poor in the mill towns of
the South lived too exclusively upon a corn diet without admixture of
milk or fresh animal food or even of cabbage, and pellagra has been the
consequence.

The Food Administrator asks us to eat corn bread and save the wheat for
export. It is a very small sacrifice to eat corn bread at one meal or
more a day. Indian corn saved our New England ancestors from starvation,
and we can in part substitute it for our wheat and send the latter
abroad to spare others from starvation. The simplest elements of
patriotism demand that we do this. Therefore let us cry, "Eat corn bread
and save the wheat for France, the home of Lafayette!"

The United States Department of Agriculture has estimated that only 6.6
per cent. of our corn crop is used for human food, and of this, 3.4 per
cent. is consumed by the farmers and their families.

The substitution of foods is no new thing. We find that an English
contemporary author thus described the food habits of the English people
during the "golden days of Good Queen Bess," three hundred and fifty
years ago:

"The gentilitie commonly provide themselves sufficiently of
wheat for their own tables, whylest their household and poore
neighbours in some shires are forced to content themselves
with rye or barleie; yea and in time of dearth many with bread
made eyther of beanes, peason[1] or otes, or of altogether and
some acornes among."

[1] An obsolete plural of pease.

A difference between those days and ours is that the "gentilitie" and
the "poore neighbours" are now asked to unite in reducing the
consumption of wheat and to do this for the safety and welfare of all
mankind.

Another point in war economy is the use of whole milk in greater
quantity, and the diminution of the use of butter and cream. Cream is
bought only by the wealthy, but in sufficient volume to largely reduce
the amount of whole milk available. In Germany before the war 15 per
cent. of the milk supply of that country was used for the production of
cream. The consequent restriction of the milk supply was distinctly to
the detriment of the health of the peasant farmers of Bavaria. Regarding
the use of butter, a Swiss professor, himself an expert in nutrition,
complains that whereas in his youth children were never given butter on
their bread for breakfast, not even when there was no jam in the house,
yet to-day absence of butter from the table is held to be indicative of
dires