or
luncheon you may have an egg, but only one day during two weeks.
Hotels still serve a weak, highly colored tea and apples or oranges.
For dinner you may have soup without any meat or fat in it. Soups are
just a mixture of water and vegetables. Two days a week you can get a
small piece of meat with a meat card. Other days you can eat boiled
fish.

People who keep house, of course, have more food, because as a rule
they have been storing supplies. Take the Christian Scientists as an
instance. Members of this Church have organised a semi-official club.
Members buy all the extra food possible. Then they divide and store
away what they want for the "siege"--the time when food will be scarcer
than it is to-day.

Two women practitioners in Berlin, who live together, bought thirty
pounds of butter from an American who had brought it in from
Copenhagen. They canned it and planned to make this butter last one
year. Until a few weeks ago people with money could go to Switzerland,
Holland and Denmark and bring back food with them, either with or
without permission. Some wealthy citizens who import machinery and
other things from outside neutral countries have their agents smuggle
food at the same time.

While the Dutch, Danish and Swiss governments try to stop smuggling;
there is always some going through. The rich have the money to bribe
border officers and inspectors. When I was in Duesseldorf, last
October, I met the owner of a number of canal boats, who shipped coal
and iron products from the Rhine Valley to Denmark. He told me his
canal barges brought back food from Copenhagen every trip and that the
border authorities were not very careful in making an investigation of
his boats.

In Duesseldorf, too, as well as in Cologne, business men spoke about the
food they got from Belgium. They did not get great quantities, of
course, but the leakage was enough to enable them to live better than
those who had to depend upon the food in Germany.

When the food supplies began to decrease the Government instituted the
card system of distribution. Bread cards had been very successful, so
the authorities figured that meat, butter, potato and other cards would
be equally so. But their calculations were wrong.

When potato cards were issued each person was given nine pounds a week.
But the potato harvest was a big failure. The supply was so much less
than the estimates that seed potatoes had to be used to keep the p