Small
farms

This
Famishing
World


Food follies that maim and kill
the rich and the poor -- that
cheat the growing child and rob
the prospective mother of health --
that burn up millions in treasure
and fill untimely graves -- and
the remedy

by

Alfred W. McCann



Author of
"Thirty Cent Bread," "Starving America," Etc.


New York



George H. Doran Company
Copyright, 1918, by George H. Doran Company




Printed in the United States of America



THREE men, Jason Rogers, William Shillaber, Jr., and Henry J. Wright, stood by unfalteringly when powerful interests, by open and covert attack, by arrest, by civil and criminal action, threatened to destroy me. The courage of these men has made this book possible. To them I dedicate it with an affection that has something in it akin to sadness. I know that neither they nor I can ever again pour into any one task in behalf of humanity the sustained effort, the overflowing measure of energy and devotion, the solemnized and consecrated will to be right at any cost (and the cost to them was heavy) that have tabulated this volume of suppressed truths. The dark and sinister shadows have been penetrated. They lie behind. That we shall not enter them again is but a reminder that all things pass. Our many battles in the courts and outside of them have been won but even in the hazards we escaped there lurks a sense of loss. We are not to meet them again.

Preface

The world's food problems have not ended with the end of war. Peace has stepped in upon the deadliest of food perils. The time has come to probe the depths if civilisation is to harvest the material and spiritual fruits of the carnage of four terrorised years.

The extraordinary activities of the governments of Great Britain and the United States in establishing, 1918, a unified international food control, were inspired by a vision of a long, grim, hard future. The world is going to get hungrier and hungrier year after year for many years to come. America during each of these years will become progressively responsible for feeding the famished mouths of Europe. As the surpluses of foods increase in Australia and the Argentine, the difficulty of carrying them to hungry Europe will also increase.

The distance from Australia to Liverpool is 11,890 miles; from Australia to San Francisco is 6,966 miles; from Buenos Ayres to Liverpool is 6,258 miles; from Bombay to Liverpool is 10,680 miles.

The distance from New York to Liverpool is only 3,036 miles. The tonnage saved by shipping food 3,036 miles from New York to Liverpool instead of by the long routes is equivalent to 12,000,000 tons of shipping. The submarine, with its monstrous toll of destroyed vessels, is paralleled by the ravages that have depleted the dairy herds and breeding stock of America from which the European milk and meat supply must be reconstructed and restored. There is a world shortage not only of ships but of food.

With Belgium and Northern France evacuated by the Germans, 10,000,000 more mouths will have to be fed by America. Even Austria and Germany must be helped if anarchy is to be averted.

Europe cannot starve while America is using ships to bring her soldiers home. If America cannot fill those ships with food on their return voyages they will be sent to South America, to India, and Australia where there will be food to put into them. Europe must either draw upon those distant countries for the nourishment she needs, or she must depend upon America.

The United States Food Administration estimates that in Eastern Europe there are 180,000,000 people who must be fed after the war if famine more horrible than the world has ever known, is to be averted. The total deaths among British troops from the beginning of the war to the end of 1918 numbered a little more than one million. During the same period five million civilians in Europe starved to death, and more are starving every day.

With the establishment of peace, all Europe becomes a bidder for American food and for the ships to carry it. It is for this reason that America faces at home a food shortage far more serious than any through which she passed during the war.

Judson C. Welliver emphasises the fact that perfectly sane men who have brooded over this problem talk gravely about the possibility of famine in the United States unless measures are taken to establish food reserves, and later to maintain such rigid control of food production and distribution as will protect the country from having its own necessities of life taken away through the frantic bidding of starving multitudes on the other side.

If America would do her full duty to herself and the rest of the world she must learn how to maintain her stamina, her health, her resistance to disease while sharing her vanishing supplies with others.

This book tells how to meet the crisis and makes clear a path through which we may come out of it healthier and sturdier than when we entered its shadows.

Contents

One: The Human Scrap Heap is Piling Higher

Two: Two Kinds of Food -- The Constructive -- The Destructive

Three: Why Modern Refining Processes are More Deadly than War

Four: Eight Poison Squads that Cry for Action

Five: Amazing Confusion of Clinic and Classroom

Six: How "Business" Muzzles Truth

Seven: Why Famine Follows the Use of Artificial Sugar

Eight: Preventable Tragedies of Milk and Meat

Nine: What the World Should Know of the Mysteries of Food

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