If the Prime Minister had read a brochure (I fancy
that is the right description) which has just reached me, called How America Eats, he would certainly have made Mr. Alfred Edwards, M.P., something or other at the Ministry of Food. For Mr. Edwards has been (with Mr. Robert Stent) to America to watch them eating, and the effect on the reader's system resembles on a small scale the atom-bomb sensation. The booklet is not, let me add, about American methods of eating—such things are not appropriate subjects of discussion between Allies—but about what Americans eat. The chief author is Mr. Stent, who, I should judge, finds a knife and fork more congenial than a pen—not that that matters—but Mr. Edwards was a partner in the whole attractive business. The real inquiry was into how factory-feeding and office-feeding is carried out in the United States, a subject on which we clearly have a lot to learn. But the reproduction of sample menus from the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, the Palmer. House at Chicago, and the Santa Fe railway dining-car is a wanton incitement to envy, malice and every kind of uncharitableness.
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