Waste Line

Cambridge industrialist Charles Luckman has gone to Washington: he is straining to win national support for President Truman's Citizens Food Committee. The stakes are the lives of distressed millions in Europe and the relief of threatening inflationary pressures at home. Yet colossal as the need looms, the University community has not entered the Administration's endeavor. Measures capable of institution here may seem small in proportion to the enormity of the issue, but they cry for adoption; and "meatless Tuesdays and poultryless Thursdays" spell only a start.

On the strength of a quick look backward to previous tussles with this recurring crisis of the Forties, the Student Council might well undertake a two-fold program. The first and most crucial aspect would entail revitalizing its Relief Committee. Here the emphasis must fall upon providing a sense of personal student participation in aiding the shipment of food and other supplies to specific parties abroad. For the second phase of its program the Council should seriously consider a plan for stopping general food waste in the dining halls. While this is an impersonal method, the results will fit neatly into the frame of thinking outlined last night in the President's radio appeal.

It is in the latter part of possible Council action that University residents will most feel the pinch. Specifically, conservation steps would encompass eliminating dessert at noon meals and more importantly in the light of Government stress upon wheat conservation, passing by wheat cereals on the breakfast menu and dispensing with bread for dinner.

This approach clearly could not succeed without wide student approval. The Council must swing into action on existing long-range plans by immediately polling in the dining halls. If the student body lends a mandate to conservation, the Council could then present the University with its final proposals-and ask transferral of all financial savings from the slashes to its Relief Committee for channeling to the Unitarian and Friends Service Committees. The wishful weakness of a national "voluntary" approach can through such implementation find bolstering.