Another and important reason for rationing is to ensure a satisfactory distribution of essential foods to everyone. If food had been unrationed and prices not controlled it would have resulted in the poor, on account of poverty and lack of storage accommodation, being deprived of essential foods. It has been calculated that without Government control of prices by subsidy the price of food would have risen by 30 per cent. whereas it has risen by but 8 per cent.
This leaves out of account attempts ich might have been made by the rich to hoard the less perishable articles of food. The rich and middle classes have been compelled by rationing to share and share alike with the poor. In the case of milk the Ministry of Food's policy has gone even further and they are attempting to remove any stigma of pauperism attaching to the grant of free milk.
Hand-in-hand with this policy one of preventing the consumption of luxury foods and hotels and restaurants frequented by the well-todo are to serve fewer courses and lo: elaborate dishes. The Government which is spending some £60,000 000 a year in subsidizing food is bound to ensure that the foods so subsidized should go to the people who most need it.
The whole of the British Gov ments food policy is really an amazing economic and dietetic experiment and is utilizing wartime stresses not so much to cut down the consumption of the gross amounts of food consumed, but to use them to develop the resources of food production in the direction of increasing protective foods—which Great Britain is particularly favoured by soil and climate to produce—and to convert the inhabitants of that land to a more healthy and rational diet than they had consumed (like every other industrial nation) in times of peace.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.