298 J.-A. PEMBERTON
was a member of the National Research Council in Rome and from 1920
to 1936 was the leader of the Italian delegation to the ILO.^202
Appointments to the committee were in hands of the council and
were largely complete by December 18. One appointment that had yet
to be made at that point in time was the committee’s chair. McDougall
had proposed to League officials that the chair be occupied by a Briton.
The council evidently agreed as Bruce, then a member of the council, was
charged with approaching potential British candidates.^203 In regard to
this, Way records the following: Bruce ‘sounded out Austen Chamberlain.
Winston Churchill was interested and would have taken the role, had
he not been preoccupied with defence problems. He did offer to make
“a big speech on the subject” at any appropriate occasion. Bruce really
wanted Astor, but had to wait until 18 January to see him in person,’
by which time Bruce was president of the council.^204 In the event, Astor,
chair of the British Milk-in-Schools Advisory Committee of the Milk
Marketing Board, former parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Food
and later the Ministry of Health, happily accepted the role.^205
The Mixed Committee held three sessions and these took place on the
following dates: February 10–16 and June 4–7, 1936, and April 12–17,
- At the conclusion of its first session, its members agreed that it
would be impossible to produce a comprehensive report covering such a
vast field in time for the next assembly. It thus decided that before com-
pleting the entirety of its investigations it would issue an interim report
devoted primarily to explaining modern scientific ideas about nutrition
and the dangers to public health of disregarding these ideas and exposing
the principles that should guide national nutrition policies.^206
(^202) For the international outlook of Giuseppe De Michelis, see Giuseppe De Michelis,
World Reorganisation on Corporative Lines (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1935),
171-4. See also Giuseppe De Michelis, La coporazione nel mundo (Milan: Bompian,
1934), and Giussepe De Michelis, La corporation dans le monde (Paris: Éditions Denoël
et Steele, 1935). For nuanced portrait of Giuseppe De Michelis, see Jens Steffek, ‘Fascist
Internationalism,’ Millennium 44, no. 1 (2015): 3-22. See also League of Nations,
Nutrition: Final Report of the Mixed Committee of the League of Nations on the Relation of
Nutrition to Health, Agriculture and Economic Policy, 9–10.
(^203) Way, A New Idea Each Day, 171–72.
(^204) Ibid., 172.
(^205) Ibid and League of Nations, Nutrition: Final Report of the Mixed Committee of the
League of Nations on the Relation of Nutrition to Health, Agriculture and Economic Policy, 9.
(^206) League of Nations, Interim Report of the Mixed Committee on the Problem of Nutrition,
5, and League of Nations, Nutrition: Final Report of the Mixed Committee of the League of
Nations on the Relation of Nutrition to Health, Agriculture and Economic Policy, 14, 21.