WASTE NOT, WANT NOT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 157, 26 June 1942, Page 13

WASTE NOT, WANT NOT

(Written for "The Listener" by

Dr.

.MURIEL

BELL

Nutritionist to the . Dept. of Health)

3 I put out my modest scraps of | bread and of fat into the wirebasket from which the wax-eyes feed, I have a guilty feeling which conflicts with my ornithological interests. Much as I want to see whether any of them have rings on their legs (as indicative of whether they have flown the five miles from the territory of the professor who rings them), there are stirrings of the conscience against throwing away bread. The conscience was first sensitised in early youth, but the feeling was intensified on coming into contact in England with those who had been through the last war and who were stern, even a decade later, against any wastage of bread. There is much more immoderate wastage of bread occurring in many households here. In this land of plenty, we waste a great deal of food. Think of the fish that are not brought to market because the housewife spurns them-moki, trevalli, gurnet. Think of the attitude to eels, which are only fish whose body oil contains appreciable amounts of vitamin D-the vitamin that cannot be supplied by ordinary foodstuffs (one pound of eel flesh is equivalent to a tablespoonful of cod-liver oil in terms of vitamin D). Add to this our foolish scorn of fish(Continued on next page)

WASTE NOT, WANT NOT (Continued from previous page) heads and our neglect of shell-fish. The Maoris have much more wisdom in this respect, for they use all these, The Nutrition Research Department recently weighed the flesh present in fish heads: from a representative sample containing groper, red cod, and blue cod, 6 fishheads weighing 5 lbs. 10 ozs. as purchased yielded 4 lbs. of edible portion. Value of Skim Milk Then there is our skim milk, a very valuable food containing the more nutritious elements of the milk, The Department of Home Science has demonstrated that rats grow much better on bread and skim than they do on bread and butter. The skim milk contains all the protein and all the calcium of whole milk, both being valuable particularly for growing children. Too often do we despise the odd bits of the carcase-such things as liver,

heart, kidney, brains, sweetbreads. Nutrition authorities advise using these bits because they are often more nutritious, Take for example our waste of livers. By reason of the fact that we have been careless in our hygiene of dogs, half the sheep-livers are rejected because they contain hydatid cysts. If we had the will, we could clear out this scourgeby dogs regularly with arecoline, and by being careful not to allow dogs to eat raw offal from which they become infected, thus repeating the cycle by once more infecting the lambs, Now that we are short of eggs, mothers want to know what they should feed to their babies in place of egg yolk to prevent them from becoming anaemic; and when they are told that liver is the best known food for providing iron, they say "But we cannot get liver." There would be twice the number of livers obtainable if we solved our hydatid problem. (Next week: "Oil-Non-Belligerent," by Dr. Turbott.)