UofM How Food Was Used in 20 Th Century to Further Goals of War and Peace Paper Word count at least 600 Question:  Examine how food was used during the twe

UofM How Food Was Used in 20 Th Century to Further Goals of War and Peace Paper Word count at least 600
Question: 
Examine how food was used during the twentieth century by various nations to further goals of war or peace. Were these campaigns successful? Why/why not?  

Writing requirement:

1) THESIS STATEMENT. Make sure you address all parts of the prompt/question, and be specific. For example, if you are answering question 1, you must address both parts of the prompt – the factors causing separation from food sources AND the effects of this separation. (“Urbanization and the mass factory production of food during the Industrial Revolution caused humans to be increasingly alienated from nature and their food sources. The most important long term effects have been environmental pollution and cruelty toward animals.”) Your thesis statement needs to state your complete answer, which you will then go on to “prove” with specific examples in your essay.

2) OUTLINE/STRUCTURE. As you set up your outline (see template in midterm essay module) make sure that in addition to a clear thesis statement you’ve written down strong topic sentences and specific examples for each paragraph. In your midterm essays many of you started off with great ideas but did not provide specific examples. For example, if you wrote “Crops from the Americas led to many important changes in Europe,” you should go on to define what crops and what exactly those changes were; did the population increase because of corn and potato consumption? Provide a statistic, tell me where and when this happened. Once you’ve given your specific examples you should explain why and how this helps prove your thesis. 
3) CONTEXT. Remember to address the “Five Ws” in your essay – who, what, when, where, and why – especially as you are setting up the historical context. 
4) TEXTUAL SOURCES. Some of the readings that will help you most in your final essay prep: 
Warner (Pandora’s Lunchbox), Collingham (Taste of War), Kitchen Debate, White Bread article Food and Foodways
ISSN: 0740-9710 (Print) 1542-3484 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gfof20
Making White Bread by the Bomb’s Early Light:
Anxiety, Abundance, and Industrial Food Power in
the Early Cold War
Aaron Bobrow-Strain
To cite this article: Aaron Bobrow-Strain (2011) Making White Bread by the Bomb’s Early Light:
Anxiety, Abundance, and Industrial Food Power in the Early Cold War, Food and Foodways,
19:1-2, 74-97
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.2011.544191
Published online: 23 Feb 2011.
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Food and Foodways, 19:74–97, 2011
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0740-9710 print / 1542-3484 online
DOI: 10.1080/07409710.2011.544191
Making White Bread by the Bomb’s Early Light:
Anxiety, Abundance, and Industrial Food
Power in the Early Cold War
AARON BOBROW-STRAIN
Associate Professor of Politics, Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington, USA
This article explores U.S. policymakers and consumers’ engagements with global bread politics in the early Cold War. This provides
a glimpse into the making of a particular form of postwar “American alimentary exceptionalism” premised on the universal choiceworthiness of industrial foodways. This alimentary exceptionalism
did not assume that the U.S. industrial diet was gastronomically
superior to other countries’ diets, but rather that it offered a unique
foundation of strength, stability, choice, and abundance on which
world peace could rest in the uncertain postwar world. Thus, the
article contends that Americans’ confidence in industrial foodways
and industrial food production systems—something whose legacies
we still grapple with today—was forged, in part, on the imperial
landscape of Cold War competition. In that sense, the article traces
the largely unexamined flipside of postwar food imperialism: how
the exercise of food power abroad shaped Americans’ understandings of their own diet and its place in the world.
“The U.S. is not loved or hated because it is a citadel of political
liberty . . . [it is] measured by its ability and willingness to contribute
from its own comfortable fat to strengthen Europe’s shivering frame. . . .
At the moment the tendency [in Europe] is to judge the United States
rather severely and to make allowances for Soviet Russia . . . [but] bread
comes from America and it does not come from Russia.”
—Hamilton Fish, 1947
Address correspondence to Aaron Bobrow-Strain, Associate Professor of Politics,
Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA 99362. E-mail: straina@whitman.edu
74
Making White Bread by the Bomb’s Early Light
75
“Bread: It Is the First Concern of a Hungry World. Trouble Looms for the
Nations Which Cannot Provide it.”
—Los Angeles Times headline, August 10, 1947
“WHERE IS THE WHITE BREAD?”
After six weeks of fierce fighting for Sicily in the summer of 1943, Allied
forces established their first occupation government in former Axis territory.
