Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (74 page)

The one New Deal relief programme to be saved was the school lunch programme. A concerted campaign by nutritionists at the Bureau of Home Economics managed to secure continued federal funding for the scheme. The senator for Georgia, Richard Russell, reminded the government that these meals were more important than ever to schoolchildren now that their mothers were engaged in war work and could not be expected to come home at noon to prepare a hot meal. ‘At a time when England is enlarging her school lunch program I do not see how we in this country could justify curtailment here.’
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Indeed, the
scheme expanded until, by the end of the war, it was feeding 8 million children while another 2 million received milk at school.
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The school lunch programme was the one area of wartime food policy where nutritionists gained real power. Each state was required to hire dieticians and nutritionists to supervise the scheme, and the recommended daily allowances were used to measure whether the lunches were ‘of optimum nutritional value’.
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The Committee on Food Habits, under the direction of the anthropologist Margaret Mead, devoted its efforts to creating suggested menus which would provide meals that were not only healthy but which fostered a sense of national unity. Mead argued that school lunches should avoid offending the tastes of the many ethnic groups within America’s diverse population. For this reason she argued that spicy seasonings, which would alienate one group or another, should be avoided and suggested that salt should be the only flavouring used. By trying to please all tastes Mead succeeded in promoting the insipid. The committee produced a set of menus which reduced the ethnic and regional diversity represented within the culinary repertoire of the United States to a bland array of soups, meat pies, broiled fish and plain boiled vegetables. School lunches acted as a powerful force for homogenizing the American diet, subtly creating preferences for innocuous meals which all Americans could share. In Chicago the school lunch programme was praised as a force which Americanized immigrant children. The Polish, Lithuanian, Mexican, Italian, Catholic, Protestant or Jewish children who sat down to consume these meals were described as ‘eating democracy’.
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If they helped to create a unified American diet, school lunches did little to actually feed the poor. The programme did stipulate that all children from low-income families and those on welfare should receive a free meal. But federal funding only covered the cost of the food and the states had to find the money to provide new lunchrooms and kitchens, and to pay for helpers. This meant that the poorest states had the fewest participating schools and not very many school meals ended up in the stomachs of the needy.
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The laissez-faire attitude of the government, the bureaucratic muddle of the food administration, and the failure of American nutritionists to find a powerful government minister, like the British Lord Woolton, to champion their cause, ensured
that the American rationing system was far less effective as an instrument of welfare than rationing was in Britain.

FUTURE HOPES

The new-found prosperity of American workers allowed them to buy goods which had previously been out of their reach. Peggy Terry overheard ‘a woman saying on the bus that she hoped the war didn’t end until she got her refrigerator paid for. An old man hit her over the head with an umbrella.’
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But the desires generated by wealth were thwarted by shortages of every imaginable consumable as industry focused its energies on armaments. Instead, consumers were urged to save and, to encourage them, a vision of a post-war world of plenty was disseminated through advertising campaigns which spread the government’s propaganda messages while maintaining a brand presence in the eyes of potential consumers. The relentless advertising created an absurd sense that the only thing Americans were fighting for was for the right to consume. A Royal typewriter advertisement captured the tone of the great majority of wartime American advertisements: ‘WHAT THIS WAR IS ALL ABOUT … [is the right to] once more walk into any store in the land and buy anything you want.’
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Eileen Barth, a social worker whose husband was in the army, explained, ‘I remember an ad in which people were shown as pigs because they seemed to want so much. To me, it was wanting to have things for the first time in their lives. They were able to enjoy life a little more, even get a house in the suburbs. These were people who lived through the Depression, as children, many of them. I guess you’d say a new middle class came into being. Perhaps they concentrated a little too much on the material life. The war did it.’
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The privations Americans had put up with during the Depression and now during the war shaped their post-war desires.

What most Americans wanted was their own home. Given the overcrowding in the cities and the state of disrepair of both urban and rural housing stock, it was hardly surprising. Jean Muller Pearson married a pilot in the 120th Observation Squadron and followed him to his base in Boise, Idaho. The housing shortage meant that people would rent
virtually any habitable space, and she and her husband squeezed into the top floor of a house with another couple, sharing a bathroom, kitchen and a sitting room on the landing. Then her husband was posted to Tonopah, Nevada, where they ended up living in what had been a miner’s shack. They had an old iron stove in the kitchen which was both oven and water heater, and the ‘“refrigerator” was a wooden crate attached to the outside of the kitchen accessible through a window that opened inward. On very cold nights milk and produce froze.’
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They were fortunate in that they had a bathroom in a lean-to built on the side of the shack. Theirs was one of only thirty bathtubs in the whole town and Jean would invite the other wives over for a bath.

