Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Connections between civilian diet and military mobilization are ancient, of course. Armies march on
their stomachs, and civilian populations have always been asked to sacrifice to make that possible. Yet,
during the world wars of the twentieth century, the United States found itself insulated from conflict's
most fearsome camp followers: starvation, trammeled fields, and interrupted production. Americans
conserved and went without, to be sure, but the geographical accident of unscathed food production also
enabled the emergence of a different kind of relation between eating and defense.
Deliberately cultivated by military planners, food industry representatives, and public health officials,
this new ethic didn't just ask civilians to reduce intake of certain foods so that troops might have
more. It also demanded that civilians increase consumption of foods deemed essential to home front fit-
ness—maximizing nutrition and energy intake on the home front in the name of defense.
The idea that patriotic civilian populations must conform to particular notions of scientifically de-
termined healthy eating has its roots in the early twentieth century. After the Boer War, for example,
Great Britain instituted the Committee on the Deterioration of the Race to study the nation's diet as a
way of improving physical readiness for future conflicts. During World War I, Americans were berated
for carrying millions of pounds of excess fat that could be better used as rations or tallow. Well-known
physiologist Francis Benedict questioned “whether a patriot should be permitted in times of stress to
carry excess body-weight.” And after the war, a Carnegie Institution study reflected that imperfect nu-
trition, particularly on the part of the civilian poor, “was a hindrance and danger to the state.” By the
eve of World War II, some officials had begun to speak of poor nutrition as a form of desertion. 6 If, for
eugenicists and followers of Physical Culture, poor diet was seen as a crime against society in ordinary
times, during wars the stakes were even higher—it was treason.
This idea is still with us today in modified forms. From the U.S. Army declaring “battle on the bulge”
to vitamin supplements marketed as weapons in a war against ill health, diet and combat have blurred
together in our minds in ways early proponents couldn't have imagined. Individual food choices, we
are told, have far-ranging consequences for the national readiness, whether that readiness is needed for
an actually existing hot war, a future war, or simply to gird us in all-out social struggles against myri-
ad perceived threats. Given the importance of bread in the U.S. diet, it shouldn't surprise us that this
consciousness—particularly the association between added vitamins and defense—was, in crucial ways,
forged around bread. More specifically, it materialized out of educational campaigns surrounding the
panicked introduction of synthetically enriched white bread on the eve of World War II.
By exploring the story of wartime bread enrichment, we'll see that forceful national security rhetoric
can, in fact, inspire sweeping positive improvements for all eaters—not just for a privileged elite. At the
same time, the sense of urgency generated by linking food to national security inclined consumers and
policy makers to accept stopgap measures and hurried compromises. These urgent measures, perhaps
necessary in the moment, ultimately ended up narrowing Americans' bread options and reinforcing the
power of giant baking companies. What appeared only as short-term wartime expedience would set the
stage for the 1950s and 1960s golden age of Wonder bread.
UNFIT TO FIGHT
In 1940, with U.S entry into Europe's war appearing ever more inevitable, Congress authorized the
country's first peacetime draft. As men across the country lined up outside neighborhood draft boards,
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