Quick victory in Sicily would help turn the tide of the European war, but
the question on the minds of many of the island’s half-starved residents was
far more quotidian: “In many a liberated town,” Time magazine reported,
“the first question asked was: ‘Where is the white bread?”’1 The war’s end
was still years away, but Time’s focus on hungry Sicilians’ demands offered a
glimpse into how the United States would see itself in the postwar world—a
world that seemed to clamor desperately for bread that only America could
provide.
This article explores U.S. policymakers and consumers’ engagements
with global bread politics during the early Cold War. It does that with an
eye toward understanding the making of a particular form of “American
alimentary exceptionalism” premised on the universal choiceworthiness of
industrial foodways.2 This alimentary exceptionalism did not assume that the
U.S. industrial diet was gastronomically superior to other countries’ diets, but
rather that it offered a unique foundation of strength, stability, choice, and
abundance on which world peace could rest in the uncertain postwar world.
During World War II, homefront food production and everyday dietary
choices had been explicitly enlisted in U.S. national defense efforts. Diet,
patriotism, and military readiness had become inextricably linked, as Amy
Bentley masterfully shows in Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity.3 With victories in Europe and Asia, however, American
kitchens appeared to demobilize. In Amy Drake McFeely’s words, “Relieved
of their pseudo-military roles, women embraced new assignments as consumers . . . With sugared words and pictures, the ads reminded the public
once again that abundance is at the core of the American dream. The war in
the kitchen was over.”4
Or had it simply taken on new forms? A growing number of scholars
have begun to note how Cold War propaganda explicitly mobilized “the
American kitchen”—with its shining new appliances, sleek lines, and dazzling surfaces—“as an icon of the Western way of life.”5 But what about
American food itself? To what extent was America’s burgeoning taste for
abundant industrial food linked to what Daniel Yergin, in his classic history of the early Cold War, called the country’s newfound commitment to
“permanent military readiness”?6
76
A. Bobrow-Strain
That question place this article in conversation with debates about the
United States’ exercise of “food power” during the Cold War. For decades,
a well-developed line of scholarship has shown how the United States’s
postwar projection of food power abroad through food aid and technology
transfer constituted a form of cultural, economic, and dietary imperialism.7
Not surprisingly, debates about these alimentary projections have largely
centered on the nature of their impact abroad; how they affected the culture,
diets, and livelihoods of people outside the United States. This is an important
subject, but not this article’s focus.
Instead, this article explores the largely unexamined flipside of postwar
food imperialism: how the exercise of food power abroad during the early
Cold War shaped Americans’ understandings of their diet and its place in the
world. It argues that Americans’ strong confidence in the choiceworthiness
of its industrial foodways and industrial food production system—something
whose legacies we still grapple with today—were forged, in part, on the
imperial landscape of Cold War competition.
The United States’s alimentary imperialism and its faith in industrial food
both pre-date the Cold War,8 but this article contends that they took on a
new form in era of superpower competition.9 In the end, Cold War practices
of food aid, reconstruction, and propaganda reinforced a particular kind
of American alimentary exceptionalism—one less explicitly racialized than
previous versions, and more grounded in ideologies connecting consumer
abundance to global stability.
This fusing of industrial foodways with the imperatives of national security instilled a particular, narrow vision of “good food” with geopolitical
urgency (and marginalized alternative visions). More than a half-century
later, even as critiques of industrial foodways mount from all directions, this
urgency has not disappeared. Indeed, it energizes key attempts to defend
industrial food production against proponents of slow, local, and organic
eating.10 By placing American industrial foodways in a Cold War context,
this article reminds us that, even when couched in the language of humanitarianism and world peace, the present-day eliding of industrial food
production and global security by authors such as James McWilliams or Nina
Federoff normalizes a state of emergency in which the enormous social,
economic, environmental, and health costs of industrial must be accepted
without question or critique.11
ANXIETY AND ABUNDANCE: COLD WAR CULTURAL POLITICS
AND U.S. FOODWAYS
The argument introduced above owes a debt to feminist food historians who
first framed postwar foodways as political—a site of struggle over household
Making White Bread by the Bomb’s Early Light
77
gender relations, constructions of masculinity and femininity, and the meanings of domesticity in a nation of industrial power.12 This article builds on
those insights by placing household- and national-level food politics in global
relief. It suggests that our understanding of the role domestic discourses of
“healthiness,” “abundance,” “choice,” “newness,” and even “convenience,”
played in shaping postwar foodways will benefit by being brought into conversation with global Cold War history.
