Wealth & Money Quote by David F. Houston

“Rice at present prices” is the tell: this isn’t a cozy tribute to comfort food, it’s a budget line item dressed as advice. David F. Houston, a politician and early 20th-century administrator steeped in Progressive-era faith in expertise, frames eating as an economic problem to be solved with comparative advantage. The sentence reads like a calm recommendation, but its real work is to normalize austerity as rational choice. He’s not selling rice; he’s selling the idea that hardship can be managed if citizens behave like efficient consumers.

The phrasing “provides more food for the money” borrows the language of markets and measurement, implying that nourishment is best understood as quantity-per-dollar. That’s a subtle but powerful shift: it nudges the public away from desires (taste, tradition, dignity) toward compliance with “sound” policy. In periods of price volatility and wartime or postwar strain, such framing turns households into auxiliary economic actors, enlisted in national stability through their grocery lists.

The subtext also hints at hierarchy. Rice becomes the sensible staple for those who must count pennies, while “most of the other cereals” quietly stands in for choice, variety, and the cultural habits of people who can afford them. Houston’s line carries the Progressive conviction that social problems can be handled through data and disciplined behavior, yet it also reveals the limits of that worldview: when you reduce food to “more for the money,” you risk treating citizens less like people to be served than like variables to be optimized.