PREFACE
The long war has brought hunger to Europe; some of her peoples stand constantly face to face with starvation.
All agriculture has been seriously interfered with. Food production has been lessened to the point of danger. Millions of men who had given all their time and energy to raising food have been killed; more millions are still fighting; other millions have gone from the farms into the great war-factories. Women, too, have been drafted from the fields and home gardens into the factories and to replace the absent men in a host of occupations. Great stretches of once fertile land have been temporarily ruined by the scourge of war; some are still under falling shot and shell. Belgium and France have lost millions of acres of productive land to the enemy. The fertilizers necessary for keeping up the production of the land still available are lacking.
All this means that the Allies have to rely on the outside for the maintenance of their food-supply. But because ships are fewer than they were, and because many of them must carry troops and munitions exclusively, these ships cannot be sent on voyages longer than absolutely necessary to find and bring back the needed food. They cannot afford to go the long time-consuming way to Australia and back; but few of them can be let go to India and the Argentine. They must carry food by the shortest routes. The shortest is from North America to England and France.
Therefore by far the greater part of the food provided for the Allies from the outside must come from us. As a matter of fact more than 50 per cent of this outside food for the Allies does now come from North America. And that is a great deal. It is very much more than we ever sent them before. Also we are sending more and more food overseas for our own growing armies in France and our growing fleets in European waters.
To meet all this great food need in Europe—and meeting it is an imperative military necessity—we must be very careful and economical in our food use here at home. We must eat less; we must waste nothing; we must equalize the distribution of what food we may retain for ourselves; we must prevent extortion and profiteering which make prices so high that the poor cannot buy the food they actually need; and we must try to produce more food by planting more wheat and other grain, raising more cattle and swine and sheep, and making gardens everywhere.
To help the people of America do all these things, and to coordinate their efforts, the President and Congress created the United States Food Administration. The Food Administration, therefore, asks all the people to help feed the Allies that they may continue to fight, to help feed the hungry in Belgium and other starving lands that they may continue to live, and to help feed our own sailors and soldiers so that they may want nothing. It asks help, also, in its great task of preventing prices from going too high and of stabilizing them, and of keeping the flow of distribution even, so that all our people, rich and poor alike, may be able to obtain the food they need.