Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (15 page)

In the summer of 1944, as the German atrocities in eastern Europe began to come to light, the German prisoners were sad to find that they were no longer fed as though they were American soldiers. Their rations were reduced but their food was still well above the standard received by any labourer on a German farm in 1945, let alone a prisoner of war or forced worker.
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Despite condemning the ‘Jewish’ liberal conspiracy of American capitalism, Hitler had held up the United States as a country which had achieved a level of wealth and mass consumerism to which Germany should aspire. When they were repatriated these German prisoners of war will have taken home to their battered and defeated country a fuller understanding of the superiority of American resources and the meaning of American abundance.

If the Americans treated their prisoners of war well, one of the least triumphant aspects of American wartime agriculture was the
bracero
programme. About 50,000 Mexican workers, brought in specifically to work in the vegetable and cotton fields of California and the south-west, were corralled into work gangs, housed in the most basic of barracks, and paid derisory wages. The
braceros
provided large-scale agribusinesses with a supply of cheap, non-unionized, fully exploitable labour.
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An even darker side of America’s war in the countryside was its treatment of Japanese-American farmers. Japanese-Americans owned only 1 per cent of Californian land but produced 10 per cent of the state’s agricultural produce. During the wave of hysterical hatred which followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Californian fruit and vegetable farmers saw their opportunity to rid themselves of the unwanted competition. C. L. Preisker, Chairman of the Board of Supervisors in the Santa Barbara district, said: ‘if we begin now to shut out the Japanese, after the war we have the chance of accomplishing something’.
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Japanese-Americans were interned in camps in 1942. Many sold their farms at bargain prices and left their fruit and vegetables to rot in the fields.
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The most effective way of compensating for the loss of farm labour was to mechanize. Mechanization had been progressing slowly in the 1930s but the lack of profits and farm capital held the process back. War guaranteed the farmers high prices for their produce but it also pushed up the wages for labour. This created an even greater incentive to replace men with machines, and increased profits enabled farmers to buy in new machinery. Steel shortages meant that agricultural machinery was rationed; nevertheless, of all the countries in the world the United States had sufficient raw materials and labour to spare in order to produce enough tractors, combine harvesters and milking machines for the number of these machines in use on American farms to double between 1941 and 1945. Maize- and cotton-pickers and threshers became commonplace.
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The rural electrification programme, which had begun in the 1930s, was extended to the point where electricity had become a standard utility for nearly half of America’s farms by 1945, allowing the introduction of electric milk-coolers, feed-grinders and heating systems for chicken coops.
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The spread of machinery was matched by increased use of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. The United States, Canada and Britain combined their resources and this meant that they were the only countries in the world with sufficient raw materials to allow them collectively to increase their use of artificial fertilizers while still producing explosives. The United States government set up ten synthetic-nitrogen-processing plants and greatly increased its mining of potash and phosphoric rock. Most of the production was channelled into the explosives industry but there was enough available for American farmers to triple the amount of fertilizer they used, thus ensuring that the United States, Canada and Britain were the only countries that possessed agricultural soil which had not been severely depleted of its nutrients by over-farming by the end of the war. There were extreme shortages of pyrethrins, most of which were made in Japanese-occupied south-east Asia. They were used to manufacture insecticides for use in agriculture and for troops fighting in the tropics. But imports of pyrethrum from daisies grown in Kenya meant that American farmers were able to increase the use of arsenate and calcium arsenate insecticides.
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In addition, the widespread introduction of hybrid seeds and selective breeding for livestock allowed great strides to be made in increasing
yields. Thus, while virtually every other nation struggled to maintain, let alone increase, its agricultural productivity, US agriculture ended the war with productivity having risen by somewhere between 11 and 30 per cent.
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In 1909 President Theodore Roosevelt extolled the virtues of America’s farming population. He told Congress that ‘our civilization rests at bottom on the wholesomeness, prosperity, of life in the country. The men and women on the farms stand for what is fundamentally best and most needed in our American life … [W]e need the development of men in the open country, who will be in the future, as in the past, the stay and strength of the nation in time of war, and its guiding and controlling spirit in time of peace.’
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But this romanticized notion of farming as a way of life gave way as market forces reshaped farming into a business which faced the same sorts of competition and price pressures as industry, where the constant demand was that more should be produced for less.
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By rejuvenating the market for food the war enabled farmers to take advantage of new scientific improvements. But fertilizers, insecticides, machines, hybrid seeds which needed to be bought in each year (formerly farmers had saved a part of the previous crop for seed), and selective breeding for livestock, all demanded more and more capital (rather than labour) investment. Small farms had begun to disappear in the 1930s as the New Deal’s farming subsidies favoured the larger farms which agrarian reformers concluded were better able to meet efficiently the needs of the vast nation.
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This process accelerated during the war. Just as the government awarded industrial war contracts to large businesses (more than half of the $175 billion spent went to ‘just thirty-three firms’), agribusinesses were favoured by agricultural wartime spending.
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Farm and commodity lobbies, which became increasingly influential, also tended to promote the interests of large-scale farmers at the expense of the small and marginal.
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The size of America’s farms increased, while their number declined.
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In the south, large, fully mechanized agribusinesses moved in and the dispossession of the mainly black share-croppers, which had begun in the 1930s, was virtually completed.
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Seabrook Farms in New Jersey is an excellent example of the way in which, during the first half of the twentieth century, American agriculture transformed into an industry and of how this development was
consolidated during the Second World War. Charles F. Seabrook, always known as C. F., took over a fruit and vegetable farm from his father in 1913. He hated the dirtiness of farming and his real ambition was to become a construction engineer. He did eventually qualify in engineering and set up a construction company. Meanwhile, he applied his engineering interests to farming. Having noticed an ingenious method whereby a neighbouring Danish farmer irrigated his vegetables by means of iron pipes, he experimented, and in 1920 Seabrook Farms possessed the largest overhead irrigation system in America. C. F. indulged his passion for construction by building a highway that linked his farm to the large customer bases in Philadelphia and New York. On the farm he built power- and food-processing plants, a cold-storage warehouse, a sawmill, water storage and pumping stations to feed the irrigation pipelines, as well as houses and a school for the workers and their families. By the First World War it was a small self-contained industrial village and the farm prospered, supplying the United States army with fresh and canned fruits and vegetables.
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C. F. failed to withstand the decline in demand once the war was over and in 1924 he went bankrupt and was bought out of the farm, only to buy it back in 1929 with the proceeds of his construction company. By then his sons Belford and Jack had joined him in the business and it was their ingenious ideas that kept the farm afloat through the difficult years of the Depression. Their strategy was to add value to low-priced and unwanted crops, which otherwise would have been left to rot in the fields. Cabbages were turned into cans of sauerkraut, and the farm bought up skinny mid-western cattle at low prices and added the meat to their potatoes and carrots to make canned beef stew. The cans were sold to the state for its programme of food distribution to the poor.
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But it was the freezing industry that really rejuvenated the farm. In the 1910s Clarence Birdseye had learnt about freezing food while living with the Innu in Labrador. General Foods patented Birdseye’s freezing technique and in the late 1930s C. F. signed a contract with them. As a result Seabrook Farms became the largest frozen foods company in America, controlling the process from seed to packages of frozen food. The farm developed new varieties of vegetables which were more suitable for freezing. The latest technology was used in the 20,000 acres
of fields, from power tractors, many-disc ploughs, four-row cultivators, and the latest fertilizers, which, alongside pesticides and fungicides, were sprayed on the crops by aircraft.
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Large vegetable-processing assembly lines were built on the farm, and refrigeration and cold storage facilities expanded. The workers’ village grew into a small town.
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When America entered the Second World War Seabrook Farms was poised to take advantage of the boom in demand for food, especially easily transportable food. Stimulated by domestic demand, as a result of the shortage of canned items, the frozen food industry doubled its output during the war. Indeed the amount of vegetables grown for processing in the United States increased by a staggering 91 per cent. Many of the potatoes, carrots, onions, sweet potatoes, cabbage, beets and tomatoes were dehydrated for the military. But realizing that dehydrated vegetables were unlikely to be a roaring success after the war, the food-processing industry was much more interested in expanding its freezing capacity.
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Meanwhile, Belford Seabrook was sent to Australia to teach farmers there the art of industrialized vegetable production to feed the US troops fighting in the Pacific.