This, in turn, inserts the article into a larger engagement with Cold War
cultural history—particularly debates over whether and how anxieties about
global conflict affected ordinary Americans immersed in postwar celebrations of consumer abundance. Cold War historians have long traced the
ways that concerns about global superpower conflict reinjected values of
military readiness and competitive toughness into many arenas of everyday
life, including constructions of masculinity, child rearing practices, popular
fiction, Hollywood films, and Broadway musicals.13 Although it has received
less attention than other areas of Cold War popular culture, it seems likely
that American foodways were shaped by those same anxieties. At the same
time, however, historians have also begun to warn against ascribing too
much agency to Cold War anxieties. During the late 1940s and early 1950s,
the argument runs, Americans may have worried about their country’s ability
to compete with Communists, but they also had a lot of other things on their
minds. As Leo Ribuffo suggests, “Documentary filmmakers who retrospectively cherish images of suburban school children ducking under their desks
during air raid drills should also show them rushing Good Humor trucks to
buy ice-cream cones.”14
This article takes a different tack in its approach to the question of
anxiety and consumption. By placing U.S. foodways—specifically, the taste
for industrially processed bread—in their larger geopolitical context, it blurs
implicit divides between anxious thoughts of military readiness and joyful
celebrations of consumer abundance. While McFeely and Ribuffo’s points
are well taken, this article suggests that duck and cover drills and Good
Humor bars were not as different as we might think. Fueled by the successes of postwar food relief, an explosion of new convenience foods, and
the messages of Cold War propaganda, celebrations of American alimentary
abundance at home and abroad provided a reassurance at a time when the
country seemed to be falling behind the Soviets in many other arenas. Wonder Bread might not have tasted as good as French baguettes or contained
the natural nutrients of Soviet “black bread,” as many consumers readily acknowledged, but, unlike those other breads, they were fortified, plentiful,
and cheap—and world peace seemed to depend on them.
Located at the nexus of cultural and geopolitical history, this article
deploys a diverse set of sources ranging from women’s magazines, domestic advice columns, advertising, and popular food writing to the records
of the Foreign Agriculture Service (FAS), U.S. Information Agency (USIA),
78
A. Bobrow-Strain
and Supreme Commander of the Allies in the Pacific Japanese Occupation
Authorities (SCAP). The article proceeds as follows: First, it places postwar
breadways in the historical context of ongoing struggles over industrially
produced loaves. The next two sections examine the European food crisis
of 1946–1948 and early 1950s anti-Soviet propaganda, respectively, showing
how American bread, industrially farmed wheat, and other modern convenience foods came to be seen as critical elements in the fight against Communism. Finally, two more case studies—efforts to convert Japanese diets from
rice to wheat and the mid-1950s craze for French bread—illustrate sites of uncertainty and struggle over the universal choiceworthiness of U.S. foodways.
In both cases, policy makers, tastemakers, and ordinary consumers found
their confidence in the universal choiceworthiness of American industrial
foodways challenged by alien diets. In many ways these global encounters ultimately reinforced assumptions about the superiority of U.S industrial
bread, but they also exposed cracks in the architecture of alimentary exceptionalism, creating space for the resurfacing of long-held doubts about the
meaning of industrial bread. Not coincidentally, by the late 1960s, “natural”
Asian diets and “authentic” French food would emerge as important icons
of resistance to American industrial food (and the imperial politics it seemed
to represent). And industrial white bread would emerge as a leading icon of
all that was wrong with Amerika.15
INDUSTRIAL BREAD AND ITS DISCONTENTS
In 1890, ninety percent of American bread was baked in homes by women,
and the country’s few commercial bread bakeries were nearly all tiny oneoven shops with a few employees serving urban neighborhoods. Less than
forty years later, this had changed dramatically: in 1930, ninety percent of the
country’s bread was baked outside the home by men in increasingly distant
factories, neighborhood bakeries were in decline, and bread had begun to
take on the form in which we know it today—a standardized, homogenous
product of food science and assembly line manufacture. From the beginning,
however, this revolutionary process of industrialization came accompanied
by virulent protests from diverse quarters.16
From the 1910s to the 1930s, anyone reading women’s magazines, health
newsletters, domestic advice columns, or listening to popular radio programs
could not have escaped an overwhelming sense that the country’s new staff
of life was broken. “The whiter your bread, the quicker you’re dead,” Dr.
