What! No Hash?

Like student managers before a big football game, hundreds of citizens toiled last week to prepare San Francisco for the world security conference three weeks hence. Treasury procurement agents rounded up 20 carloads of desks, 400 typewriters with French, Spanish and Russian keyboards, cartons of pens, pencils, binders and ink bottles. Police departments in New York, Chicago and New Orleans picked detectives to prowl San Francisco looking for New York, Chicago and New Orleans crooks. San Francisco hotelmen sweated at the thankless job of shooing guests out.

But none assumed their tasks with more gravity than San Francisco's restaurant owners--who must feed Moslems who do not eat pork, Brahmans who do not eat meat, Britons and Russians who take their tea with reverence. Pondering their task, they earnestly asked for an additional 500,000-lb. meat allotment. Their spokesman was George Mardikian, proprietor and chef of the famed restaurant Omar Khayyam. In a stately letter to San Francisco's bustling, chunky Mayor Roger Lapham he wrote:

"A good dinner will put any man in a conciliatory frame of mind. A bad one will make him quarrelsome and disputatious. How men eat definitely influences their judgment as well as their digestion. Empires can be built or destroyed at the dinner table. Peace in our time can well depend upon whether we soothe or insult the gastronomic tastes of our guests. . . ."

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