WAR AND PEACE: Food: A Weapon

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There was no division about U. S. desire to send food to Britain. Last week at his press conference, President Roosevelt announced that he was working out a program with Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard and Surgeon General Thomas Parran (just back from England), covering Britain's food needs and U. S. ability to supply them. At the Department of Agriculture, experts pointed to U. S. grain reserves (greatest in history), to stocks of fats, oils, hay, meat supplies. If food was a weapon, the U. S. was well armed. Question was: Could the U. S. use this weapon as effectively for democracy as the Nazis use hunger against it?

Other food news of the week:

> The freighter Exmouth, second U. S. relief ship (the first, the Cold Harbor, docked last fortnight at Marseille), sailed for France, carrying 12,000,000 lb. of evaporated and powdered milk, 150,000 articles of clothing for children, 500,000 units of insulin, 20,000 bottles of vitamins — as well as 12-ft. red crosses on both sides, and floodlights to illuminate them at night.

> Due to sail in two weeks are two French freighters tied up in New York Harbor, with 13,500 tons of white flour (a gift of the U. S. Red Cross). U. S. conditions: 1) the food can go only to unoccupied ports; 2) it must be directly distributed by the Red Cross; 3) "not a single pound" of similar or equivalent food must pass into Occupied France; 4) the ships must return immediately to the U. S.

> Crying "appeasement," 35 prominent liberals, in a letter to Secretary Hull, denounced the release of food to France. Their argument: French industry is working for Hitler; Nazis seized 1,000,000 tons of French wheat to hold in Occupied France; food shipments will undermine the British blockade, lead to Nazi-prompted demands for U. S. feeding of other conquered lands.