Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (16 page)

Soya was given an immense boost by the loss of the vegetable-oil-producing countries in the Far East. The growing Allied reliance on margarine to compensate for the decline in butter production, and the use of glycerine (which could be extracted from the beans) to make explosives, led to the doubling of the area under soya from 5 to 11 million hectares.
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Already in 1939 Illinois was known as the ‘Manchuria’ of the United States, producing more than one-half of America’s soya beans. The farmers complained that the crop robbed the soil of
nutrients but the profit motive for growing soya was too powerful. A new, fattier bean known as the Lincoln was developed by the Illinois Agricultural Experiment Station, and the Secretary of State for Agriculture guaranteed a generous wartime price per bushel which amounted to twice that paid for corn.
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Until the Second World War Americans were resistant to the charms of margarine. It had been invented by a French food chemist, Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, in 1869 for the French navy as a cheap and calorific butter substitute which would not go rancid on long voyages. In 1902 the German discovery of hydrogenation (by which unsaturated fat in reaction to hydrogen turns into saturated fat) meant that margarine could be made from plant oils rather than the original ingredients, which included cow’s udder, milk and sodium bicarbonate. Its name came from the Greek
magarítes
for pearl because of its pearly white sheen. Yellow dyes were mixed in to make it look more palatable and buttery.
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By the 1930s Germany, in particular, had become dependent on margarine as a butter substitute for the poorer sections of society.
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But in America dairy farmers did not want it to undermine butter production and they lobbied for heavy taxes on the substitute, especially the more appetizing yellow-coloured margarine, which was forbidden in some states.
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The agricultural administration’s failure to boost wartime milk production sufficiently meant that nutritionists recommended vitamin-A-fortified margarine as a replacement for butter. Housewives took to the product with enthusiasm. One reported that although ‘all had been against it at the start’, women were now ‘unanimous in their praise of oleo [as in its original French nameoleo-margarine] … Our butcher can’t keep up with the demand.’
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An Illinois state booklet,
Home Budgets for Victory
, recommended margarine in sixty-eight of its recipes. Surveys showed that even the households of the anti-margarine dairy farmers were using the butter substitute. In 1950 the extra taxes on margarine were abolished.
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The war had firmly established margarine as an everyday American food. In turn, this helped to establish soya as an American crop.

At the end of the war American scientists learned from their defeated German colleagues how to counter soya oil’s unpleasant smell. From then on soya’s share of the United States’ edible oil exports rose dramatically, reaching 20 per cent in 1950.
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Soya flour was also seen as a
way of meeting the need for high-protein flours to feed undernourished newly liberated European civilians. Facilities for milling the beans into flour were expanded. Under the Marshall Plan soya flour, oil and feed exports to Europe were heavily subsidized as a cheap way of feeding hungry Europeans.
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This has led to largely invisible but none the less significant changes in the western diet since 1945. Soya has now become a dominant element in European animal feed and is ubiquitous in processed foods, such as bread, biscuits, cakes, chocolate bars, breakfast cereals, soups, margarine and processed meat, to which it is added in a variety of forms as soya flour, oil, lecithin, protein or as a flavour enhancer.
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From its pre-war position as a smelly and indigestible bean, soya has become one of the three staple crops eaten by Americans. Today soya provides 257 of the average contemporary American’s daily intake of calories, while wheat provides a further 768 and corn another 554 calories.
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The enormous success of the lucrative American soya business also had its more dubious side-effects. The impact of soya products on human health is a matter for some concern. While the Japanese ferment soya beans to make tofu, miso and soya sauce, western processing of soya to produce vegetable oils and soya flour does not involve fermentation. Unfermented soya products contain phytoestrogens which mimic human oestrogen and some medics fear that if unfermented soya is consumed in large quantities it can affect the development of the reproductive system and fertility.
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Soya beans also loosen the soil far more than other crops, and in the American west, which had already lost much of its soil in the 1930s, the expansion of the crop undermined a very real need to concentrate on soil conservation, especially when the problem of drought and soil erosion returned in the 1950s.
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Nowadays, soya farming is expanding in environmentally sensitive areas in Latin America, undermining the ecosystem of the Brazilian Cerrados plateau and threatening to encroach on the Amazonian forest.
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America ended the war virtually the only country in the world with a booming agriculture sector. Its civilians barely suffered any hardship with regard to food supplies and its army was the best fed throughout the war. Yet the US was still able to supply its allies with large quantities
of much-needed food. In price terms the amount of agricultural exports tripled.
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In 1945 the United States War Food Administration summed up the importance of food as a ‘weapon of war. As such, it ranks with ships, airplanes, tanks and guns. Food, particularly American food, has been especially crucial in the present war, because it has been essential to the fighting efficiency of our allies as well as our own military forces, and has been required to maintain colossal industrial productivity here and in other allied countries. Modern war demands enormous food production, not only for consumption by huge forces on land and sea, but for consumption by the personnel employed in war industries, in transport, and in related occupations.’
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The United States’ ability to fill this need for food gave it a hold over its allies and an advantage over its enemies. When America ended the war with a bumper harvest in 1945 the administration was to discover that the ability to command plentiful quantities of food continued to equate with power in the post-war world.

5

Feeding Britain

Wartime farming was not … as productive as it is today. Feeding stuffs for cattle were rationed and the techniques for making good quality hay and silage were still in their most rudimentary stages. There were shortages of fertilisers and none of the sprays which now keep weeds out of most of our crops. A yield of one ton an acre of all grain was quite good.

