THE MEAT BOYCOTT.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9710, 4 February 1910, Page 4

THE MEAT BOYCOTT.

Now that 1,000,000 people in the United States have pledged themselves to abstain from meat for two months as a protest against the exactions of the Beef Trust, it is quite likely that the controllers of the meat supply may regret that they squeezed the public so hard. The Beef Trust is not only faced by a prosecution at the hands of the Federal Government, acting under the anti-trust law, but it is alao confronted by the prospect of a permanently reduced demand in the home market, It is a well-known | fact in human experience that when a dietary habit is once broken down the change, which was intended to be merely temporary, frequently becomes permanent. Out of every hundred persons who give up meat and adopt a different dietary for 60 days it may be anticipated that a certain percentage will continue to use the new diet permanently. Some of those who find their health benefited by the change of diet will decline to return to steaks, chops and sirloins. Fish, fruit, vegetables, and cereals will assert powerful claims. People will acquire the habit of using the new dietary, and a new habit, once thoroughly acquired, is not easily displaced. There are plenty of statistics available to show that physical and intellectual efficiency are often not impared by the avoidance of meat. Enthusiasts on the vegetarian side • even claim that efficiency is increased by adherence to their formula. Hence it is quite likely that, with the spread of the meat boycott, the heavy slump in prices which has already set in will be intensified. Incidentally there wises a prospect of rapid and surprising fluctuations in the prices of all manner of commodities if this meat boycott becomes a precedent. If large bodies of people can be so easily influenced to use or abstain from usI ing any particular commodity values all round will be liable to startling 1 and sudden changes. Unstable markets, in fact, will be the necessary corollary of food combines. Since the price-raising combine is illegal, and the price-owering boycott is not, it would appear that a vigorous administration of the existing law of the United States might prevent a recurrence of the exciting cause of the present trouble.