1947: Bakeries scolded for tossing day-old bread

“Agriculture Commissioner W. Kerr Scott has urged that bakeries eliminate consignment selling of bread and thus save ‘untold thousands of bushels of wheat daily’ to help the emergency food situation [in Europe].

“Scott said in a wire to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Clinton P. Anderson that the bakeries’ practice of ‘crowding the market’ with consignment bread resulted in the loss of approximately 150,000 bushels of wheat annually in North Carolina alone, and he placed the estimated money value of the loss in this State at about $1,000,000 a year….

“Scott said he got his figures from Department of Agriculture field men in the Pure Food and Drugs Division. Their survey showed, he said, that thousands of loaves of bread were wasted daily in North Carolina through the consignment practice of taking day-old bread off store shelves.”

— From “Sound plan urged for saving grain” in the Sylva Herald and Ruralite (Oct. 20, 1947)

Two weeks earlier, in the first televised White House address, President Truman had called on Americans to help stockpile grain for Europe by forgoing meat on Tuesdays and poultry and eggs on Thursdays.