In 1943 Seabrook Farms produced 60 million pounds of vegetables and employed 7,500 workers around the clock at harvest time. The farms’ demand for labour was insatiable and the Seabrooks solved the problem of wartime labour shortages with their customary ingenuity. Every summer a group of black female college students from Atlanta were flown in, along with a contingent of chaperones. The women slept in a large barrack with bunk beds, and sorted peas, beans, spinach, strawberries, corn and beets by day. The field work was done by hundreds of men hired in from the West Indies, who earned fifty cents an hour and sent most of what they earned back home to their families.
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Once the Japanese-American internees were released from the camps in the west, Seabrook Farms took 2,500, who were joined in the summer of 1944 by German prisoners of war. In 1945 the farm found room for 600 Estonians from displaced-persons camps in Germany.
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C. F. liked to present the farm as a paternal enterprise which humanely gave work to unwanted ‘enemy aliens’. But his sons recalled a cold and rather heartless man and the memories of the workers confirm that while agribusiness was good for the farmer it was a rather less joyful development for agricultural labourers.
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As it was a long
way to the nearest towns, the workers were forced to buy their food and other necessities from over-priced company stores. Their dominant memories were of long hours, poor pay – unions had been withdrawn from the workers on the farm when strikes in the early 1930s had disrupted production – and segregated, purpose-built villages of concrete block houses.
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In the post-war years, American agricultural productivity increases continued until by the late 1980s one farmer, who would have been able to feed about ten people in the 1940s, could produce enough to feed ninety.
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The face of American agriculture changed dramatically. In the south cotton was no longer the king of crops, and black farmers had virtually disappeared. In California rice became an important crop, while speciality crops (mainly fruits and vegetables) were now grown on large-scale holdings. Across the north dairy cattle remained important but in the mid-west corn, hogs, poultry and soya beans became the dominant crops.
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Before the war the Americans had used soya beans to provide protein in animal feed but it was indigestible for chickens and pigs. It was not until the 1940s that research developed a technique for deactivating the enzyme inhibitor in the meal, which allowed these animals to tolerate the feed. Their high protein content made the beans a useful meat substitute and American soya bean flour became the main ingredient in British sausages. Vere Hodgson in London commented that ‘Thursday I have an order with the Dairy for a pound of sausage. These make-do for Thursday, Friday and part Saturday. No taste much of sausage, but are of soya bean flour. We just pretend they are the real thing.’
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The United States also sent out self-heating tins of soya chunks to help feed the Indian army, which by reason of religious taboos was not very keen on corned beef or canned pork. But they went down like ‘a lead balloon’.
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