When Food Becomes a Luxury
IN the December Popular Science Monthly, Prof. E. H. S. Bailey, of the University of Kansas, discusses the modern tendency toward buying foods in small packages or tins, rather than by the bulk or weight. He says:— “One of the most conspicuous illustrations of the tendency to allow the manufacturer to reap, to say the least, a large profit, because the consumer wants to buy his food ‘ready prepared,’ is the fad of making the breakfast to a great extent of the newly invented ‘breakfast cereals.’ A few years ago the people did not know the meaning of these words, and now they are common in the most modest bill of fare.” “Since these foods are made mostly from wheat, corn, and oats, it is absurd to suppose that the claims of some of the manufacturers are true, when they say that these foods are in every way better than the original grains from which they are made. . . . It is a question, anyway, whether the normal stomach welcomes the appearance of predigested food; it is provided by nature with ‘apparatus and chemicals’ necessary for the digestion of food, and why should the work be taken away from it?” But the point in the article is the cost of specially prepared foods in packets, over the cost of the ground cereals in bulk. Professor Bailey says:— “From the Bulletin of the Maine Agricultural Experiment Station for 1906, we quote the following cost in cents per pound for some of these foods: Quaker Oats, 3.1 cents; Nichol’s Pearl Hominy, 4.5; Cream of Wheat, 8.8; Grape Nuts, 14.6; Shredded Whole Wheat, 15.5; Force, 16.5; Flaked Rice, 18.2; Granula, 27.2. To this may be added the cost of some other brands, as Quaker Corn Flakes, 13.3; Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, 13.3; Maple Corn Flakes, 14.5; Post Toasties, 14.5; Grape Sugar Flakes, 17.8; Malta Vita, 18.4; Sugar Corn Flakes, 20; Holland Rusk, 22.8; Puffed Wheat, 29.1 cents. At this rate a bushel of wheat, which might be originally worth one dollar, would when made into a breakfast food, cost the housekeeper from five dollars to twelve dollars, calculating that seventy-five per cent of the grain is available as food, as is the case in making wheat flour. Oatmeal in bulk sells at five cents a pound, and simple preparations of the other grains at from five to seven cents.” “These are a few of the illustrations to show ‘where the money goes,’ or at least some of it. Some of us are living on the luxuries of the market. . . . Instead of using the oak and maple and pine for fuel, we are feeding the fire with mahogany, and walnut, and rare imported woods.”