CANNED SALMON IN THE WAREHOUSE READY FOR DISTRIBUTION Photograph by Curtis & Miller Some of the most important advances man has made in his food supply have been the result of war. Napoleon's bounty brought about the HOW THE WORLD IS FED muscles of meats, the casein of milk, the gluten of flour, and the nitrogenous fats. It may also happen that as a result of the war will come the utilization of other plant products than those now entering into direct use as human food. There are approximately half a million species of plants in the world, and yet only a few thousand of them are used at all for food, while only a few hundred of these are used to any important extent. Some of the plants which we now grow are expensive food - producers, some produce food that is difficult to digest, and some give a small yield per acre. DEVELOPING NEW FOODS We are constantly developing new foods. It is only little more than half a century since the tomato was a curiosity of the South, known as the "love apple,' and used to scare the slaves, who thought it poisonous. Corn came to us from the Indians, and has become one of the leading cereal crops of the world. It is less than a century ago that the lima bean came to us from South America, and the potato was unknown to civilization before the white man went to Peru and Colombia (see page 42). Today representatives of all of the leading nations are scouring the remote places of the earth for crops which promise to increase the world's total yield of food, as well as its per-acre production. In our own Department of Agriculture we have a division which has brought perhaps 40,000 different kinds of plants into the United States, many of them to be placed on trial as food-producers. The Mission Fathers of our Southwest who brought the olive and the date from the Mediterranean region, gave to California some of the richest olive and date orchards in the world, while a woman missionary, traveling in Brazil, sent us cuttings from which the great orangegrowing industry of our country has been developed (see page 71). FRUITS AND VEGETABLES HAVE BEEN Not only is mankind gradually increasing the possible acreage for the growing of foodstuffs-and statistics indicate that only the most fertile third of the world's potential food - producing acreage is under cultivation today-but the crops themselves are being constantly improved and their natural per-acre yield increased. It is a far cry from the little old knotted and gnarled apples of a few centuries ago to the magnificent Stayman winesaps, York imperials, and Albemarle pippins of today; and it is also a far cry from the unimproved, small and hard peach of the olden days to the big, luscious Alberta of the present; nor is the change that has come over the potato since Burbank begun his experiments any less noted. Both in the animal and in the vegetable world a marked improvement is constantly taking place. Whether there will be further improvements as a result of the war in Europe remains to be seen. WHAT OF THE FUTURE? Many men are inclined to sound a pessimistic note as to the adequacy of the world's food supply for future generations, and, like Malthus a hundred years ago, are inclined to predict that the day has at last come when the human race must cease to expand its numbers, or else face inevitable hunger. And when we consider how many mouths there are in this world to feed, and how much food it takes to satisfy them, little room is there to wonder at this note of pessimism. The earth's population today reaches a grand total of about 1,700,000,000 souls. If they were all set down at a banquet it would require sixteen tables reaching around the globe to seat them. For every ounce of food they ate, the dinner-giver would have to provide 53,000 tons of provisions, and if the dinner were no more than a democratic dollar-a-plate affair, it would cost, in the aggregate, as much as it costs to run the United States government a year and a half. Expressed in terms of annual consumption, the world's market basket is one that defies portrayal in weight and size. One is forced to cast around for new units of measurement to give a proper idea of its proportions. Assuming that the average inhabitant of the earth uses two pounds of provisions a A DAY'S RATIONS FOR 43 BOYS: TIENTSIN, NORTH CHINA The food for one day (two meals) is, beginning at the left: bag of wheat flour for bread, 32 pounds; bottle of sesame seed oil; little basket of sea salt; two pounds of bean curd (in wicker ladle); large stone bowl of rice, 33 pounds, and several heads of Chinese cabbage. The bundle of dried grass at the right is the fuel for preparing it. day, the total for the year would amount to a billion and a quarter tons. It would require a string of cars, carrying thirty tons to the car and reaching eight times around the earth, to haul this material. THE AVERAGE RATION The fact, however, is that the average inhabitant of the earth probably uses more than two pounds of provisions a day. The steerage passengers on English ships are allowed 21⁄2 pounds each a day. Even the prisoner in the average jail gets more than 2 pounds; the Russian conscript 4 pounds; and the Austrian common soldier 21⁄2 pounds a day. Still another way to get an idea of the size of the world's food problem is to assume that the average individual consumes ten cents' worth of food daily. On this basis it would require the entire national wealth of the United States, the richest nation of all history, to pay the world's food bill for twenty-six months. For every cent per day per capita that the cost of living increases, more than $6,000,000,000 is added to the world's annual market-basket expense. STARVATION STILL REMOTE But when one considers the possibilities of future food production, it is difficult to have much faith in the prophecies of pessimism of these twentieth-century successors of Malthus (see also page 91). For instance, in the United States we have 935,000,000 acres of arable land, only 400,000,000 of which are under cultivation. Yet, with less than half of our available land utilized, the United States produces one-sixth of the world's wheat, four-ninths of its corn, one-fourth of its oats, one-eighth of its cattle, one-third of its hogs, and one-twelfth of its sheep. Even with the land now under cultivation, if we produced as much wheat per acre as England and Germany, we could supply the world with two-thirds of its flour. If we produced as much corn to the acre as they do, we could double the world's supply of that product. Today the United States has a total SHEEP IN AN IRRIGATION DISTRICT: WASHINGTON STATE Photograph by Curtis & Miller "Taking the world's supply of sheep, cattle, and hogs, and making proper allowances for less improved methods of stock-raising on other parts of the globe as compared with those of the United States, it appears that mankind at large uses in the neighborhood of 47,000,000,000 pounds of meat a year," which is about 49 pounds per capita, as compared with America's 172 pounds (see text, page 12). |