After such living conditions, a detached suburban home with its own yard and, most importantly, a sense of privacy, seemed very appealing, as did numerous labour-saving appliances such as washing machines.
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A vital element in this new world was not only a new refrigerator standing proudly in the kitchen of the ideal suburban home but one that was filled to the brim with food. A public service advertisement for Macy’s in the
New York Daily News
in September 1943 listed ‘defending Democracy’ and ‘a better world’ as things Americans were fighting for, but it also included ‘a steak for every frying pan’.
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In May 1943 an opinion poll found that rationing and wartime food shortages had barely made any impact on American meals. Two-thirds of the women surveyed asserted that their diet had changed very little since the introduction of rationing, and three-quarters of the women acknowledged that the size of their meals had stayed the same.
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The minimal impact that rationing had on American eating habits is revealed by the passing comment of a woman from New York, who noted that coffee rationing, which cut consumption from three cups to one a day, was ‘the wartime measure to have affected one the most’.
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The food privations inflicted on American civilians by the war were minimal compared to those suffered by civilians in all other combatant nations. As one US soldier acknowledged to his English hostess: ‘if American women had had to put up with half as much as we have they would have made a terrific fuss’. As it was they still complained a great deal.
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The overriding problem was that Americans had no particular emotional investment in the war. Before Pearl Harbor American public opinion had been adamantly opposed to involvement in another European
conflict. After the Japanese attack there was outrage and anger and a sense that the United States had to win. But there was ambivalence about the sacrifices American civilians were willing to make. Many could see that agriculture was booming and food was plentiful and they did not believe that rationing was really necessary. The Americans’ natural suspicion of state intervention made them question the government’s motives for implementing the system. One soldier’s wife commented sourly that she thought it ‘was a patriotic ploy to keep our enthusiasm at fever pitch’.
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Housewives resented the favourable distribution of sugar to commercial bakeries. This made them more reliant on bought cakes and denied them the homely activity of baking.
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Intermittent shortages of foodstuffs followed by sudden gluts of the same foods shook housewives’ faith in the rationing system. In the spring of 1943 potatoes disappeared from city shops. The army had used up the winter reserve stocks. A few weeks later there were so many potatoes no one knew what to do with them.
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Eggs followed a similar pattern in the autumn – disappearing, only to return in the spring of 1944 in excess.
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These food shortages were certainly not serious, as they were in Germany’s cities where staple foods became unavailable, leaving the inhabitants with insufficient food to sustain their energy and health. But they were unsettling and inconvenient.
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In addition, half the black women employed as maids and cooks deserted their employers for better paid war work, leaving their mistresses to cope with only the assistance of recipe books and filled with the resentful sense that the proper order of life had been thoroughly upset.
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The food around which American civilians’ dissatisfaction with rationing centred was red meat. Red meat, preferably beef, was highly valued as a prime source of energy, especially for the working man, and its presence on a plate helped to define the food as a proper meal. But during the war most red meat, and especially steak, disappeared into the army bases. Butchers continued to stock lower-quality cuts of red meat, pork, poultry and fish, and during the war Americans ate at least 2.5 pounds of meat per person per week. This was a generous quantity and it represented a per capita increase of at least 10 pounds a year.
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In comparison, Soviet workers were lucky to find a scrap of sausage in their canteen’s cabbage soup and the British had to get by
on less than half the American ration. Moreover, a proportion of the pound of meat per week which British civilians ate was often made up of corned beef or offal. American women did not take kindly to offal and few took the advice of a recipe book designed to assist the ‘gallant soldier on the home front … in making the most of her meat purchases during the present emergency’ by beginning resolutely to jelly tongues, Creole kidneys, fry liver like the French, and apply the cooking of Maryland to tripe.
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Instead, they preferred to use ‘stretchers’ to make their meat go further and reduced waste by religiously using up leftovers.
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There was plenty of meat available but it was not the kind American civilians craved. It is therefore unsurprising that the black market in food was most active in the meat trade. During the war a large number of small slaughterhouses sprang up which traded locally and were able to evade the inspectors from the Office of Price Administration. They would buy livestock for slaughter above the ceiling price and then sell it on to black market distributors.
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Butchers would sell favoured customers high quality steaks in the guise of ‘pre-ground’ hamburger which used up fewer ration points. In an attempt to persuade Americans to abide by the rules, Eleanor Roosevelt took the Home Front Pledge to always pay ration points in full.
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The food at the White House, which under the Roosevelts had never been good, was now used to set an example, and although the ‘
New York Times
sympathised with the President for having to lunch on salt fish four days in a row’ Eleanor insisted that this was only fitting in a time of war.
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In sympathy with the American public’s dismay over coffee rationing Eleanor also cut the demitasse of coffee from the White House after-dinner ritual.
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The American black market never got so out of hand that it was a threat to the economy, but the illegal meat trade was sufficiently active for it to threaten the Department of Agriculture’s ability to meet its supply commitments to Britain. It grew in size throughout 1943 as enthusiasm for the war waned once the public realized that a speedy victory was beyond the reach of the Allies.
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The attitude of Americans towards the black market signalled that both a consensus and social cohesion were weaker in wartime America. In contrast to Britain, where petty pilfering was justified with guilty defensiveness, many Americans viewed it with the triumphant sense that they had beaten the system.
Others simply did not question it at all, taking small under-the-counter transactions for granted. When Helen Studer was working as a riveter at the Douglas aircraft factory in California, she recalled, without any apparent guilt, how the friendly woman at the grocery store would slip extra goods into her bag. ‘When I’d get home, I’d have three or four things on my bill that wasn’t said out loud. I’d have a carton of cigar-ettes … There might have been a couple of pounds of oleo [margarine] or there may have been five pounds of sugar. I never knew what I was going to have.’
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