1917 | Food Availability
Food Availability
Riots break out in February at New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, where rising food prices have made it difficult for poor people to feed their families (see 1916). The New York rioters attack food shops and burn peddlers' pushcarts on the lower East Side and in Brooklyn's Brownsville and Williamsburg sections, rejecting suggestions that they substitute rice for potatoes and milk for eggs and meat. Some 6,000 kosher poultry shops and 150 kosher poultry slaughter houses close down just before Passover to protest wholesalers accused of cornering the market.
Britain's war bread beginning in February is made from flour milled at an extraction rate of up to 81 percent with a compulsory admixture of 5 percent barley, oat, or rye flour to stretch available supplies. Food Controller Lord Devenport asks heads of families to limit their family bread consumption to four pounds per person each week, meat to 2½ pounds, sugar to three-quarters of a pound.
Britain's House of Commons is stunned by news that 2 million tons of shipping have been lost to German U-boats and that the country has only 3 to 4 weeks' supply of food in stock.
British retail food prices rise to 94 percent above July 1914 levels by the end of March. A four-pound loaf of bread fetches a shilling; a Royal Commission reports that rising prices and faulty food distribution are creating industrial unrest.
Some 200,000 Berlin factory workers strike for a week in April to protest a reduction in bread rations.
George V calls May 2 for national constraint on bread consumption.
The embargo proclamation issued by President Wilson July 9 places exports of foodstuffs under government control. Congress passes a Food Control Act (Lever Act) August 10, and Iowa-born mining engineer Herbert C. Hoover, 43, is officially named Food Administrator (he has been unofficial administrator since March). Hoover has served as chairman of the Commission for Relief in Belgium and encourages U.S. farmers with the slogan "Food Can Win the War."
The U.S. Food Administration's Grain Corp. buys, stores, transports, and sells wheat and fixes its price at $2.20 per bushel under terms of the Lever Act passed August 10 to establish government control over food and fuel.
Well-to-do Britons miss sugar, butter, and white bread, but price increases after July are at only one-fourth the rate earlier, and government subsidization of bread and other staples keeps food relatively cheap as compared with other commodities. Mostly because the war has virtually ended unemployment, British working class diets actually improve, although potatoes are often in short supply, and long rows of women, many with children and some with infants in their arms, queue up for margarine at London 2 weeks before Christmas.