Our Food Resources
OUR FOOD RESOURCES
Some Misleading Deductions From Official Statistics
DUPLICATION IN CENSUS FIGURES
How It Is Illustrated In the Interdependence of Various Sources of Food Supply - Difficulty of Making Comparisons Between Different Periods - Value of Wild Fruits and Nuts.
The theory that figures never lie is possibly true, but that they may sometimes unintentionally mislead is obvious from some deductions made in a bulletin on the relations of population and food products of the United States compiled by James H. Blodgett of the department of agriculture, chiefly from the census reports of the last half century, says a Washington special dispatch to the New York Post .One of the difficulties of drawing correct inferences concerning food resources from the bare figures of the census enumeration Mr. Blodgett finds to rest in the danger of duplication. For example, when cattle are enumerated we in some sense include the materials furnished by cattle. Milk does not represent a resource additional to the cattle that produce the milk. Butter and cheese are not resources additional to the milk from which they are made. Eggs do not represent resources additional to poultry.
Again, we run into danger when we count the food animals as additional to the annual product of grain. The standard grains taken alone represent their full value as expressed In the statistical tables; so do the cattle, swine, sheep, poultry, llkewise taken alone; but to maintain these animals also as available food would be to count part of the grain twice - first in its raw condition and then as converted into animal products. Moreover, the proportion of grain fed to animals is not definitely determined, nor is it constant from year to year.
The difficulty of comparisons between different periods is illustrated by the native food animals, which were relatively far more important in 1850 than now. Fish were then abundant in streams which now yield a scanty supply or have ceased to flow regularly. In northern Illinois, where in the first half of the last century a trap set over night would furnish a bushel of fish in the morning, some of the same waters now are sterile. Oysters are decreasing. We have no means of calculating the loss of available food in fifty years through the destruction of deer and buffalo, wild turkeys, geese and ducks, wood pigeons, prairie chickens and quail.
Wild fruits, such as grapes, berries and nuts, have a value for food not measured in any census. The abundance of blackberries in certain regions was manifest in the civil war, when considerable bodies of troops would gather them freely for weeks without exhausting those convenient to their camps. The chestnuts of the mountain districts, over wide stretches of country, are roasted for eating just after the frosts of the fall, and pecans, which grow wild in the river bottom lands of certain parts of the south are procurable all the year around in the city markets of the entire country. Less abundant, but still important, is the natural supply of hickory nuts and walnuts.
Another suggestion brought out in the report is the interdependence of states and countries for food supplies. Here is where we are liable to be misled by a casual reading of the figures in tables of imports and exports. It does not necessarily imply that we are raising an insufficient quantity of a particular product; that we find some importations noted in the reports of any given period. Some of the importations may be due to the greater convenience of certain consumers to foreign producers than to producers in distant parts of their own country. Thus Canada at the northeast and the West Indies at the southeast are closer to dense bodies of population in the United States than some sources of supply within our own borders.
Of breadstuffs and meats the United States has usually a great surplus for export, but the amount we are able to send abroad varies according to the abundance of our own harvests and the foreign demand. For example, the remarkable drought of 1901 cut down our exports of food stuffs much below those of 1900, and the decline for 1902 was still more marked. The treasury reports show the highest known exports of corn to have been in 1900, the exports of 1901 and 1902. As oats were needed at home to make up in part for the dearth of corn, their exports declined from $12,000,000 in 1901 to $4,000,000 in 1902. Of course, with less feed material less live stock could be raised, with the result that the exports of cattle and beef products fell off $11,000,000 between 1901 and 1902. In spite of the lessons of thrift forced upon mankind by civilization the world is never far removed from dependence on the last preceding harvest. In other words, abundant harvests do not furnish a surplus of permanent endurance. The failure of crops for a single season means distress.
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Old News
Ann Arbor Argus-Democrat