Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (72 page)

THE ‘GOOD WAR’

In the early 1940s the effects of the Depression could still be seen in the American working population. Raging unemployment in the 1930s had swelled the numbers of the destitute and marginalized. America’s commitment to the philosophy of individualism meant that there was no welfare system in place to cushion the fall of the 15 million unemployed men and their families.
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Millions sold their possessions to make ends meet and millions more were evicted from their homes after failing to pay the rent. Hunger ravaged these families, and when unemployment was at its height in 1933 it became commonplace for people to collapse from hunger in the streets of Chicago.
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In 1941 Paul McNutt, director of the newly created Office of Defense Health and Welfare Services, claimed that as many as 45 million Americans ‘do not have enough to eat of the foods we know are essential to good
health’.
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As preparations for war got under way, the head of the Draft Board, Lewis B. Hershey, asserted that two out of every five men called up were unfit for military service due to disabilities which were linked to poor nutrition. The Surgeon-General, Thomas Parran, warned that poor health due to poor diet would not only pose a threat to the country’s military strength but would also slow down industrial production and lower ‘the morale of millions’.
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The Second World War lifted the United States out of the Depression and into a period of economic boom.
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The growth in the war industries brought an end to the plague of unemployment, and between 1941 and 1944 the lowest-earning families doubled their wages.
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Helen Studer and her husband had been hard hit by the Depression. Their hog-raising business collapsed and the only work her husband was able to find was digging ditches for pipes in Colorado, where the family lived in a tent. When the war came she and her husband moved to California and they both found work in the Douglas aircraft factory. ‘People didn’t know what to do with their money when they were making so much. ’Course I came from the ridiculous to the sublime, ’cause we went through a depression in the thirties and we were in debt when we came out here. Between my husband and I, within a year we were out of debt.’
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Helen Studer’s story was replicated across the United States. During the war, Peggy Terry from Paducah, Kentucky, first found work in a shell factory close to home and then moved to Michigan to work in a factory testing aeroplane radios. Her wage increased from $32 to $90. ‘We had a lotta good times and we had money and we had food on the table and the rent was paid. Which had never happened to us before.’
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It was this growth in prosperity which earned the Second World War the title ‘the good war’ in the United States. Lee Ormont, who had a partnership in a supermarket chain, acknowledged, ‘Those of us who lost nobody at the front had a pretty good time … We suddenly found ourselves relatively prosperous. We really didn’t suffer.’
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The rise in wages had an extremely beneficial impact on the nutritional well-being of the working classes. American workers now had the means to eat well. The war did not redistribute American wealth. In fact, the income gap between rich and poor widened, but wage increases had the same levelling-up effect as in Britain and the dietary gap between the rich
and poor began to close. Before the war the richest third of the American population had spent double the amount that the poorest third spent on food. In 1944 the rich were spending only a third more on food than the poor.
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In particular, the working classes increased their consumption of the protective foods – meat, dairy products, fruit and vegetables – which had been under-represented in their pre-war diet. The animal protein gap between the classes was narrowed as the working classes increased their consumption of meat by 17 per cent, while the wealthiest section of society ate 4 per cent less.
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‘Customers, who have never enjoyed the luxury of club steaks, are now requesting them in five-pound cuts for roasts’, reported the manager of the Great Eastern supermarket chain.
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In 1948 a survey of urban families found that three-quarters of them were consuming the recommended amount of calcium compared with one-half in the spring of 1942, and only one-third in 1936.
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The 20 million Victory Gardens that were planted across America added interesting new tastes and vitamins to working-class menus.
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Salads, squash and baked aubergine all found their way into the dishes of people used to a more conservative diet. In Mississippi, two-thirds of the new foods which people discovered during the war were vegetables, mainly home grown.
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In 1943 a team surveying the diets of New York schoolchildren were pleasantly surprised to find that the children were now eating not only fresh fruit, but also green vegetables such as spinach. A survey of 400 Texan families from all sections of society showed them to be eating more milk, eggs and butter and twice as many green vegetables than in 1927–29 when a similar survey had been conducted.
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As in Britain, many Americans ate a healthier diet during the war than they had done in the 1930s. In contrast to the British, they also ate more. The supermarket owner Lee Ormont recalled that people ‘splurged on food’.
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With the shortage of consumer goods and strict petrol rationing, there was little else to buy. While the British reduced their expenditure on food by about 11 per cent, in America expenditure on food increased by 8 per cent and rationing had to be introduced in order to restrict civilian consumption of high-quality and condensed foods which were needed by the military and America’s allies.
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More than half the supply of some foodstuffs and a large proportion of the
best-quality food disappeared into the storehouses of the military quartermasters. In addition, large amounts of canned foods, especially canned meats, had to be withheld from the American public so that the United States could honour its commitment to supply lend-lease food to its British, Soviet and Chinese allies.
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By 1943 sugar, sweets, coffee, butter, cheese, canned goods, frozen and dried vegetables and fruits, and red meat were all rationed.