(John Cherrington, a farmer in Hampshire during the war)
¹

Britain entered the war as the combatant nation most dependent on wheat imports. But the Ministry of Agriculture’s campaign to restructure farming and switch to growing wheat and potatoes was so successful that the government never had to ration bread. Many historians have celebrated the government-initiated ploughing-up campaign as a resounding success. It is portrayed as having taken British farming out of a depressed phase of low input, low productivity pastoral farming and, with the introduction of technological innovations, to have reoriented British farms towards much more productive arable farming. In
The People’s War
Angus Calder argued that the campaign returned British agriculture to its mid-Victorian hey-day before the new global economy in food developed and Britain began to import cheap grains from abroad.
²
Certainly, farmers were the social group that benefited the most from the war. The generous pricing scheme which the government introduced meant that between 1939 and 1945 farm incomes quadrupled. Even farm labourers benefited as their wages doubled.
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Consumers were protected from these rising costs by subsidies which kept the price of food in the shops at a reasonable level.
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However,
recent research suggests that the agricultural achievements of wartime were less impressive than is usually suggested. Those gains in yields which were achieved were more the straightforward result of an increase in the cultivated area and old-fashioned hard work rather than the by-product of technological innovations.
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By expanding the area under crops British farmers were able to increase their contribution to the British diet from 33 per cent of calories to 44 per cent and Britain was able to extend the number of days a year when it could feed itself from 120 to 160.
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These figures demonstrate that the reorganization of British agriculture by no means freed the island from its dependence on imports. Rather, the ploughing-up campaign enabled Britain to compensate for the fact that food imports fell by half from 22 million tons to somewhere between 15 and 11 million tons a year.
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Britain stopped importing non-essential foodstuffs. The most important saving was in the area of animal feed, which virtually disappeared from supply ships. Another 2.5 million tons a year were saved by severely cutting imports of sugar, fresh fruit and nuts. By growing more wheat to make bread, British farmers enabled the government to prioritize the import of condensed high-energy foods such as meat and dairy products, which filled the protein and calcium gap in the workers’ diets, and added variety and interest to a monotonous menu based on bread.
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FROM MEAT TO BREAD AND POTATOES

In the 1930s the only food in which Britain was entirely self-sufficient was liquid milk.
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Most of British agricultural land was under pasture and livestock products made up 70 per cent of the value of farming output.
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At the time it was calculated that while ten acres of grassland for stock-raising could feed twelve people, the same area under wheat could feed 200, while ten acres planted with potatoes could feed as many as 400.
¹¹
With the reduction of food coming into the country it made more sense to extend the number of people Britain’s farmland could feed and plans were made to reduce livestock and plough up pastures to plant with wheat, sugar beet and potatoes.
¹²
However, the Ministry of Agriculture still hoped to maintain a meat reserve on the
hoof, rather than in cans which would be stored in warehouses vulnerable to the German aerial bombing campaign.
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In the summer of 1941 the government realized that the shipping crisis was going to be much worse than they had expected and Cabinet Office economists protested that animals were being allowed ‘to eat shipping space … at a rate comparable with the rate at which submarines are destroying it. No more costly reserve could be devised … A reserve ought to be held against an emergency. But a livestock reserve creates an emergency.’
¹⁴
In response the Food Policy Committee cut the annual import of animal feed to a mere 150,000 tons for the next three years. Dairy cattle were given first priority for imported feed as the government concentrated on maintaining milk production. Livestock farmers were required to become self-sufficient and grow their own feed grains.

In order to achieve the feat of ploughing up the pastures the government encouraged farmers to use tractors. Before the war, horses pulling the plough were a common sight in British fields. In 1939 only one in six British farmers owned a tractor. By 1946 the number of tractors on British farms had quadrupled.
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It was also possible, via the county agricultural committees, to hire in a contractor who used government-owned machines.
¹⁶
The tractors, made by the Ford Motor Company at Dagenham, or shipped in from America as part of the lend-lease agreement, were by no means cutting edge. The Ministry of Agriculture preferred to stick to the well-known and temperamental Fordson rather than any of the new and innovative tractors on the market at the time.
¹⁷
But even the exasperatingly unreliable Fordsons made the task of ploughing up 2.5 million acres of pasture land a great deal easier. Although the tractors look antiquated to us now, the sight of a land girl using a tractor to plough pasture land was a powerful contemporary image of the modernity that the war was bringing in its wake.
¹⁸
There were limits, however, to the mechanical revolution. During the war most planting was done using cup feed drill machines which had been in production since the nineteenth century.
¹⁹

In order to ensure the success of the ploughing-up campaign it was essential to increase the use of fertilizers, as much of the new land that was brought under cultivation was poor in phosphoric acid. One of Canada’s most vital contributions to maintaining Britain’s food supply was the expansion of its phosphate and nitrogen industry.
²⁰
Nitrogen
was essential for both explosives and artificial fertilizers and four large synthetic nitrogen plants were set up in Canada with British financial assistance. In this way Britain protected its vital source of nitrogen from German bombs and Canada acted as a safe warehouse for Britain’s ammonium phosphate.
²¹
Through the auspices of the Combined Food Board, Canada also compensated for the disruption caused to the global fertilizer trade by becoming the main supplier of ammonium phosphate fertilizers to the rest of the Commonwealth and Britain’s empire, which in turn also provided Britain with food.