The Birmingham age-herald., 1917-06-10

Tn the trenches and how much work can one do on such diet? I have been in Manchuria in winter. It is bitterly cold. ana there is nowhere that one needs n,ore food to keep warm. Nevertheless u was upon diet of rice and fish that the japanese soldiers endured all their hard ships and succeeded in defeating the meat-fed Cossacks from Russia Every solder in the Japanese army had lit tie lacquered tin case about as big as an old-fashioned cartridge box This con- Ialneo a pound or so of raw rice, and that was sufficient to sustain his life and fighting strength for two or three days. The rice could be cooked any where that a fire could be made and water obtained It was used both in the camps and on the march,
 As to the value of rice for our people at home, it is equally good. It forms the chef bread of Asia and about half of the people of the whole world make it their principal food. The Filipino keeps fat upon rice, and the Chinese cooie works F hours day upon his scanty supply. have had Japanese. jinrikisha men carry me over the country at six miles an hour, running all day, on nothing but rice, and I have seen Korean porters car rying loads of 300 pounds on the same food.
 Our department of agriculture says that, pound for pound rice ranks higher than corn, wheat or oats in the amount of nutrition contained and that it has three times much food energy as the same weight of potatoes and more than twice that of fat beef. It has a higher heat-producing power than rye, barley or wheat and far more than white bread or beefsteak. Dr. Atwater, one of the chief authorities on the chemistry of foods, says the ideal ration Is rice mixed with chicken, beef or veal in stew
 Moreover, rice can easily be digested It Is out of your stomach within an hour after you eat 1t. It takes two hours to digest oatmeal three hours to digest po- tatoes and your stomach has to work four hours on meat.
 Rice has gone up in price with other provisions, but 1t is still about the cheap est of foods I have before me cook book prepared by the Southern Pacific railway which runs through this rice ter ritoryq. It has 20 pages of rice recipes, and gives much informa ton concerning the cereal as food It states that one cup of raw rice will expand in boiling to about four cups of cooked rice, and that this amount in combination with dish of meat or with beans or peas will make meal for a family of four It estimates that one pound of rice is equal to three teacupfuls, and that even though rice costs 10 cents a pound the amount mentioned in the above recipe should not cost more than or cents anywhere In the United States. Even at cents the cost would be only 1 cent per person for this part of the meal.
 The fact is that our people have never appreciated the value of rice. In most parts of the country they use it as a pudding for dessert and not as a cereal or principal article of food. In many sections the people do not know how to cook it; and, on this account the As sociaton of Rice Growers here has been considering the sending of trained cooks to the army to show how it should be prepared for the soldiers.
 AS to our rice supply, we are still inn porting several hundred million pounds every year, but if the people do their duty in extending the rice farms they can increase the crop five O. skiold in this region alone, to say nothing of the possibility of new rice lands in Califor- mia. In the central part of the latter state they have been growing rice at both ends of the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. This region is more than 400 miles long and from 20 to 60 miles wide and a great part of it can be irrigated. The two valleys contain about tWlce as much land Massachusetts. They have 9,00O,0OO or 100000 acres in all and, as I have said, there are now only 10000 in rice. The great prairies of Arkansas, which last year produced about half again as much rice as California, have less than 900 acres in that crop, and Louisiana and Texas alone could prob- ably supply five or six times their pres ent output. Our total rice yield at pres- ent is less than 1000, ,OO0 900 pounds.
 Rice cultivation as it Is carried on in these lands is the triumph of modern economy and efficiency as far as making and handling the crop are concerned. l have watched them raising rice all over the globe; and everywhere. except in the United States, the crop is grown al- most altogether by human labor. In Asia the grain is first sown in seed bed, and barefooted and barelegged men and women wade through the field and set out the plants in the mud with their hands In Japan and China the rice canals are often kept full by men who lift the water up from the streams in buckets or tight baskets, or in wheels worked by the feet somewhat on the principle of the old-fashloned dog churn