When Sir John Boyd Orr, famous English agricultural economist, was asked to deliver the 1934 Chadwick Lecture at the Rowelt Institute Aberdeen, he chose for his subject “The National Food Supply and Its Influence on Public Health. This is, he said, in some respects the most important political and social question of the present day. In the interests of agriculture, measures affecting our food supply have been taken by the present Government. These measures affect not only the farmer. As the y may determine the amount of food, they have a bearing on public health and social services and so affect every member of the community. He Might have added that even his twentieth century we have not succeeded ridding the world of the specter of starvation, which terrified the populations of past centuries. Although we have, with advances scientific agriculture, increased food production per unit area three-to fivefold, and we talk much of overproduction and surpluses, a large part of the population, the lower income groups still cannot afford an adequate diet.
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P. W. Wilson (1941) studied this question.