PANOPLIES: Caloric Crusader

Among the candidates proposed for the 1949 Nobel Peace Prize last spring were Columnists Drew Pearson and Eleanor Roosevelt, Argentine President Peron (with wife Eva) and Britain’s Lord Boyd Orr, former head of U.N.’s Food and

Agriculture Organization and a life-long crusader to bring more and better food to more people. Last week in Oslo the Norwegian Parliament’s Nobel Prize committee announced the winner: Crusader Orr.

The son of a poor Scottish family who worked his way through Glasgow University, Orr started as a theological student but got interested in the new dogma of Darwinism instead. Soon Orr became convinced that food or the lack of it was the reason for most human ills. “He began,” one writer said, “tracking down scientific clues like a detective on the trail of a mass murderer.” In World War II an Orr survey provided the basis for British food rationing. He never stopped lecturing people on eating the right kind of food; once he complained that he could get farmers interested in feeding their animals properly “but I canna get them interested in the food of their ain bairns, far less in the bairns of ither folks.”

When he was appointed head of FAO in 1945 he called the new organization “the answer to the atomic bomb.” In recent years he has sought a new answer in internationalism, became president of the Movement for World Federal Government and a sponsor of World Citizen Garry Davis (TIME, Jan. 10).

Orr last week received the news of the honor conferred on him with hardly a flick of his huge, bushy white eyebrows. He announced he would go to Oslo in December to receive his Nobel Prize medal, diploma and check; a true Scotsman, he noted that the prize money (to be used “for peace”) would be only $21,900, almost $10,000 less than what it would have been before devaluation.