‘When my nose itches, it means hay fever,’ replied Bill Brinsky, tucking his notebook back in his pocket. Then he left the press room to go back to his typewriter, and his half-finished story for tomorrow morning, which began, ‘Sources close to the President have revealed that the nation’s food crisis, already worsening by the hour, may be exacerbated by yet another problem… apart from the continent-wide crop blight. It appears that for reasons yet unexplained, any food containing cereals that was prepared in the last three weeks may be dangerous to human health. This leak, although still unconfirmed, comes from a highly reliable quarter; and if the White House does confirm it, the nation will be facing not only the total destruction of its crops and livestock, but anything up to forty per cent of its existing food stocks.’

That Tuesday evening, ignoring the imposition of a curfew at sundown, thousands of ordinary families, both black and white, marched along St Paul Street in Baltimore to City Hall. They carried burning torches and home-made banners which read SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST? and OUR FIRST CIVIL RIGHT – FOOD. The National Guardsmen who watched them shuffling silently through the warm darkness, men and women with confused but determined faces, babies in strollers, old people in wheelchairs, had been ordered not to shoot until the parade had dispersed. One of the Guardsmen, interviewed by a roving television camera, appeared on the screen with tears running down his cheeks. ‘They can order us not to shoot our people,’ he said, ‘but they can’t order us not to cry for them.’

In New York, where the Mayor had been making every effort to keep the city as quiet and as normal as possible, there were new fires in Queens and in Harlem, and nearly three hundred black youths broke into the Four Seasons Restaurant on 52nd Street, bludgeoning police and security guards and stabbing two waiters. They rampaged across tables, splashed in the ornamental pool, and strewed oysters and roast game and wine bottles all over the floor. ‘It was like something out of a Fellini movie,’ said Norman Cramer, the movie producer, whose wife suffered a dislocated shoulder. ‘There were all these savages out of the streets, dancing on plates of veal and asparagus in filthy sneakers, and sluicing themselves with Dom Perignon.’

In Muskogee, Oklahoma, twenty men and one woman tried to break into a supermarket and steal boxes of canned meat, vegetables, and fruit. They were almost through loading when they were surprised by a National Guard patrol who machine-gunned all of them without warning. Their bodies were littered across the supermarket parking lot, and a reporter for the Tulsa Herald-Bulletin said. There was so much blood it was gurgling down the storm drains like crimson bathwater.’