VITAL ROLES OF FOOD

...To understand what has been happening to our agricultural economy in the last three years one should read Food "Crisis" by Roy Hendrickson, who until recently was the Director of the Food Distribution Administration, in charge of food purchases for the Lend-Lease and relief programs...

...Unlike Mr...

...Hendrickson or Dr...

...The reason for this upsurge of interest is that food, as military men have long realized, is a weapon of war and potent instrument of peace...

...In line with the newer anthropological knowledge, Graubard believes that our food habits are not dictated so much by biological necessity as by irrational social attitudes and superstitious beliefs...

...Hendrickson patiently explains every Administration move and he is generous with statistics, such as what the Army eats and wastes, what civilians may-expect to get in the coming year, and what Lend-Lease is taking out of our food supply...

...And in the process we have changed from a have to have-not nation...

...From it we obtain the conviction that a land so triply blest by the gods as ours will survive the ravishments of two world wars, and, accorded decent recuperative postwar treatment, will happily provide our children and grandchildren with the "milk and honey" for which it was once famous...

...Food "Crisis" is the fullest official explanation yet published on such complex topics as military requirements, the philosophy and mechanism of rationing, Lend-Lease dealings in food, prices, price stabilization, and subsidies, British and American conversion of their agricultural plants to total war, the role of the United States in the United Nations food supply, and rehabilitation demands on our food...

...sometimes too ingratiating and impeccable...

...Reynal & Hitchcock...

...Reviewed by Anthony Netboy FOOD is now front-page news where formerly it was relegated to the woman's page or buried among the boiler plate features...

...Graubard is interested in man's food habits, especially the more curious and irrational, such as the mania for debased products like white bread, polished rice, and refined sugar, the craze for spices, and the addiction to useless stimulants like coffee and deleterious intoxicants like gin, rum, and whisky...

...Man's Food relates the history of our common foods (cereals, eggs, milk, meat, vegetables, sugar, fats, and oils), analyzes their nutritional value, and suggests how our diets may be improved and adjusted to a rationed food supply...

...Her book is an antidote to Hendrickson's...

...Without an adequate supply of food an army, no matter how well provided with material, cannot win victories, and a nation can succumb to the enemy even if not invaded, as Great Britain might have succumbed if the United States had not emptied many of its warehouses and granaries for her benefit in the gloomy months after Dunkirk...

...Graubard's Man's Food: Its Rhyme or Reason is a welcome addition to the literature of food lore...

...As the greatest food producing country in the world the United States has been called upon to supply a large part of the requirements of our hard-pressed British and Russian allies...

...Graubard, Miss Leighton is a poet, for whom the earth is the mother of life, and the people who till the soil are patient, heroic symbols of our transitory sojourn on this tragic planet...

...His manner is ingratiating and his logic is impeccable...

...Give Us This Day by the English artist and writer, Clare Leighton, is a series of impressionistic sketches of American farm life, an imaginative recreation of the agricultural processes by which our food is grown, transported, distributed, and conveyed to our table...

...Like all those who come from the densely populated and intensively cultivated European countries, Miss Leighton, in her travels across the country, stands agape at the immense resources of our land, its prodigious fertility, variety, and abundance...

...In the brief space of three years—1940 to 1943— our country has been transformed from one with bulging granaries, mountainous reserves, stamp plans for the needy, and AAA plowed-under schemes, to one in which livestock is being slaughtered for lack of food, families can't get enough staples to maintain their customary diet, and farmers are exhorted to cultivate every acre they can lay their hands on...