WHITE BREAD IMPERIALISM - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 70

IF BREAD DOESN'T COME, BOMBS WILL
During the winter of 1945-46, while the United States celebrated peace by consuming three thousand
calories a day per person and singing, “Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!” with Vaughn Monroe,
severe weather nearly destroyed Europe's entire bread grains crop. Historic drought that summer fol-
lowed by another bad winter finished the job. In a region where most people got 40-55 percent of their
daily calories from bread, nearly 125 million Europeans faced starvation. 2 Bread riots rocked France,
which had seen its worst wheat harvest in 132 years. Italy's flour stocks dwindled, and Britain reported
that its bread situation was worse than in the darkest days of the war. Wheat stocks were so low in the
U.K. that government officials were forced to extend and deepen wartime bread rationing, despite fierce
popular opposition. Winston Churchill called the decision “one of the gravest announcements [he] had
ever heard in the House in time of peace.” 3
Things looked even more dire in Asia. China faced a massive rice crisis, famine gripped Korea, and
millions of conquered Japanese survived on 520 calories per day. In total, the United States estimated,
500 million people—one in five people on the planet—faced famine conditions between 1946 and 1948.
Some relief supplies shipped to Asia, but for racial and geopolitical reasons Truman's attention—and
the country's—was riveted on Europe. Making use of his bully pulpit, grain exporters' eagerness to ex-
ploit new markets, and almost every Liberty ship in the U.S. Navy, Truman mobilized the largest move-
ment of wheat and flour in world history—almost 900 million bushels between 1946 and 1947, enough
to bake, conservatively, 70 billion loaves of white bread.
The United States' role as the postwar world's most important source of bread did not take policy
makers by surprise. Even before Pearl Harbor, military strategists commonly argued that food “would
win the war and write the peace,” and agriculture officials planned for that peace even as they mobilized
to fight. Most importantly, they wanted to make sure that the country avoided a devastating rural reces-
sion like the one triggered after WWI when war-stimulated grain production collided with a large post-
war drop in demand for U.S. wheat. This time around, the country would use its agricultural advantage
strategically, killing two birds with one stone: supporting farmers at home while projecting food power
into the uncertain political terrain of the future. The fact that the United States emerged from the war
as the only power in the world with its agricultural system not only unscathed but in peak form did not
surprise the Truman administration. What shook Washington was just how quickly America's respons-
ibilities as the most important player in the world food system thrust themselves on the country.
To free up wheat for the world, Truman called on the country to voluntarily conserve bread, pro-
hibited the use of wheat in alcohol production, and mandated a higher extraction rate for white flour.
When Americans complained about the new, supposedly “gray” high-extraction loaves, Truman scolded
them, saying that not getting “exactly the kind of bread that many prefer” was a tiny price to pay for
saving lives and establishing lasting peace. 4 Publications like Life, Look, Parents' Magazine, Time , and
American Home backed the president, running heart-wrenching stories of hunger in Europe and offer-
ing readers advice on how to conserve wheat. Thousands of women signed pledges to conserve bread in
their households, and food magazines went back on a war footing, publishing tips and recipes for saving
bread.
While Americans felt generally sympathetic toward humanitarian efforts aimed at allies and even
former enemies in Europe, public support for wheat conservation, high-extraction loaves, and possible
bread rations was short-lived. 5 Letters to newspaper editors reveal widespread skepticism about Amer-
icans' willingness to suffer bread restrictions for altruistic reasons. Instead, humanitarian concern for
starving European children segued into self-interested thinking about wheat exports and national secur-
ity. As Consumers' Guide assured readers, when they “cast [their] bread on the waters,” it would return