La Guardia Urges Women to Shun Pastry

The Herald Tribune made a big deal out of former mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s somewhat facetious remarks about women’s pastry eating habits during his address to a student veterans group at Columbia. He added that if women stopped consuming French pastries they could apply the money they saved to a new, slimmer girdle. LaGuardia was notably rotund himself. More seriously, he noted that pastry used much too much of the flour that was so desperately needed for bread around the world.

The subject of his address was the postwar famine in Europe and Asia. Hunger, he asserted, started wars. The newspaper said that he had drawn less than a full house, with only a few hundred students and faculty members in attendance. They had brought canned foods as the price of admission. While LaGuardia thanked them for their effort, he somewhat ungraciously stated that all the canned goods on all the grocery shelves in America would not go far in solving the hunger problem. He was fixated on dessert. “Anybody who’ll eat pie a la mode today in the face of what we need simply has no heart,” he pontificated. “He’s just a belly American.” He expressed hope that there were not too many belly Americans. But the US to date had fallen far short in meeting its promised allotment of wheat for the relief effort. Greece, Yugoslavia, Poland and Italy would be reaching the bottom of their wheat supply the following week.