutes was slight indeed. The grains, nuts, and vegetables that were used as substitutes for coffee would have had the same food value if consumed in some other form. The advantage was that their conversion served to placate the old eating habits of the public. To what extent these had to be placated was made plain on every meatless, fatless, or wheatless or some other "less" day or period.

There was the rice "lamb" chop, for instance. The rice was boiled and then formed into lumps resembling a chop. Into the lump a skewer of wood was stuck to serve as a bone, and to make the illusion more complete a little paper rosette was used to top off the "bone." All of it was very comme il faut. Then the things were fried in real mutton tallow, and when they came on the table its looks and aroma, now reinforced by green peas and a sprig of watercress, would satisfy the most exacting. Nor could fault be found with the taste.

The vegetable beefsteak was another thing that gave great satisfaction, once you had become used to the color of the thing's interior, which was pale green—a signal in a real steak that it should not be eaten. The steak in question was a synthetic affair, composed of cornmeal, spinach, potatoes, and ground nuts. An egg was used to bind the mass together, and some of the culinary lights of Berlin and Vienna succeeded in making it cohesive enough to require the knife in real earnest.

What I have outlined here so far may be called the private effort at substitution. But substitution also had a governmental application. Its purpose was to break the populace of its habit of eating highly concentrated foods, especially fats.

The slaughter of the porkers in 1914 had accidentally led the way to this policy. The shortage in fats caused by this economic error was soon to illustrate that the masses could get along very well on about a quarter of the fat they had consumed in the past. Soon it was plain, also, that the health of the public could be improved in this manner by the gradual building up of a stronger physique.

It would have been easy to again crowd the pigsties. The animal is very prolific, and a little encouragement of the pig-raisers would have had that result inside of a year had it been desired. But it was not done. It was difficult to get the necessary feed for these animals, and the small quantities that could be imported from Roumania were never a guarantee that the farmers would not feed their pigs with home-raised cereals and other foods that were of greater value to the state in the form of cereal and vegetable food for the population. The prices of fats and meats were well up. A hundred pounds of wheat converted into animal products would bring nearly three times what the farmer could get for the grain. Illicit trading in these articles, moreover, was easier carried on than in breadstuffs.