Excerpt from Report of the Food Controller
The military authorities of Germany, with their wonderful genius for organization and preparedness, had long before the war carefully and scientifically thought out the food problem in operations of a war that might be protracted far beyond their military expectations. They left nothing to chance and almost as soon as war was declared the nation was put on a food ration, and a food control was set in action that would have only been possible with a people trained "to the highly organized discipline and minute administrative control characteristic of the German people and their government" as an American writer expresses it. But so elusive is food of an effective control in respect of rationing and price-fixation that even in Germany, where political conditions were so favorable to success, success has only been partial, and in important instances efforts for regulation have been a failure. The burden has not been laid on all people equally or equitably, and to quote again from the writer already referred to, "That the restrictions in the diet during the past year and a half have fallen almost entirely upon the industrial workers of the cities is fully realized by the industrial classes and represents a casus belli between them and the agrarians that will be the occasion of bitter political contests after the war. The harsh treatment inflicted by the peasants during the past summer upon city children sent to the country for recuperation has only intensified this bitterness." So, that the German experience, even if our democratic instincts did not suggest it, would dictate a policy of food administration based upon the nutritive requirements of the people who have to do the hard work of the nation in a time of war and that in regard to staple foods, or what may be regarded as the necessaries of life, there should be one standard or a set of standards of diet for rich and poor, such standards as in many food products it as the endeavor to set in Canada and the United States.
Germany"s success in conserving food has been principally in rationing and in respect of keeping the price of bread and meat down to about pre-war rates, but that has been accomplished by buying supplies and selling at a loss to dealers, the loss being borne by the nation as a whole. In all perishable food products Germany has not been able to successfully contend with the problem, and no system of food control which has not the co-operation of the people as a whole can be made to work out according to any schedule.
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