Europeans eat even larger amounts of wheat than we. Over half the food of the French is bread, so if the wheat shortage were near the danger-line, it might lead to a serious weakening of the marvellous courage of the French people.
WHEAT FLOUR IN WAR-TIME
To use this country's share of the short supply of wheat to the greatest advantage the Food Administration has changed the making of flour to include more of the wheat-kernel. The difference between peace and war time flour is easily understood if the structure of grains is considered. Wheat and other cereals have kernels much alike; all have three principal parts:
The outer covering, called bran, is made up of several layers. This is rich in important mineral salts, and the rest is largely cellulose, or woody fibre.
The germ is the small part from which the new plant will develop. Here the small amount of fat in the kernel is stored.
The largest part of the kernel, called the endosperm, contains the nourishment to be used by the plant as it begins to develop. This is mostly starch, with some protein. It is the part of the wheat, for instance, which is chiefly used to make our white flour.
The kind of flour made depends on how much and what parts of the kernel are used. Graham flour is manufactured by grinding practically all of the wheat-kernel—a 100-per-cent use of the grain, called 100-per-cent extraction. Some people still fail to realize that Graham flour and Graham bread are wheat, perhaps because of the different name and brown color. The so-called "whole-wheat" flour is often 95 per cent of the kernel only, but may be as little as 85 per cent, depending on the amount of the bran and germ removed in the making.
Ordinary white flour contains the endosperm alone, with practically none of the bran and germ. Some brands before the war used up as little as 56 per cent of the wheat, leaving the rest of it to be turned into lower-grade flours and cattle-feed. White flour thus uses less of the wheat for human food than Graham or whole-wheat flour.
Yet to convert all the country's wheat into Graham flour would not be a wheat-saving measure, because it is not so well suited to our trade conditions. Graham flour, for one thing, does not keep so well as flour of lower extractions, as the fat in the germ may become rancid in a comparatively short time. Flour in this country is often thirty days or longer in transit and may be months in warehouses, stores, and homes. A flour to be satisfactory under extreme conditions here or for shipment abroad must keep at least six months—too long to be sure that Graham flour will keep. In small countries like England, where flour is used up more promptly, a high extraction is more practicable than in the United States.