Clark jingled on his Home Health Hour radio show, while other prominent
food gurus accused industrial bread of contributing to, among other ills,
anemia, cancer, diabetes, blood poisoning, criminal tendencies, tuberculosis, polyneuritis, neurasthenia, gout, bursal rheumatism, tooth decay, liver
Making White Bread by the Bomb’s Early Light
79
disease, kidney failure, overstimulated nervous systems, physical disfigurement, and acidosis.17
During World War II, highly successful campaigns to synthetically enrich
industrial bread and train consumers about the value of vitamin-charged
loaves silenced most of this criticism. Industrial bread was, once again, seen
as vital and strong—a weapon of national defense. While, many of industrial
bread’s most prominent critics disliked synthetic enrichment, they reluctantly
rallied to the cause in the name of wartime expediency.18 By the late 1940s,
however, they once again felt free to vent.
In fact, even during the industrially infatuated 1950s, it would have
been difficult to find anything positive written about industrial bread’s flavor
or texture in venues ranging from women’s magazines to newspaper food
columns. It was “cottony fluff,” “cotton batting,” “fake,” “purposeless perfection,” “inedible,” “limp,” and “hot air.” Consumers, for their part, echoed
many of these concerns. In the largest multiyear study of American bread
habits ever, a third of respondents described supermarket bread as “doughy;
gummy; soggy; not well baked,” about 15 percent thought the taste was
terrible, and as much as eighteen percent thought it too airy. Only about a
third to a quarter (depending on the year of the study) could find nothing
in their bread flavor or texture to complain about. Importantly, however, the
one thing consumers could agree on was that their bread was good for them.
With the memory of wartime enrichment campaigns still fresh in their minds,
96–100 percent of respondents believed industrial bread had the nutritional
strength to build strong bodies.19
Whether they liked it or not, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Americans
ate a lot of industrial bread—even though, with rising prosperity, the end of
wartime shortages, and the dawning of a new age of techno-food marvels,
they had many other options; perhaps more options than any group of eaters
in history up to that point. But the vast majority of households in the United
States ate store-bought white bread at all three meals—totaling some 8.6
billion loaves a year in 1954 (not including home-baked bread, and storebought whole wheat, raisin bread, and “ethnic” breads). According to another
study 98.8 percent of the country ate bread daily. Most people consumed
3–7 slices a day, but an astounding 33 percent of the population finished
off more than 8 slices a day. And this level of bread consumption cut across
class: while the wealthiest 10 percent of the country consumed bread in
slightly smaller quantities, the remaining nine income deciles varied little in
their daily intake. Age seem to matter either: adults and children ate bread
at exactly the same rate. Only gender seemed to differentiate bread eaters:
women, forbidden the staff of life by many popular diets of the time ate the
least, while men and boys, associating bread with body-building strength,
ate the most.20
During World War II, bread consumption, driven by the rationing of
other staples, accounted for as much as 40 percent of all calories consumed
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A. Bobrow-Strain
in the country daily. After the war, Americans could have abandoned bread,
just as they traded Victory Gardens for backyard barbecues. Instead, the
proportion of calories derived from bread settled in at 25–30 percent and
then, despite the absolute certainty with which food economists and baking
industry specialists predicted rapid declines in consumption, hovered around
the same point for the 1950s. Studies remarked at the high percentage of daily
vitamins, iron, and protein consumers derived from the much-derided staff
of life.21
Why did postwar consumers continued to eat so much industrial bread,
despite widespread popular condemnation of its flavor and texture? The
answer wasn’t that consumers lacked options. Americans could have abandoned bread as a staple, or purchased breads other than industrial white.
They didn’t. When, from time to time, big baking companies attempted to
launch lines of whole wheat bread, they invariably fell flat. And, despite
the continued survival of small specialty bakeries, especially in cities, rye,
whole wheat, and other “ethnic” loaves offered little competition, accounting for only 8–12 percent of bread consumption during the postwar period.
Likewise, convenience and habit can’t entirely explain bread’s salience. As
marketing experts discovered convenience and habit ranked low in consumers’ reasons for buying bread, while quality, value, and nutrition topped
the list.22
So why did postwar America uniformly stick to gummy bread, at least
across class and age lines? A complete answer to that question is beyond the
scope of this article. Instead it focuses on one unexamined element: the way
that American industrial bread’s place in Cold War politics created a metric
with which consumers could compare their limp, fluffy, and much-derided
bread positively to the world’s dense, hearty loaves.
IF BREAD DOESN’T COME, BOMBS WILL
During the winter of 1945–1946, while the United States celebrated peace by
consuming 3,000 calories a day per person and singing “Let it snow! Let it
snow! Let it snow!” with Vaughn Monroe, severe weathe…
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