Are the Women to Blame?

Whose fault is it that New Zealanders eat so badly? That the food served in private homes, restaurants, hotels and boarding houses is so ill-chosen and so badly cooked? Surely, it is the fault of the women, because they are the ones who order the food and plan the meals for the family. If all the women of New Zealand who planned meals knew more of the fundamental facts of nutrition, they would not serve the foods which are going to give their families deficiency diseases when they grow up.

Yet, even if the women of New Zealand did stop cooking their vegetables with soda, and loading their families with white flour and sugar concoctions (which they call cakes), there are still many pitfalls into which they would unconsciously fall when they purchased their food supplies. Women unfortunately do not know what they are up against when they ask for as simple a thing as whole meal bread, or fresh fruits and vegetables. There are so many difficulties in their way. Supposing for instance a housewife decides to feed her family on their pint of milk per day, and their greens and their fruit and their fish and eggs and cheese and their whole grain foods, and supposing that she has intelligently planned these into an adequate menu, and convinced her family that cakes and meat pies and sausages are not the best food obtainable, she is still up against the economic difficulty of finding the money with which to purchase these foods.

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