and be glad that the war has stirred
you out of food ruts!

Cereals combined with milk make most wholesome puddings, each almost a
well-balanced meal in itself. They are easier to make than pies,
shortcakes, and other desserts which require wheat flour, and they are
splendid growing food for boys and girls.

For the hard-working man who misses the slowly-digesting pie, serve the
puddings with a hard sauce or add a little butter when making them. For
the growing children, raisins, dates, and other fruits are welcome
additions on account of their iron. From half a cupful to a cupful of
almost any cereal pudding made with milk is the equivalent of an ordinary
serving of pie.

Aside from the avoidance of actual waste of food materials, there seems to
be no one service so imperative for housewives to render in these critical
times as the mastery of the art of using cereals. These must be made to
save not only wheat but meat, and for most of us also money.

A wholesome and yet economical diet may be built upon a plan wherein we
find for an average working man fourteen ounces of cereal food and one
pint of milk, from two to four ounces of meat or a good meat substitute,
two ounces of fat, three ounces of sugar or other sweeteners, at least one
kind of fruit, and one kind of vegetable besides potatoes (more if one has
a garden).

The cereal may furnish half the fuel value of the diet, partly
bread-stuffs and partly in some of the other ways as suggested, without
any danger of undernutrition. Remember the fable of the farmer who told
his sons he had left them a fortune and bade them dig on his farm for it
after his death, and how they found wealth not as buried treasure but
through thorough tillage of the soil. So one might leave a message to
woman to look in the cereal pot, for there is a key to health and wealth,
and a weapon to win the greatest war the world has ever seen.

CHAPTER III

THE MEAT WE OUGHT TO SAVE

"Do not buy a pound of meat until you have bought three quarts of milk" is
a "war sign" pointing two ways. On the one hand it tells us that we need
to save meat; on the other, that we should encourage the production of
that most indispensable food--milk.

But what a revolution in some households if this advice is heeded!
Statisticians tell us that Americans have been consuming meat at the rate
of 171 pounds per capita per year, which means nearly half a pound apiece
every day for each man, woman, c