The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Digital Edition > My Day
My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt

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NEW YORK, Tuesday—Tomorrow noon, on the steps of the City Hall, the New York City campaign for funds asked for by the Emergency Food Collection on behalf of UNRRA will start. Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson is coming up from Washington for the ceremonies. The program, which will be broadcast, ought to reach not only the people of this city but the people of many other communities.

I have to be at a meeting of a drafting committee of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, and so, much to my regret, I will not be able to attend these ceremonies. There is nothing, however, which should be closer to the hearts of every person in this country than the cooperation of their own locality in the Emergency Food Collection drive.

There are 800,000,000 men, women and children throughout the world who are hungry and may die of starvation in countries which have been through hardships which we have been spared because our men fought to keep the war far away from our own shores. Speed is important in this drive, and that is why you are asked to give money rather than food. Gifts of money will mean that a greater amount of canned foods can be bought and shipped more quickly to the places where the need is greatest. Your money should be sent to "Hunger, 100 Maiden Lane, New York City."

Many people will ask whether our former enemies, the Germans and the Japanese, may be fed under this program. The answer is that only displaced persons in those countries may receive food from this source, because the armies of occupation are responsible for feeding the people of the area they occupy.

* * *

The Emergency Food Collection is not duplicating any of the work which UNRRA can do with the funds contributed by the various nations. It is simply adding food to meet the immediate needs, and this will be distributed by UNRRA as part of its program. UNRRA handles many items besides food and, in this desperate situation, the immediate needs could not be met entirely under UNRRA's present relief program.

Cooperating with the Emergency Food Collection are various religious groups and certain groups representing particular nationalities. Their collections are distributed in the same way to relieve distress, and their efforts are endorsed by the Emergency Food Collection.

It is not just money, however, that you are being asked to contribute. There will be shortages at home because of the things which will have to be sent abroad and because our own food supplies are not always equally available in every part of the country. At times you may have to ration yourselves, principally on wheat, some other cereals, and fats.

You are asked to save every bit of fat that you can and to eat at least 40 percent less wheat than you have eaten in the past. We have potatoes, fresh vegetables and fruit, all of which are lacking in Europe and Asia, so we are not going to suffer if we eat less bread.

A hungry nation will never be a safe and peaceful nation.

E. R.

(WORLD COPYRIGHT, 1946, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC.; REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR PART PROHIBITED.)


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, June 12, 1946

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962
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Digital edition created by The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project The George Washington University 312 Academic Building 2100 Foxhall Road, NW Washington, DC 20007

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MEP edition publlished on June 30, 2008.

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Transcription created from a photocopy of a UFS wire copy of a My Day column instance archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
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