These valuable monographs were prepared by experts, mostly specialists, women as well as men. Distributed free when first published, they are afterwards sold at cost price, usually a nickel apiece; few of them cost more than a dime. Full lists, with prices and general instructions can be obtained by sending a postal card to the Superintendent of Documents at Washington. There are separate price lists of documents relating to agriculture, dairying, food and diet, irrigation, soils, wild animals, fishes, health and hygiene, poultry and birds, etc.
In addition to all these documents there are many papers in the Daily Consular and Trade Reports containing valuable information on foreign foods and methods of marketing, gathered by the Consuls at the Government's request.
The supplying of information on everything relating to foods is only one phase of the Government's gastronomic activity. Another consists in calling attention to neglected edible plants. On this subject one of the experts of the Bureau of Plant Industry says:
What we call weeds are no more so than other plants that we term vegetables. Weeds are vegetables, and our so-called vegetables were once upon a time no more than weeds. The classification results from a matter of habit. We are slaves of habit, and because we are so it has not occurred to us that we could eat anything but just the old list of vegetables our ancestors have eaten for generations. But now we are having our eyes opened and are beginning to peer into fence corners and back yards and wild pastures for new and wonderful foodstuffs that we have heretofore regarded as just weeds. It is a bit mortifying that because of this preconceived idea we have let most nutritious and valuable foodstuffs go to waste under our very eyes, while perhaps we were wailing that we had little to eat and that vegetables were too expensive and so on.
Among the plants thus neglected, but which, if properly improved and marketed, would enrich truck farmers, are yellow dock, dandelions, milkweed, golden thistles, mallows, purslane (recommended by Thoreau), poke shoot, red clover, sorrel, hop shoots, yarrow, leek, and lupines.
A third gastronomic function of our Government is the importing of foreign fruits and vegetables that promise to add agreeable variety to the American dietary. For this purpose experts are sent to all parts of the world to find and bring home new plants which are then acclimated in accordance with the latest scientific methods.
David Fairchild, one of these gastronomic explorers, has repeatedly given in the "National Geographic Magazine" fascinating glimpses of the activity of the Bureau of Plant Industry in this direction. What he says about the date is particularly suggestive.
Search through the deserts of the world has revealed the fact that the dates of our markets are only one or two kinds of the vast number of varieties known to the Arabs and others whose principal food is the date. "Those we prize as delicacies are by no means looked upon by the desert dwellers as their best." The search has brought to light, among other desirable kinds, "the hard, dry date, which Americans do not know at all, and which they will learn to appreciate as a food, just as the Arab has."
In 1906 no fewer than a hundred and seventy varieties of dates had been introduced, and many of these are now growing successfully in Arizona. The time will come when we can have the choice of as many different kinds of dates in our markets as we have now of apples and pears. And this experiment with dates is, as Mr. Fairchild says, something that "private enterprise would not have undertaken for decades to come."
Experiments by the Bureau of Plant Industry are being carried on also in Porto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, and the Panama Canal Zone. It makes one's mouth water to read what Mr. Fairchild writes, for instance, of the mangosteen. There are at least fifteen edible species. "It has a beautiful white fruit pulp, more delicate than that of a plum, and a flavor that is indescribably delicate and luscious, while its purple-brown rind will distinguish it from all other fruits and make it bring fancy prices wherever it is offered for sale."