Evening star., 1941-01-14

Dee1SteakS appear again, while Fri.
day is still a meat day, even for the
Catholics who have been granted 8
special diSpensation to eat meat
on fast day by the Archbishop oi
Paris.
Saturday and Sunday you car
eat almost anything you please, Il
It's available. But there are addi-
tional complications. If you order
meat for lunch III a restaurant, you
can't also have cheese for the same
meal. And on only one night a week
-Sunday-are meat dishes allowed
for dinner.
Enforcement Up to French.
Rationing is strictly supervised
by German agricultural experts who
have surveyed existing food stocks
Actual enforcement is left up to the
French administration.
The basis of the system is a little
brown book, pasted up with coupons
Once month. depending on highly
complicated French redtape, each
resident exchanges certain coupons
for sheets of blue, or green, or
purple tickets, each marked for a
specific amount of commodity
Whether it's in store or a
restaurant, you must hand in your
tickets before you get what you've
ordered.
OF course, there's cheating and
bootlegging. But the penalties on
conviction are severe, running from
stiff fines to temporary or perma-
nent closing of establishments vio-
lating the regulations.
The dangers to rationing to the
individual are evident. If you blow
yourself to a big beef roast early in
the month, you may end up eating
fish for a week at the end of the
same month. It's the old salary
check problem: Stretch it out and
you'll be all right, spend 1t all at
once and you'll find yourself short.
The coffee situation is different,
because most of it comes from Latin
America and must run the British
blockade.
Coffee Substitute.
In the place of real coffee French
men drink what they call blends,
but what blends! Acorns. barley,
chicoree. roots of many types and
malt, mixed with perhaps 20 per
cent real coffee It's hot and if you
hold your nose you can get it down
The French have found that a shot
OF brandy. of which there is plenti-
full supply, helps the taste.
However, coffee always has been
expensive in France and much of
the population, especially in the
north. rarely used coffee except on
special occasions.
Potatoes, with fairly normal crop
in the Brittany area, are becoming
more and more plentiful, but here
again the principal problem is the
shortage of trucks and gasoline for
civilian use.
German Army units have all the
gasoline they need. part of it SYM
thetic from the huge refining plants
In their own country, the rest from
stocks seized in France. Now they
are releasing part of this latter to
aid In transportation of foodstuffs.
All these complications in diet.
living conditions and the general
difficulty in daily existence have
brought on a variety of physical
ailments which Parisians called "oc-
cupationitis.
Almost every one has several and
many as high as half dozen. They
show themselves in various symp-
toms-upset stomach, colds and
coughs, rashes, extreme fatigue,
night blindness, or neuralgia.
Not even the German occupation
forces are spared, although army
doctors do their best to keep officers
aand men in good condition. One
young lieutenant from Berlin used
to exchange notes with me almost
every day on how our similar cases
of skin rash were progressing.
Doctors are not certain about the
exact causes of most of these condi-
tions. They say they apparently
result from combinations of certain
deficiencies in diet complicated by
depression and worry over the un-
certainty of war developments.
Night blindness Is attributed to de-
ficiency of vitamin A.
BY far the worst ailment has
been pronounced by medical men as
a type of "confusional insanity"
This term does not mean that those
affected actually are insane. 1t is
closer to the American expression
"jitters"
When you get that way, you lose
some of your sense of proportion.
You find that even the simplest tasks
are extremely fatiguing. You find
that you must steel yourself to carry