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Show Kathlee Our Daily Bread BeU Syndicate WNU Features. 1 fcf ; "There is hardly a household in America whose mistress could not cut down (pod waste." By KATHLEEN NORMS jo WOMAN knows how J far she can cut down the food waste in her house, until she tries," writes Mrs. Elmer Hillgrass of Santa San-ta Barbara. "I've never thought of myself as wasteful, waste-ful, but I've always set a generous gen-erous table, as my mother did before me. ! "My family includes a good husband, a brother just back from four years' service, my mother and her ten-year-old son, and my own two babies. Milk, meat and grocery bills have run around $170 a month; that is, averaging $24 a m6nth per personnot high, considering the cost of everything nowadays. "However, when the call went out for food economy, I determined to see what I could do, took the whole family into my confidence, and set to work. Brother Chester approved, because in Europe he saw the bitter bit-ter need of food shipments to the starving; Elmer approved because our bills were worrying him a little and he saw this plan killing two birds with one stone, and Mother approved because she thinks we haven't character enough and hoped this would help. "Bread was one of our weak spots; do what I would, we threw out what amounted to a loaf or two every week. Cut slices, cold toast, the end of a french loaf all grew stale and sometimes mouldy, and when my jar of crumbs was full there seemed nothing to do with it but throw it away. Saved It AU. "That I stopped. While conceding conced-ing to my family that fresh bread is much more tempting than stale, I determined that no bread should ever be thrown out again. Housewives House-wives know a hundred uses for old bread, I employed them all. Odd bits, crisped in a little margarine, went Into soups; old slices were freshened and put under asparagus, scrambled eggs, creamed things. "Once a week every last scrap was toasted, buttered, put into a tureen and covered with hot salted milk and that, with dessert, was our supper. Everyone liked it, and it was finished to the last ladleful and my bread box was washed, aired, and ready for fresh supplies. "Once the bread problem was conquered, the rest came easy. Every Ev-ery saucer of tomato sauce, every chicken or steak bone, every half-onion half-onion or spoonful of the babies' uneaten carrots or spinach went into the soup pot. Doughnuts, grapefruit, grape-fruit, chops weren't bought by the dozen any more, but on a strict ratio ra-tio of five, for my five adults. I say 'chops' but we rarely have chops; the proportion of bone weight and fat makes them a wasteful meat. Pot-roasts, stews, ground beef lamb shoulders, all these are varied by the cheaper foods, frankfurters, tongues, pigs feet, beef short-ribs, tripe, fish, curries of all sorts. "These are my figures. In March a year ago we used 70 loaves of bread, 80 pounds of meat and 17 pounds of fish. In March this year we bought 41 pounds of meat, 44 loaves of bread and 15 pounds of fish. The money saving is very noticeable. Our milk still stands at 4 quarts a day; eggs we get from our own chickens, about one dozen iK'n'l waste it! a day. The family is deeply interested interest-ed in this experiment of food saving, sav-ing, and claims that it never has lived better. In fractions this means that we save about one-third in cost and bulk of food, and throw out almost nothing that is edible. I don't cut on my vegetable or fruit bill, and haven't calculated in here the help that homemade small breads give me, cornbread, muffins, and so on, because that ratio remains re-mains about the same. Remarkable Record. "But isn't a saving of one-third encouraging and illuminating?" concludes this cheerful and helpful letter. "Elmer and I say that no matter what the food situation gets to be in the future, we never want to waste again." Everyone, I suppose, cannot follow fol-low this brilliant example, and reduce re-duce food .consumption so remarkably remark-ably and with such success. But there is hardly a household in America Amer-ica whose mistress could not cut down food waste in some such proportion pro-portion as that accomplished bv Mrs. Hillgrass. Apart from the national na-tional food demand, and international internation-al food demand, there will be im mediate financial saving, and perhaps per-haps a lesson to the younger members mem-bers of the family that, will stand them in good stead in their own homes some day. Scrimping and parsimony and squeezing pennies is ugly business, but to live more simply sim-ply and at the same time interest and satisfy the family; to serve no only our own government and help to end the suffering of the world-those world-those are objects worth any woman wom-an s time and effort, those are Ts important today as was the actual winning of the war. |