Hunger U. S. A.-Malnutrition and Ignorance

(Jean Mayer (MAY ARE) is Professor of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. He was born in Paris in 1920 and served as a field artillery officer in the French Army during World War II. He was decorated with the Croix de Guerre and thirteen other wartime citations. In December 1969 Mayer chaired the White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health.)

THERE was a time when Popeye was the only one who could tell me what to eat. Last week, in the dining room of a narrow but long Beacon Hill townhouse, Jean Mayer usurped him. Mayer had just complimented his wife on her choice of bread and mentioned that Shana Alexander and the other editors at McCall's thought that his commentary on woman's liberation "was the greatest thing they had seen in years," when he said to me, "You should eat more." Before I could protest he served me up a triple portion of squash and in his customary French accent added, "When I was a boy we ate whatever was put before us." Then, as I looked skeptically at the yellow mound on my plate, Mayer brought one hand to his rounding stomach and concluded, smiling, "That's why my generation is too heavy today."

Later, in a formal living room once the main set of a CBS documentary, "Hunger, U. S. A.," Mayer wiped a squash stain from his suit and showed me the bound volumes of his 400 published articles on the human hunger and thirst mechanisms, and his definitive book on obesity. Above the mantel piece hung a portrait of his father Andre in World War I uniform. The soldier of the portrait was the first scientist to relate human behavior to measurable physiological changes. Although the son Jean studied history and philosophy as a 17-year-old senior at the University of Paris, Jean Mayer remembered the early respect he had for his father, who invented the gas mask, correlated thirst as a psychological phenomenon with rises in blood pressure, and founded the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Jean Mayer intended to do graduate work in physiology at Harvard when, in 1939, he enlisted in the French Army. In 1941 Mayer found himself barred by the German Army from following DeGaulle to London. He went to Lisbon and from there to the United States. From March 1941 to March 1942 he worked on a chemistry research project at Harvard, waiting impatiently for clearance by the FBI to rejoin the Free French Forces in England. Mayer was reactivated in the spring of 1942 and joined a convoy in the Notrh Atlantic. "I was torpedoed off Halifax soon after," he says. "Betty (whom he met at Harvard) flew in from Boston to see me in the hospital. We found two strangers to be witnesses and we were married the day she arrived."

The next day Mayer was called back to his ship and then ordered to London to become a member of DeGaulle's private staff. Not so young four years later when he rejoined Mrs. Mayer after D-Day, Mayer and his beautiful wife returned to America, his college diploma summa cum laude in hand and his war decorations in a trunk. Mayer said, "I never had that Scott Fitzgerald youth that one can imagine enjoying to the hilt . . . After spending five years as an artillery officer engaging in wholescale destruction, I wanted to help rebuild the world through science." He came to America, this time Yale, partly he says, "because it would have been too easy to succeed in France without knowing anything."

Some mothers today remember Dr. Mayer as the man who went on TV to say that monosodium glutamate (trade name Accent) in baby foods might be harming their children. He says today that consumers no longer know what they eat. "In 1949 ninety per cent of the food sold was for the housewife. Now only fifty per cent is, and at least half of that is highly-processed with all sorts of additives-vegetable protein substitutes for meat and excessive salt to mask the taste of excessive sugar and on and on." Mayer wants calories, proteins, and minerals to appear by amount on all processed food labels. He would like to see date limiting and unit pricing by manufacturers.

"Pet foods are better labeled than human foods. The quality of the food has gotten worse, not better. Heart diseases, which are closely related to our diets of saturated fats and sugars, have nullified twenty years of nutritional and medical advances. In 1949 we spent $12 billion on medicine. Last year it was $63 billion and life expectancy statistics have remained the same. There are twenty countries which have passed our expectancy averages in that time."

"Food chains," Mayer reports, "are more willing to go along with reforms than the manufacturers. Chains and supermarkets will always sell food, but the manufacturers are afraid that the markets for their biggest money-makers will disappear." Mayer harbors no deep love for General Mills and General Foods but he is hesitant to have one corporation reform itself unilaterally while the others make a killing. "It is right, I think, that there be tough national food and drug regulations, complete with enforcement provisions."

Since 1968, when he served as chairman of the National Council on Hunger and Malnutrition, scientist Mayer has become the spokesman for nutritionist muckrackers in the United States. Asked by Nixon to organize the first White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health, Mayer tried to emphasize that Americans, especially old people and single women with small children in both the North and the South, still starve. "More than ten per cent of our total population," he said. At the Conference Mayer pointed out that the very poor in rural areas were not on welfare. He named 500 counties in the United States which had no food subsidy programs at all.

Since the Washington conference in December 1969, Dr. Mayer reports that all counties now have food programs. Most of these county programs involve food stamps, which unlike the older commodity distribution ("surplus food') plan, does not depend on traveling large distances to food pick up sites in transportation which the poor do not have.

Despite Massachusetts, which more than any other state allows its hungry poor to starve, Myer says, "We could wipe out hunger in the United States within a year if we tried. Last year we spent $1.5 billion on our food programs and over $5 billion on our farm price support programs. We have the resources and are capable of the task. It is not a question of whether we can wipe out hunger, but when, or if we want to . . . In Massachusetts no one cares. Maurice Donabue, the one man who supported action, no longer holds a state office. "Biggest problem to date, Mayer says, has been keeping the hunger issue non-partisan. He does not consider himself part of the Nixon Administration and says, "The minute hunger becomes a political issue we are dead."

