Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 117, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 May 1918 — Avena Sativa Can Be Employed to Reduce Expenses of Household [ARTICLE]

Avena Sativa Can Be Employed to Reduce Expenses of Household

By O. L. HALL, Chicago

A little camouflage is required to make oats an all-day food, and this camouflage is being prepared. Wearing a thin disguise, but scomiiig the refuge of anonymity, an alias, or the use of its handsome scientific name of Avena Sativa,Jhe humble oat is in a fair way of associating itself with wheat and getting baked into the same war loaf. What Americans are learning or are to learn in war will remain part of the knowledge of living when the war is no more. That is what the prophets say, and that’s why, peering into the afterwhile, they predict a future increased reliance on the food grains. The government is endeavoring to regulate, through countless committees of experts, the flow of food from its source to the consumer. One of these assisting organizations is the corn milling committee, appointed by Food Administrator Hoover to organize mills and affiliated industries in the service of food conservation. The extremely high prices of corn —it has run a mad race with wheat —have discouraged in a degree the milling of this plentiful grain. Some of the larger millers engaging in a country-wide business a*hd owning valuable trade-marks are said to have been selling package cornmeal at a loss, merely to hold their trade and keep up competition. But they expect the new crop of corn to reach them at $1.40 to $1.50 a bushel, which will enable them to get back on a more comfortable basis. The estimate that 100,000,000 bushels of corn goes into food annually in this country does not tell the whole story. It doesn’t figure bn the old ash barrels which stand behind thousands of cabins and farmhouses and drip the lye which converts maize into homemade hominy. But it does take into account what passes through the mills. And there are mills'enough in this country to grind additional hundreds of millions of bushels. Few if any of them are running on a 24-hour schedule. The milling committee will be able to have ground all the cornmeal that all the pone bakers and johnnycake makers in America can use.