Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (85 page)

The war also stimulated advances in food science and the processing, packaging and transportation of foods, which laid the foundations for the explosion of processed and packaged foods in the late 1950s and 1960s. In 1939 the Institute of Food Technologists, the first professional society for food scientists, was founded in the United States. American technology and know-how was transferred to Australia during the war when the country was turned into a major supplier of canned and dehydrated foods for the US forces in the south-west Pacific.
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By 1945 Australia’s scientists were at the cutting edge of food science and in the following decade the industry built on the knowledge
and skills they had acquired in wartime. The dehydrated vegetables produced for the troops had been ‘rather less than satisfactory, they looked, smelt and tasted pretty bad’, but after the war the dehydration of potatoes was perfected and powdered mashed potato found its way into the domestic kitchen cupboards of the developed world.
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Before the war, vegetable oils were unpalatable and unstable but by the late 1950s the processing of vegetable oil had improved to the extent that firms were able to produce high-quality salad dressings and bottled mayonnaise.
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During the war the American quartermaster developed a technique which reduced milk to dehydrated butterfat and skim milk powder. These powders were easily transported over long distances and could be recombined to produce butter. Once the hostilities were over, Australian companies adopted the method to manufacture a variety of dairy products in various Asian countries where there was a growing market. A by-product of the research into this technique was a method to precipitate
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casein and whey. Both these products are now widely used in processed foods.
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American farmers were already growing acre upon acre of soya beans, which are ubiquitous in processed foods, masquerading as bacon bits or used as a flour high in fat and protein. Seabrook Farms in New Jersey had already perfected the art of freezing vegetables. In Germany a freezing industry quickly grew out of the German army’s wartime freezing enterprises, which included a mobile freezing ship operating off the coast of Norway.
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Camp coffee essence, which had been produced for the troops during the war, quickly became popular as an easy way to make coffee.

Thus, the war paved the way for, and accelerated the development of, technological processes which made possible the bags of frozen vegetables, canned fruit juices, packets of dried soup powders, powdered pudding and custard mixes, jars of instant coffee, salad oils, meat pastes, and ready meals which we now take for granted. The new food science also helped to boost the rise of junk food, as the principles of the mass assembly line were applied to food. By the 1930s Lyons Corner Houses had bought the franchise for Wimpy Grills from America, where they were established in Chicago. Eventually, special areas known as Wimpy
bars were set up in the Corner Houses. After the war these bars were emulated by a string of fast-food chains.
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The post-war agricultural revolution, and the revolution in food processing which accompanied it, both made a greater variety of foodstuffs widely available. Economic recovery, which saw the whole of Europe achieve full employment by the 1960s, meant that disposable incomes rose. An indicator of how affordable food had become is the falling proportion of household income which was spent on food. This was most dramatic in the United States where the proportion of the total household budget allocated for food dropped from 33 per cent in the 1930s to 13 per cent in the 1980s. In Britain it declined from 33 per cent to 25 per cent over the same period.
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Governments now took responsibility for a series of programmes designed to protect the health of the entire nation, from the fortification with vitamins of staple foods such as bread, to programmes providing school meals and milk. In the post-war decades the nutritional gap between the wealthy and the poor, which had so worried the League of Nations in the 1930s, was firmly closed in the developed world.

However, mass consumption has not delivered all that its advocates promised. The lower classes did have more money to spend and they closed the dietary class gap, but spending money and consuming did not pull the lower classes up the social hierarchy. In fact, the income gap between the rich and the poor has widened since the end of the Second World War. And in the United States the myth that the working classes could spend their way into prosperity left them without the protection of socially progressive government policies and resulted in a divided and segregated suburban America.
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One of the most powerful impacts of the war was to intensify the American obsession with plenty which, as soon as hostilities ended, manifested itself in an immediate increase in the consumption of meat and dairy products. Thus, the war gave impetus to the development of an American culture of over-eating. The phenomenon was not confined to the United States. The explosion of consumption was replicated throughout the developed world as soon as economic recovery allowed. Many Europeans spent the war years craving red meat, white bread spread generously with butter, sweet cakes and biscuits, and when in the 1950s they were able to satisfy these desires a wave of consumption
swept over western Europe. People bought themselves new appliances such as fridges and then filled them with food.
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In Germany the post-war years of hunger were followed by a period of guzzling.
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In Britain rationing finally came to an end in 1954. Amid the immediate flurry of consumption there was little sign that the war had drastically changed people’s tastes. Instead, they satisfied their cravings for the fats and sugars which they had missed and rapidly undid much of the good done by the wartime diet. Once butter was freely available the British doubled their consumption. By 1953 each person was eating 173 grams (nearly an entire packet) a week. There was a similar orgy of cake- and biscuit-eating which meant that fat accounted for an unhealthy 45 per cent of the energy in the diet. British sugar consumption had always been exceptionally high and it rose to a poisonous 500 grams a week. Conversely, the consumption of green vegetables, which the war had promoted, fell by 100 grams a week. Deficiency diseases and susceptibility to diseases of malnourishment such as tuberculosis and diphtheria were replaced by the diseases of affluence. In Britain the incidence of dental caries in children’s teeth soared. The death-rate from coronary heart disease grew alarmingly throughout the western world.
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If anything, palates appear to have been coarsened and tastes homo-genized by the monotony of wartime diets. This was particularly noticeable where governments controlled what people ate. Endless bland meals in army messes, factory canteens and British Restaurants habituated people to insipid dishes designed to neither offend nor excite the taste buds. This tendency was particularly noticeable among young American and Japanese men, whose army diets deliberately avoided regional dishes and sought to create a uniform cuisine.

