NATIONAL FOOD FUND.
[TO THE EDITOR 07 THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—May I appeal through your columns for support for an organization which has recently been started under the above title, and which I believe is doing a work hitherto almost untouched by any other Society ? The National Food Fund has three main objects :—First : to encourage the most careful handling of the nation's food supplies and to prevent waste. Second : to collect and redistribute food, both the surplus of the markets, which would otherwise be lost, and gifts from private people and the trade. The distribution is to be made strictly through already existing and well-accredited Societies, and in no case will the Fund distribute food to individuals. Third : to conduct an educational campaign on a very wide scale throughout the country in the principles of household economy, in buying, cooking, and using food to the best advantage. For this part of the campaign the co-operation and support of some of the most important agricultural associations and of several of the first food-experts in the kingdom have been secured, and the work will be linked up with all that is already being done by the educational authorities.
The scheme has already been working in London for about a month, and the response received both from the trade and from private people has been magnificent. Already some thousand persons, of whom a large number are Belgian refugees, are being fed daily at a cost of about one farthing a meal, all food being contributed free. Up to the present no money has been publicly appealed for, and the work has so far been accomplished on an expenditure -varying from £3 to £15 a week, and not a penny of debt has been incurred. But now the National Food Fund has arrived at a point where funds are needed for carrying on the work on a national scale, and I make this appeal to the public with some confidence, because I think the scheme, though in one sense a war emergency one, is also something more, and I have every hope that it will continue after the war is over in a modified form, and prove of great and lasting benefit to the nation. Cheques should be made payable to The National Food Fund, Capital and Counties Bank, Piccadilly Branch, and gifts and promises of food sent to le Dover Street, Piccadilly, W.—I am,
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