Because of World War II and his frontline service in the French Army, Mayer leaned to act decisively. Today Jean Mayer is a decisive man. The day I visited him, Mayer woke up at 4:30 a. m. to watch the funeral of DeGaulle on television. He said, "When I was with DeGaulle in London in 1942, it was clear to me and clear to everyone else there except the American government that De Gaulle was the only man who could lead France when we returned." Mayer, however, has no particular reverence for his former boss De Gaulle or for any man. He seems certain that the leaders of his generation are his equals and his associates-that he knows many of them is a reflection on his own foresight.

Of his family he says, "We probably have more ties with Harvard than most of the old Harvard families in Boston." He counts his wife and numerous in-laws as Harvard alumni. His father lectured one year at the School of Public Health. His sister, who also attended the School of Public Health, has studied children's growth patterns exclusively, in Africa, and now teaches in France. Three of Jean Mayer's children have been to Harvard, one is now at Yale, and ten-year-old Pierre goes to The Shady Hill School in Cambridge and is bored by the idea of breakfast at the White House.

LAST summer at the Swedish Nutrition Council meetings in Stockholm, Dr. Mayer proposed that starvation be banned as a means of warfare. "Bacteriological warfare," he says, "was outlawed in the 1920's because it was argued that germ warfare was indiscriminate in its effects on women and children. Actually starvation is not just indiscriminate, but it only affects women, children, and the infirm. Fighting men never starve because they can seize supplies in the territory they patrol." The Swedish government has asked the United Nations General Assembly to act on this ban as well as Mayer's proposal to start an independent international relief organization to deal with famines.

Remembering his trips to Biafra in 1968, Dr. Mayer says, "There is invariably utter chaos in relief operations. Although a disaster strikes at least once every year, the relief organization in each case is dealing with tragedy for the first time. Political complications hamper American Red Cross operations, and the International Red Cross, which is a Swiss organization, is not equipped to provide massive aid. The Pakistani government," he says, "is the greatest ob-stacle to the East Pakistan relief operations. The United States, even if it wants to, can not send massive relief for political reasons. Reading between the lines, I can't help thinking that we could be saving hundreds of thousands of lives if an independent relief organization existed."

McCall's Magazine plans to hit newstands and grocery stores with Jean Mayer's article on women's liberation later this winter. It is ammunition for Radcliffe graduates enraged at being forced to secretarial schools. Mayer points out that women make up half the doctor talent pool in this country but only 7 per cent of our doctors are women. "Medical school admissions boards refuse to consider women because they believe that women will inevitably marry and become housewives when in fact all our data shows that they don't. Yet at Harvard Med many of the male students never practice medicine but take administrative posts or do research-jobs they didn't need M. D. s for."

"Because of career limitations that have always been forced upon women in the past, Mayer believes that there are certain spheres in which women could not only work on an equal basis with men, but where they begin with clear-cut advantages. "If women planned public housing projects, we would never build another development with no laundries, no food stores, and no playing areas for the children. Women would make better mayors.

"Men are so conditioned by team sports that they look at every job as a competition with an opponent to vanquish. They take over City Hall with no experience in keeping tabs on daily operations which require continuity and it becomes for them a series of political encounters. The job of mayors is essentially a scaling-up of the running of a household. Women understand better how to get from day to day while men come to the job having no experience in supervising even a small-scale operation and suddenly they expect to manage an enormous one."

MAYER, who as a child read Plato in the original and is glad that he did, defends the ideal of liberal arts colleges. In a recent article for The Harvard Bulletin (November 16, 1970) Dr. Mayer called for courses which will provide law for the layman and medicine for the curious. He believes that too much is yielded to the specialists. "After all," he writes, "everybody will have to deal with problems which have legal implications, choose doctors and decide to consult them, choose schools for his or her children, buy houses or stocks, and vote for representatives who oversee the spending of billions of defense dollars."

"There's a great chasm," he says, "between budget-making and educational philosophy at Harvard. Students, professors, and alumni should be told how the University's budget is made. I wouldn't want to say that anyone at Harvard actively conceals administrative decisions but there is obviously a lack of active explanation of these decisions to the university community. Some people seem to have the idea that their jobs are easier when they do not have to discuss them publicly." He adds, though, that good PR men won't solve everything.

"We need more financial support from the government, but with no strings. At the School of Public Health every man below the rank of full professor supports himself and his staff on research grants. If we expect men to teach, then we must pay these men at least in part to teach." Mayer suggests that the government give a large portion of its research money to students as scholarships. Students would then use this money to pay universities offering good teaching. Universities would be forced to provide better teaching, and students would have some choice about the kind of school they want. Dr. Mayer says, "Now all the money goes to research and good teaching goes un-rewarded. If it sounds like I'm proposing that universities and professors set themselves up in business, I am not. I am suggesting that we need to restore some balance to the university. I doubt," he said laughing, "that any professor will suddenly make a million dollars."

Although Jean Mayer might have filled the big brick house behind Emerson Hall, his obituary isn't going to suffer if he has to stay on Beacon Hill. As we were looking at his father's portrait and the French sabers opposite it on the wall, Dr. Mayer said to me, "A man has to know where he comes from in order to know where he wants to go. Otherwise he will live from moment to moment, and instead of being a statesman he will be a politician, instead of a scientist, a technician." I was sure that Jean Mayer knew where he stood. He said, "It is an accident, but you'll notice how my life is curiously like my father's." It was no accident, I thought, that Mayer was the first to notice the parallel, but I had to agree with him about it.

(The author is a junior living in Adams House.)