Food for Thought

PROFESSOR JEAN MAYER'S proposal to institute meatless days at Harvard deserves serious consideration. Eating meat is the most inefficient method of obtaining calories, since it takes about eight pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat. The world's grain reserves are at a dangerously low level, and the average American--who now consumes over twice as much beef as in 1950--is helping to deplete them even further.

There is only one way to decrease this wasteful and unhealthy level of meat consumption, and that is for every individual to eat less meat. The Food Services should help foster this change in eating habits by offering more non-meat alternatives, particularly vegetarian dishes that use high-protein beans and vegetables. Students should approach these alternatives with open minds, remembering that they are probably less likely to contract food poisoning from soybeans or lentils than from "breakfast steak" or "veal parmigiana."

The Committee on Housing and Undergraduate Life should adopt the proposal, passed on Monday by the subcommittee on Food Services, to institute an experimental policy of having two meatless days a week, to be followed by a student referendum on the question of instituting the plan permanently. But even if the plan is adopted, it will not be enough. Aside from the fact that it does not cover any of the graduate or professional schools--not to mention the Faculty Club--the meatless days plan does not insure any fundamental change in eating habits. No plan can do that, short of policing every mouthful eaten in every dining hall in the University. One thing that could easily be changed, however, is the amount of food wasted at every meal, simply by decreasing the size of servings.

The Food Services staff is understandably reluctant to consider such possibly unpopular policy changes as restricting portions and using more soybeans, fearing the wrath of their dissatisfied "customers." But this fear should not prevent anyone from experimenting. It may just turn out that people here are beginning to think of themselves less as customers and more as people living in a world that is threatened by the possibility of starvation on a massive scale. The point is that food is a social commodity that should be distributed according to need and not according to purchasing power.