The United States government exhibited a characteristically laissez-faire approach to the mobilization of the economy and society for war. The energies of private business and industry were harnessed, but they were not brought under direct government control. William Knusden, head of the Office of Production Management, initiated the redirection of industry into the construction of military equipment simply by calling together America’s leading businessmen and presenting them with a list of military requirements which they then volunteered to supply.
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Secretary for War Henry Stimson summed up the approach: ‘If you are going to try to go to war … in a capitalist country you have got to let business make money out of the process, or business won’t work.’
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This strategy was remarkably successful in a climate in which businessmen disliked being told what to do but presided over an industry with ‘widespread experience of mass-production … great depth of technical and organisational skill, the willingness to “think big”, [and an] ethos of hustling competition’.
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When the United States entered the war its economy was still essentially geared to civilian production, and military expenditure was minimal.
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But by the end of 1942 America had developed a military economy which out-produced the Axis, and by the end of the four years of war America had doubled its industrial production. ‘Two-thirds of all the Allied military equipment produced during the war’ was manufactured in America.
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In spheres such as food production and supply, where it was necessary for the state to take control and cut out the free market, the American government exhibited a cautious distrust of its own interventionist measures. Rationing was introduced in order to spread shortages fairly across the different socio-economic groups within the population. This was the motivating force behind most rationing systems. However, in other countries rationing was also used as a tool to direct eating habits. In Britain the food system pushed the population
towards a higher consumption of bread and potatoes; in Japan the population were given noodles in order to save rice. The United States government was unique in the wartime world in its adamant declaration that in the sphere of food it had no wish to undermine the ‘initiative and democratic habits of American citizens’, and the public were told that rationing had been introduced in order to protect people’s ability to make their
own
food choices. The government was remarkably tentative in its attempts to direct consumption, even towards healthier foodstuffs.
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This was partly a reflection of the public’s hostility towards government intervention in the private areas of everyday life and partly a consequence of the abundance of food within the system. During the war American farmers produced 50 per cent more food per person than before the war, and even with the voracious demands of the military and America’s allies this meant that there was still plenty of food in the system, the government having no need to intervene in order to ensure that those supporting the war effort got enough to eat.
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Thus, the United States allowed itself the luxury of retaining the ideology of individual liberty during wartime. American resources were so plentiful that the country could afford the wastage of energies that resulted from allowing the individual and the market as free a rein as possible.

One of the consequences of this laissez-faire approach to food consumption was that the influence of nutritionists on government food policy was limited while, despite wartime restrictions, the food industry retained its power to protect its commercial interests. In 1940 the National Research Council created two boards to develop a national food policy. The Food and Nutrition Board was given the task of collating the latest scientific research and developing nutritional standards, while the Committee on Food Habits was supposed to translate its findings into concrete recommendations for meals. In May 1941 the Food and Nutrition Board presented its most influential piece of work at the National Nutrition Conference. This was a table of recommended daily allowances which addressed a serious gap in scientific knowledge by clearly stating ‘how much of each of the known nutrients a person needed to maintain good health’.
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The table provided the military, the government and a variety of private agencies with an authoritative measure against which to judge the diets of soldiers, workers and their
families. However, in drawing up the table the nutritionists erred on the side of caution. The recommendations were about 30 per cent above what they considered to be average requirements. This created a tendency for American rations to be overly generous and, conversely, for various menus and diets to be deemed insufficiently nutritious when they were, in fact, more than adequate.
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The influence of the food industry could also be seen in the phrasing of the recommendations, which repeatedly asserted that a wide variety of foods could meet each particular nutritional requirement. This was an attempt to placate the different farm and food interest groups which protested vigorously if nutritional advice appeared to favour one foodstuff over another. For example, the beef industry was apt to protest loudly at any suggestion that beans or eggs made good substitutes for meat.
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The Food and Nutrition Board’s recommended daily allowances were widely publicized in newspapers, magazines and radio broadcasts. In 1943 the Department of Agriculture printed them in its most widely circulated pamphlet, the
National Wartime Nutritional Guide
. By the end of the war the American public, a large proportion of whom in 1941 had been unable to distinguish between vitamins and calories, understood the need for a healthy diet and balanced meals.
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However, this was a diffuse level of influence. Nutritionists were never able actively to direct civilian eating habits in the most effective way, by manipulating pricing, as they were unable to gain executive powers within the Office of Price Administration where the price of foodstuffs was regulated. They achieved a minor success in that they persuaded the government to implement the fortification of basic foodstuffs such as bread, milk and margarine with iron, the various B vitamins and vitamins A and D.
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This was a health measure which benefited the population across the board. But even the propaganda of healthy eating was more efficiently exploited by the food industry than by the scientists. The War Advertising Council was attended by representatives from advertising agencies, corporate advisers, the media and officials from various interested government departments such as the Office of War Information. Together they agreed on the outlines of public information campaigns. In this way the government co-opted the food industry to do the work of spreading healthy-eating propaganda while still allowing them to make money, or at least keep their brands in the
public eye, guaranteeing them future – if not always present – sales.
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The problem was that the food industry tended to use the language of the new science of nutrition to sell its products, regardless of their real health benefits. Thus, the American public were urged to eat grapefruit because it was rich in ‘Victory Vitamin C’, but they were also told that Nestlé’s cocoa was a ‘concentrated energizing food’, and children’s love of sweets was encouraged by campaigns which promoted the benefits of sugar by pointing out that it was an essential part of a combat soldier’s diet.
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