fied bread in the course of fifteen or twenty days, and the people, left in an absolutely starving condition for ten days, are likely to become sick and even to die from lack of food.
In the third place, the distribution of flour among poor families, even among those that still have means of their own, does not attain the purpose of forefending men from famine diseases, because in a family where strong men easily get along with poor food, the weak, the young, and the old contract disease from want and the poor quality of food.
In all famine-stricken places all families, both rich and poor, eat miserable bread made with lebeda-weed.
Strange to say now in a large number of cases the very poor, on receiving grain from the zemstvo, eat unmodified bread, while almost all the rich families eat it with orach, with this year's disgusting unripe lebeda-weed.[1]
And it all the time happens that while the stronger members of a rich family thrive on the lebeda-weed bread, the weaker, older members pine away and die of it.
Thus a sick woman comes from a rich farm, carrying in her hand a piece of black lebeda-weed bread constituting her principal article of food, and asking admission in the eating-room simply because she is sick, and then only while she is sick.
Another example: I come to a muzhik who is not receiving assistance and considers himself rich. He lives alone with his wife; they have no children. I find them at dinner. Potato soup and bread with the lebeda-weed. In the trough is new bread, likewise adulterated with a large proportion of the lebeda. The husband and wife are healthy and happy, but on the stove is
- ↑ The fact that this year lebeda, orach, or pig-weed is universally employed in food may be explained by the tradition that they have eaten this weed before,—and there is a proverb to the effect that "it is no misfortune to have lebeda in the rye,"—and the fact that it grows in the rye-field and is ground up with the rye. It seems to me that if it were not for this tradition and if it were not found in the rye-fields they would sooner adulterate their bread with oats, straw, or sawdust than with this deleterious weed. But they mix it in everywhere.—Author's Note.
