Photo by P. Thompson

The Battle Scene at Home

During the war the Allies called on the United States for food in far greater quantities than we had ever dreamed of exporting. For example, in the last years before the war we had been sending yearly to Europe about five million tons of food. In 1918 alone we shipped more than fourteen million tons of foodstuffs overseas.

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GERMANY'S FOOD PROBLEM

Now in the light of these needs for proper feeding, and in the light of the special conditions produced by the war, what was Germany's food problem through the war? It was that of attempting to increase production when the men and work animals had been sent to the fighting lines, of repressing consumption when both men in the army and the men in the war factories had to be well fed in order to fight well and work well, of attempting to get in food from outside the country when a blockade was steadily closing the borders ever and ever more tightly, and finally, of trying to get the people to modify their food habits in the way of accepting substitutes and using strange new semi-artificial foods in place of the familiar staples.

In 1916 the potato crop of Germany was a failure—but the turnip crop was enormous. So turnips were substituted largely for potatoes, and for many other kinds of food as well. Even marmalade and coffee substitutes were made from them, and turnip meal was mixed in the already too coarse and too much mixed flour. The Germans will never forget that terrible kohl-rüben zeit, or turnip time, of late 1916 and early 1917. And it was just after this time that the effects of Germany's great food difficulties began to show in a really serious way; they began to undermine the strength and health of the people. Those diseases like tuberculosis, which can rest in incipient or suppressed form for years without becoming serious as long as the body is well nourished, began to develop rapidly and dangerously. The birth rate decreased and the death rate increased. The physical and mental and moral tone of the whole nation dropped.

THE SUGAR SHORTAGE

Belgium and Germany illustrate a special food situation created by the war, namely, one in which a country, which relied on outside sources for a greater or lesser part of its food needs, had access to these sources suddenly and almost completely shut off. But grave food problems also confronted the countries which were not blockaded in so specific a way. England and France, with full access to all the great food-producing lands overseas (except to the extent that the submarines reduced this freedom of access), nevertheless had food problems hardly less serious than those of the more strictly blockaded countries. Their difficulties arose primarily from the fact that there was only so much shipping in the world and that the war conditions created suddenly a need for much more shipping than existed. The transference of large numbers of troops with their necessary equipment and munitions from the distant colonies to the European seat of fighting, and of other numbers from the mother countries to extra-European battlegrounds, made great demands on the shipping available to these nations. At the same time, the reduction of their native production increased largely their needs of food importations.