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Show - I Uncle Sam's Best Seller I Ey Frederic J. Haskin. -f . "WASHINGTON, p. . S-'pt. ?n.Of all the adnaniuon.s which our t tnbau K'-'vernineiu laid upon u.s during: tho war. i ho one thai impressed us most deeply was the admonition : 'Van '." Wo t-H ved daylight and money and babies, wo bought thrift stamps and liberty lib-erty bonds, wn t-w ailed llk-s and pro-Germans, pro-Germans, we gave up Sunday motoring and candy. We were tmutred, robbed and bamboozled, bur we stood it because the government, said we had to. "We proved beyond i he shadow of doubt I ha t t he A merican people are not only the freest in the world, but also the easiest in the world to lend by the nose. But of all these tricks we learned during dur-ing l lie war, there is only one that has in any considerable depree stayed with us. That is te trick of canning. This idea of having a larpe supply of fruits and Vegetables stored away in the cupboard against the coming of winter somehow appeals to us. Maybe it is just the ancient animal instinct to lay up something against the coming of cold weather. Maybe it is a recrudescence of the forethought that our pioneering ancestors an-cestors had to use. Maybe it is a desire to get even with that Greek on the corner cor-ner who soaks us a dime for an apple. And maybe the impulse comes from our innards, which arc. mid long have been, sadly in need of more garden sass and fresh fruit than most of us can afford , to buy. Anyway, we not only canned in war because we had to, but now we arc canning can-ning in peace because we can. The story of the canning campaign is told concretely in the record of the distribution of Us textbook. Two years ago the department of agriculture got out Farmers' Bulletin 83fJ, which has come to be recognized as the standard . publication of the government on can- i ning. It has printed, under tho stimulus : of constant demand. a.IiOO.000 copies of . this bulletin. The demand is such that it is sure that it will have to print hundreds hun-dreds of thousands more. Tho call for this bulletin is greater than that for anything any-thing that the department or any other agency of the government has ever printed. print-ed. It is the goverumen t's ono best seller. Upon it have been based five separate sep-arate books privately published and sold. Tho material that it offers has been Incorporated In-corporated as departments in at least twelve other household books. Because the government has not been able to meet the public demand, slate colleges and other such institutions have printed and distributed three million copies of the instructions in-structions it contains. There is hardly , a magazine or a newspaper in the nation na-tion that has not borrowed copy freely from its pages. j O. H. Benson, specialist in charge of club work for the department of agri- , culture, recently attended the, stern States exposition at Springfield, Mass. The department had an exhibit there. A placard suggested that anybody interested inter-ested in any of the branches of government govern-ment work represented might get a bulletin bul-letin for every one who asked for the next most popular publication. A wire was sent for 3000 of these bulletins and they were distributed to individuals in a single day. Last year tho government provided, in the interests of war economy, half a million mil-lion dollars to bo used in teaching the public to conserve its food supply by canning can-ning and drying. That fund made it possible pos-sible to train a great corps of experts and send them forth to carry the message mes-sage to the masses. The department at Washington trained a canning corps and sent representatives to every state. These trained subsidiary state corps. These in turn sent their trained people to every county. This year, the war being over, adequate ade-quate funds have not been available to continue the work on this scale. But the advertising has been done and the canning can-ning idea has been estabbshed. The people peo-ple are converted to it. They want more definite information. And so, in state and interstate fairs of the present summer sum-mer and fallsuch fairs as that at Sioux' Citv, where twelve states gathered, or that at Spokane, which represented all the northwest tho great demand has been for canning information. The exhibits ex-hibits of canned products have been leading lead-ing attractions. The idea has even overflown over-flown the borders of our country into Canada. The provinces of Ontario and Manitoba have borrowed Farmers' Bulletin Bul-letin 839, and have reprinted it, and broadcasted it. Tn addition to the handicap of restricted appropriations this year, the advocates of canning have faced the added difficulty of a national shortage of sugar. The big "ranners have had no trouble in getting all the sugar they want. The price is controlled con-trolled and therefore not particularly high. Thev buv direct from the refiners. But this individual householder has had trouble over the sugar question. This has largely been due to the indifference of the grocer. He has been allowed only a certain cer-tain margin of profit on sugar. That margin of profit is less than he makes on the other articles he handles. He, therefore, there-fore, wants to do as little sugar husinesa as possible wants to drive this less profitable trade to his competitor. He often causes the customer who wants sugar all the inconvenience he can. He has made it so difficult for the customer that he has discouraged the putting up of f ru i t. But it is possible to put up fruit without with-out sugar. Farmers' Bulletin 839 has told hundreds of thousands of housewives how to do this. Altogether the canning for the season just passed is estimated to have amounted to 60 per cent of that of the summer of 19bS, accomplished under the stimulus of actual war. This is regarded as pretty fair and as holding out a good promise for the future when the sugar supply gets back to normal. Fruit crops this year, as a general proposition, prop-osition, have been excellent particularly in the east. The peach crop has been a record-breaker. Under normal conditions canned fruit would be cheap this winter. The packers are already issuing bulletins, bulle-tins, however, to the effect that canned fruit will cosr ') per cent more this year than last. The demand from Europe for sucli materials is the reason. So. despite the high prices of fruit and of sugar. It will cost the housewife more to buy her canned fruit than to can it herself. The shame of it is that half the fruit grown in the nation rots on the ground. Hundreds of thousands of acres of land in the United States today are literally covered cov-ered with fallen apples that will never be used. Fifty per cent of the apples rot in the. orchards every year, while the public pays fancy prices for apples and apple sauce and apple juice. Half the peoplo resort to purgatives in their attempts to kppp themselves healthy when an adequate winter supply of fruits and vegetables, made available through canning, would provide their systems with nature's pur-go pur-go t ives. The effect of the campaign for canning may be Gauged to some extent by the number of quart containers sold by niami- facturers. Kefore the war the market usually absorbed about fiOO.000,000 conf tainers. ln the summer of 1918 the, maiut-facturers maiut-facturers sold J, 400,000.000 such cans an)d jars. The home canning of the natio.) was more than doubled. So it is possible to go back 40 per cent this year and still have more cans and jars sealed up thafn ever scaled in a single year before the war. The community spirit that has been developed de-veloped in this work is considered of great value. Ashville, N. C, established a municipal cannery in the courthouse squaro to which any woman could bring her fruit and sugar and have them canned, the city keeping a small share of the prod-( uct. In Middletown, O., 5u0 acres of gardens gar-dens were tilled by men from the mills, who canned the- product co-operatively. Industrial peace came through the rivalry and the common interest in this sort of work. A shipbuilders' strike in San Francisco Fran-cisco was broken because the wives of the workmen refused to move until the vegetables veg-etables were put up. Thus the can stands for much besides a winter supply of fruit and vegetables. It stands for co-operative effort and for individual in-dividual thrift two forces that may go a long way toward settling the world-wide wave of unrest. (Any reader who would liko a. copy of Farmers Bulletin 839 may secure it by sending name and address, accompanied by a 2-cent stamp for return post-ago post-ago to the Tribune Information Bureau, Frederic J. Haskin, director, Washington, Washing-ton, D. C. |