Excerpt from The Home-Keeping Book
Now is the hour of our testing. Let us make it the hour of our victory - victory over ourselves; victory over the enemy of freedom - Home Card, 1918.
The following restrictions are a military necessity:
Cut down the consumption of wheat by at least one-half.
Households keep within a weekly allowance for each person of one and a half pounds of flour and all other wheat products.
Public eating places keep within the same allowance for every twenty-one meals served; not more than two ounces of wheat products, flour included, to be served to a guest at any one meal.
Retail purchases of flour to be limited in quantity and to be accompanied by at least equal weight of other cereals.
Bakers to keep within 70 per cent. of flour formerly used; three-quarter pound loaves to go as far as the pound loaf usually does.
No wheat to be used in manufacturing for anything but food.
Let all who can go without wheat.
The Wheat Shortage
The wheat situation is the most serious in the food supply of the Allied World.
Our harvest was less than estimated; needs of the Allies are greater than were calculated; losses by sea and by battle have been heavier than were anticipated; less comes from the Argentine then had been hoped; tenser demands on shipping space restrict ships more than ever to the shortest haul and the tightest bulk.
We have fallen behind in our program. Because corn and oats were so tardy in coming to market, we have not been able to ship as much as we should, we have eaten further into our stock of wheat than we would.
Corn cannot be shipped now. We have sent it as fast as we could and we will again. But during the next two months, the season of germination, it will not do to ship corn - there is too much spoilage in shipment.
There is no margin anywhere. The Allies have wheat to-day but their stocks are down to the danger point. We dare not let anything stop the flow of wheat overseas. That would be disaster greater than defeat of an army.
We must send wheat - and more wheat - and more. To redeem our obligation we must cut down by half our own consumption of wheat.
Who Shall Bear the Burden
Going without wheat is an inconvenience - nothing worse - for homes in comfortable circumstances.
It is no hardship - no danger. Physiologists all agree that a wholesome diet need not include wheat. The South fought the Civil War three years on corn. Early New England did without wheat five years at a time with no ill effects.
Going without wheat is perhaps more expense, certainly more work. Not a hardship but a burden. Who shall bear the burden?
Shall we ask the women of France to do it? Do you know what it means to them?
The women of France are doing their own work, doing the nation's work, even doing the work of teams in the field.
The men are gone - all but the younger boys, the aged and the invalids. In almost every home is a cripple or one dying of tuberculosis an added care.
French homes have not baked bread for hundreds of years. They have not even ovens nor baking tins in their kitchens. They rely on the bakery.
If you ask them to bake their own bread - for the bakery cannot supply quick breads the women of France must add another hour to their long day of toil.
Will you ask them to do that? Or shall our homes carry the extra burden of doing without wheat?
What to do With the Flour
One and a half pounds of wheat flour goes into two and a half pounds of Victory bread. That gives just about two slices for each meal with nothing over for cake, pastry or anything else.
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