Nutrition and Food Supplies

1936-09 1936 1930s 33 pages : illustration NUTRITION AND FOOD SUPPLIES INTEREST IN NUTRITION Long before Sir George Newman (until lately the nation’s Chief Medical Officer) wrote in an Annual Report that “health is a purchasable commodity,” the Labour Movement had bee...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Standing Joint Committee of Industrial Women's Organisations (contributor)
Institution:MCR - The Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick
Language:English
English
Published: London : The Labour Party September 1936
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10796/65DE4972-5FB7-477E-BF78-636FC69D5DF6
http://hdl.handle.net/10796/4190C58E-7774-489F-AAFF-50E092607EFD
Description
Summary:1936-09 1936 1930s 33 pages : illustration NUTRITION AND FOOD SUPPLIES INTEREST IN NUTRITION Long before Sir George Newman (until lately the nation’s Chief Medical Officer) wrote in an Annual Report that “health is a purchasable commodity,” the Labour Movement had been calling attention to the fact that health was denied to large sections of the people because of their poverty. Until recently it had little support outside its own ranks. Even in 1933 when the report — “Creating a C.3 Nation” — was discussed and adopted by the National Conference of Labour Women, the danger of widespread malnutrition was not regarded seriously, and little notice was taken by the press of the demands made at that conference for adequate maintenance for the unemployed and the feeding of school children; nor of the budgets published to show that the amounts available for food in a number of unemployed families (typical of thousands more) ranged from 1/8 to 3/1½ per head per week. To-day Nutrition is a fashionable subject. There is widespread concern at the steadily accumulating evidence of the terrible effects of prolonged unemployment on health; but the present interest in Nutrition is partly due to the fact that one section of capitalist producers — farmers in this and other countries — are unable to find a profitable market for their produce. Inspiring calls for the “marriage of health to agriculture” may reflect concern for the farmer who cannot sell rather than for the poor who cannot buy. It is important to emphasise this because if the glut of food could be taken off the market in some other way — if, for example, the new fleets of cruisers could run on milk or the new squadrons of aeroplanes could be oiled with butter — we should undoubtedly find much less concern in certain quarters at the absence of first-class proteins and vitamins from the tables of the unemployed and underpaid workers. 3 127/NU/5/5/1/12
Physical Description:TEXT