Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/185

Rh in dietaries undoubtedly will have to be made. Let us notice. In 1910 for every man, woman and child in the United States there was produced seven bushels of wheat, thirty-two bushels of corn, four bushels of potatoes, and forty pounds of sugar. There were six tenths cattle for each person, six tenths sheep, and seven tenths swine. Add to this the fruits, vegetables, poultry and dairy products, oats, and other small grains and we see that there is plenty of food to go around and to spare.

There was grown in the United States in 1912 corn, which if assembled in one immense field might have covered Germany or France entirely with its rustling phalanx. How many millions might be nourished by the produce of this tremendous acreage! Here is a great source of human food at present utilized in a very slight degree.

Man takes food first of all that pleases the palate. We can no longer make our choices on the basis of palatability alone, and a study of the principles of nutrition must be pursued to help us out of those difficulties which arise from a restricted supply of food. Food has two primary functions in the body; first, to supply material out of which the body is built; and, second, to furnish energy to warm the body and to drive its machinery. Perhaps the second function is the more important. Plants alone have the power to collect solar energy and store it up in a latent or dormant form in their seeds and other parts. Animals may, by eating and digesting these plant materials, liberate and utilize this stored-up energy. When corn is fed to a steer under favorable conditions three per cent, of the energy of the corn may be recovered as meat in the edible portion of the carcass. The remaining ninety seven per cent, was used by the animal in its various activities and lost as far as the nutrition of man is concerned. In pork the recovered portion amounts to sixteen per cent.; and with the dairy cow eighteen per cent, of the energy of the food is found in the milk produced. Obviously this is a wasteful process, this conversion of grain into meat and milk. It has its justification only in the greater palatability and digestibility of the final products. Doctor Armsby, of the Pennsylvania Experiment Station, draws the conclusion: "all the edible products which the farmer's acres can yield will be needed for human consumption and the function of the stock-feeder in a permanent system of agriculture will be to utilize those inedible products in which so large a share of the solar energy is held and to render at least. a portion of the latter available for human use."

But shall we solve our food problem as it has been handled in some densely populated countries such as India and China? With an area nearly twice that of either of these countries, the capacity of the United States to maintain a population on the same standard as obtains in China, for instance, would be perhaps relatively as great. It would mean a great change in our standard of living, one to which we should not take kindly, and one which we hope need never be adopted in this country.