The Family Food Supply, published in 1934 by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.  What to buy and why.  Food and marketing helps for the homemaker. This little booklet isn’t a cookbook, but a publication to help the homemaker learn about providing healthy meals for the family.

Inside you will find information on food items that fuel the body, foods for growth and strength, and foods that protect and balance the body.  They cover many of the vitamins our bodies require, such as vitamins A, B, C, D, E, and G.  Vitamin G?  Hmm… my bottle of multi-vitamins says nothing about vitamin G.  Huh.  Well, they have a list of animal and plant products that contain vitamins, including vitamin G, so there you go.  Don’t miss out on your vitamin G or you could get pellagra, and that looks pretty creepy. (I dunno, the web says that is a niacin deficiency, which is B3… not a word about this mysterious Vitamin G.)

You will also find tips on what to eat, buying and using food, how to spend your food budget, and some helpful tips for stocking your food pantry. There are also meal suggestions, kind of.  For example, here is the Dinner meal suggestion:

Meat, fish, or eggs; Potatoes; Another vegetable; Bread and butter; Dessert.  

Even though a life insurance company produced this booklet, they must have had an interest in the dairy industry.  Comments like “milk is valuable for any normal diet” or “butter is rich in vitamin A and should be used freely, if possible”.  Of course they mention other fats, but downplay them as not being as good as butter.  They also say you shouldn’t spend more on meat than on milk, and that you should have a quart of milk a day as well as up to 7/8 of a pound of butter per week. And remember, if you are using lard, make sure to keep it cool otherwise it will become rancid… and maybe that will give you something worse than pellagra.

All-in-all this is a quaint little book with great illustrations and probably questionable nutritional information. Well, questionable for this day and age. Then again the over-all idea of trying to buy food in a more thoughtful way for one’s budget still holds true today.