It has been argued that war is one of the most powerful forces of globalization, and millions of young men, who would never otherwise have ventured far from home, travelled the globe in the armed forces during the Second World War.
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The adventurous discovered new foods and new ways of eating. Anthony Lamb recalled that during his training in the use of artillery at Deolali near Bombay the lunches were ‘appetizing curries with all the trimmings, iced limeade, delightful Indian sweets’.
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In his prison camp in Egypt Richard Eickelmann, a captive German, learned how to make ‘desert char’: extremely strong
tea, flavoured with condensed milk and lots of sugar. Even in the 1990s he still prepared tea for English guests in this fashion.
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Fred Watt, a black GI in a service corps, also enjoyed the British teatime tradition of ‘little flavoured cakes and a pot of tea’ every day at three in the afternoon. He concluded that the opportunity the war gave him to live abroad ‘was one of the greatest experiences that I have ever had … By me not being able to go to college, I still consider myself as knowledgeable as anyone else because of all my knowledge from travelling.’
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But in most of the countries occupied or visited by soldiers, rationing and the scarcity of food meant that few were able to sample the best dishes in the local cuisine’s repertoire. Rather, it was the soldiers who had access to superior foods. The Allied armies’ reliance on canned goods from America ensured that virtually every part of the globe acquired a taste for Coca-Cola and Spam. American military food probably had the most profound impact on the diet of Pacific islanders but the taste for American foodstuffs spread throughout the globe. The Australians acquired the habit of eating packaged breakfast cereals and a fondness for sweetcorn, which had been introduced to satisfy the tastes of American servicemen.
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The actress and cook Madhur Jaffrey recalled that after the war Delhi was swamped by US army ‘leftovers in the form of mysterious boxes known as K-Rations … my cousins and I tore them open as if they were Christmas presents, pulling out each carefully fitted tin or package with the greatest glee. Thus I was introduced to my first olive, my first fruit cocktail and my first taste of Spam. I rolled mouthfuls slowly around my tongue and pronounced each of them to be exotic and wonderful. I had never eaten tinned fruit or meat before.’
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Thus, the war acted as a powerful vehicle for spreading the American way of eating across the globe.

Nevertheless, even though the war forced a large proportion of the world’s population to give up rice, it did not instigate a widespread conversion to bread. The occupation of most of the world’s rice-exporting countries by the Japanese meant that rice-eating peoples throughout the British empire were confronted with wheat as a substitute. This was a deeply unpopular development, as rice-eaters claim that a switch to wheat causes stomach problems. The inability of rice-eaters to digest other, coarser grains when weakened by malnutrition was tragically demonstrated by the victims of the Bengal famine. But
wheat poses all sorts of other problems even for those who have not been weakened by hunger. Rice-eating countries often lacked mills to make wheat flour, or commercial bakeries or domestic ovens in which to bake it into bread. Ceylon had to build flour mills and bakeries to process the Australian wheat which went some way to replacing Burmese rice imports. Schools, health officers and government officials had to campaign hard, using a mix of lectures, demonstrations and posters, to persuade the Ceylonese to eat bread.
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After the war the Ceylonese immediately reverted to rice. This was the case in virtually every rice-eating country which had been forced to eat wheat during wartime, including Bengal and Mauritius. Only in Somalia did the younger generation develop a taste for wheat bread, which they continued to eat after the war, while the older generation reverted to their preferred millet and rice.
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In the post-war years it was the Japanese who were forced to eat bread. The initial American policy towards defeated Japan was that they were only prepared to give sufficient aid to the country to prevent disease and social unrest. The United States had no intention of paying for the reconstruction of the Japanese economy. But the miserable state of the Japanese food system and the disastrous harvest of 1945 meant that over the period of American occupation (August 1945 to April 1952) the United States ended up spending about $2 billion, mainly on food aid.
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However, the food which the United States provided gave no quarter to Japanese eating habits. The influx of wheat flour from America forced the Japanese to acquire the habit of eating bread and in 1946 it was announced that ‘the era of flour has arrived’.
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An electric company in Osaka even began producing bread-making machines which baked a corn- or wheatmeal batter into loaves.
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In 1947 the occupation authorities introduced school lunches in an attempt to improve the nutrition of the children. These included small white bread rolls served alongside whatever was available from army stores, perhaps a stew or soup, some vegetables and often a drink of milk. Oki Chiyo’s son recalled the introduction of American food to his school. Before this he and his sister brought a lunch from home of rice, pickled plum and a few fish flakes. He and his classmates suffered from runny noses due to the lack of protein in their diet. Over time the American lunches cured them, while at the same time they appear
to have encouraged among this generation of Japanese an eclectic attitude towards unusual combinations of western foods which is still common today.
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Economic recovery really began in Japan after 1950, when the Korean war brought in an injection of American cash. As incomes rose the Japanese continued to eat bread at breakfast time but quickly reverted to rice for lunch and dinner. The massive recruitment of peasants into the army from the 1930s onwards had changed the rural view of rice. In the military the recruits grew accustomed to eating rice as the basic staple around which every meal was structured. When they returned to civilian life they were no longer content to revert to the peasant habit of eating millet or barley, or to mix their rice with other grains. The wartime rationing system had a similar impact on the urban poor. The fact that the basic ration was rice gave the grain the status of the staple food to which every Japanese was entitled. The fact that the rice in the ration was gradually replaced by substitute foods re-inforced rather than undermined the sense that rice was the central element of the Japanese diet.
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Once they could afford it, all Japanese, rural and urban dwellers, chose to eat rice with their meals. It was the Second World War which transformed white rice into the staple of the entire Japanese population.