GUNS OR BUTTER?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 148, 24 April 1942, Page 17

GUNS OR BUTTER?

(Written fé6r "The Listener" by DR,

MURIEL

BELL

. Nutritionist to the Department of Health)

HE other day a doctor expressed the point of view that now was not the time for fussing. about sound nutrition — that when it came to a choice of "guns or butter," he was all in favour of guns, and that the Japanese appeared to do well on rice. Allowing something for legitimate teasing, I nevertheless felt that maybe others were thinking the same thing, more seriously. The fallacies in this argument deserve dissection, the better to clarify our minds at this important phase of our national history. In the first place, the phrase " guns or butter" has been rather cleverly used by Hitler. If you read Sir John Orr’s book, Feeding the People in Wartime, you will find that when he visited Germany in 1937, he observed that whereas butter was scarce and dear, milk and vegetables were abundant and cheap. The Germans are aware that there is much greater total food value in milk than in butter-and whereas they have used the phrase "guns or butter," they have actually put into practice " guns and milk versus butter." They recognise that in a food like milk, the whole is greater than the part. It can quite easily be demonstrated that even skim milk is a good food. Obviously we have been led

astray by the phrase-it has been used as a sort of decoy-which is the first point. My retort to the doctor was that perhaps it was just as well to have some, "butter " inside the man that was behind the gun. On this point of sound nutrition for the fighting forces, it is important to answer the doctor’s second fallacious idea-that the Japanese do well on rice. First, the diet of the Japanese consists of fish and soya beans, and preserved. vegetables as well as rice; they also use preserved seaweed to a large extent. Pork and chicken figure in the diet of those who can afford it. Rice, by itself, they find to be a poor food. Mixed with the other foods named, it provides a fairly adequate diet. There has been very little .milk in the dietary of the Japanese -which accounts for their poor stature, a point on which the Japanese are rather sensitive. When Japanese children have been brought up in U.S.A., where they adopt the American habit of using milk in the feeding of children, they grow to a much better height and weight than they do in their native country. Now, when it comes to fighting qualities, are we not to believe Major-General Bennett who says that the Australian troops stopped the Japanese advance everywhere they met it in Malaya, and that the Australian troops made much better individual soldiers than the Japanese. We should not credit rice with what has been due to superiority of numbers, carelessness of numerical losses, and a multiplicity of causes other than’ rice. Napoleon’s statement that "an army marches on its stomach," holds as good to-day as it did a century ago. Air Force superiority will be the test-and am I to be persuaded that a pilot who suffers from fatigue through inferior feeding is going to do as well as one who is at the peak of nutritional fitness? (Next. week: "Are Women Colder Blooded Mortals Than Men?" by Dr. Turbott.)