CORRESPONDENTS' VIEWS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 124, 28 May 1942, Page 6

CORRESPONDENTS' VIEWS

HIGH COST OF VEGETABLES

(To The Editor)

We have had our Government Commission to inquire into the price and shortage of vegetables and a large meeting in the Town Hall also protesting about the cost, and still the price remains high and the . apply short—this in a city in which nearlv every householder has a backyard. There, for the expenditure of a few shillings plus a lot of hard work, he might grow twothirds of the family's needs and have the vegetables fresh and wholesome. The whole vegetable situation poems to me to hang with the wages earned when people worked longer hours and were paid less, they realised that the less they had to buy the further their money would go, so a vegetable garden was an urgent necessitv with the large families of the eariv da£s. To-day, with more monev, it is easier for the housewife to pop around to the shc.p and buy than to go into the garden and dig tip a root of potatoes or pick a boiling of peas or beans, or ci;t a cabbage. It was the housewife, of course, who was the main prompter in the vegetable growing, who pointed out how impossible it was to buv, on' the money, all that a growing family needed. So 1 think it is to the housewife we wil! have to look for help in righting this matter. It is only as each housewife suggests, helps and encourages the growing of vegetables that we will find the back garden take its place again in the feeding of the household. With the 40-hour week each household should show some result of the extra leisure, and in these nervy davs a garden can be of much help in calming and soothing frayed nerves. GRANDMA.