The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food

by Lizzie Collingham

  Erhard’s economic policies are now generally recognized as having played a more important role in initiating German economic recovery than the American aid programme known as the Marshall Plan. In 1947 the food protests in Germany persuaded the US Congress that European distress threatened to translate into support for communism and it voted in favour of Secretary of State George Marshall’s aid programme for the whole of western Europe.48 The aid began to arrive a year later, in April 1948. It gave the recipient countries access to scarce foreign exchange and was spent mainly on American foodstuffs, fuel and equipment. Although the Marshall Plan may not have been entirely responsible for European recovery, it certainly helped to provide a basis from which the European nations could generate their own economic momentum.49 In the area of food and agriculture, $3.192 billion were pumped into food, feed and fertilizers.50 This went some way towards finally eradicating post-war hunger and helped to regenerate farming, particularly livestock farming. For the first time in over a decade sufficient quantities of meat and fat were available to the German people. With the exception of Germany, Austria and Greece, European farming had regained its pre-war levels of production by 1949–50.51

  The Marshall Plan was as much a political and ideological tool as an economic one. A proportion of the money loaned to each European country had to be set aside to pay for a concerted propaganda exercise which sought to demonstrate the benefits of the American way of life to western Europeans. Exhibitions, films, pamphlets, radio shows and concerts all spread the message of the promise of a new society which re-cast citizens as consumers rather than as workers and producers. The French were treated to images of American workers who worked reduced hours but still had enough money to spend in well-stocked supermarkets, and whiled away their leisure time in their comfortable homes, equipped with refrigerators, washing machines and televisions. Mass consumerism and capitalism were, the Marshall Plan propaganda promised, the means to the stable, comfortable life longed for by most survivors of the war.52

  This blatant exercise in spreading the American blueprint for prosperity and abundance to Europe was resisted by the British Labour government.53 In the exhibition ‘On Our Way’, which opened in London in 1949, the images were almost entirely of workers rather than consumers. One of the displays summed up the British government’s attitude. A blackboard propped outside a mock-up of a grocer’s shop carried a message warning that Marshall Aid would end in 1952 and when it did the British government would only be able to import food for which it could pay.54 Therefore British workers needed to see themselves as producers rather than consumers and continue to work hard to manufacture export goods. If Britain did not embrace the American ideology, its economic position was nevertheless shaped by its relationship with the United States. Britain’s austerity measures were a direct result of the ending of lend-lease and of the nation’s need to earn foreign exchange to buy imports of food and pay off its debt to the United States. This in turn shaped Britain’s new post-war relationship with its empire. Although Britain lost India in 1947 its relationship with its African colonies intensified as they were assigned the role of cash-crop producers to help clear the British debt.

  In the post-war world the United States used its unrivalled power to erode the trading sphere of the British empire and lever countries into a new international economic system oriented towards the needs of America.55 In Australia a distinct shift towards the United States had taken place. The terms of lend-lease, mutual aid arrangements, wartime trade agreements and recovery loans all meant that economically Australia was now less affiliated to Britain and more closely bound to America. Even before the war large American companies such as Coca-Cola, Johnson and Johnson and Heinz had established themselves in the country. Post-war, with the American determination to break down trade barriers, two-thirds of Australia’s imports came from the US.56 However, the relationship was not one of equals. Australia’s contribution to the Second World War meant that in the plans for a Third World War, which the western governments expected at some point in the 1950s, Australia was once more firmly cast in a supporting supply role. Britain’s war plan designated Australia as a ‘main support area’, which would supply western Europe and south Asia with wool, grain and other foodstuffs. The Americans expected the country to be able to provide food for 1 million US soldiers. Given that the Australian government was excluded from the NATO discussions where these decisions were made, it was a humiliating and frustrating position in which to be placed. It was agreed, however, that, in order to meet this projected demand, Australian agriculture would need to expand. When the Third World War failed to happen, Australia was left with an un-necessarily over-active agricultural sector and the problem of food surpluses.57

  In terms of agricultural development and food availability the post-war world divided into three. The first world consisted of the developed countries of North America, western Europe, the southern Dominions and Japan. In these countries the wartime advances in science which John Boyd Orr identified as the key to worldwide plenty enabled them to produce more food than ever with fewer people working on the land. In fact, they all ended up producing too much food. Their food surpluses were sent in the form of aid to the under-developed countries in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Pacific, which became known as the Third World. This view of under-developed countries as useful recipients for food surpluses reinforced a growing culture of dependency.58 In the 1960s the Third World experienced a green revolution of its own which enabled these countries to feed their rapidly expanding populations. However, protectionist policies within Europe and the United States created trade barriers which prevented the under-developed world from exporting enough of their agricultural produce to boost their economies or to branch out into more lucrative areas of trade.59 Meanwhile, the dependence on cash crops as exports made these countries particularly vulnerable to price fluctuations in the world market. South and east Asia and sub-Saharan Africa retained a large and undernourished peasantry, scraping a minimal living from the land.

  The second world of the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and China retreated into the closed world of communism. Stalin turned the Soviet Union into a superpower, despite the country’s run-down agricultural sector. In the Soviet Union the ‘average yield for most crops in the years 1949–53 was under what it had been in 1913’, and it took decades for Soviet farms to recover from the deprivations of the war.60 They were not aided by the influence of the charlatan scientist Trofim Lysenko. As director of the Institute of Genetics, Lysenko wielded sufficient political power to ensure that any scientist who challenged his scientific claims would suffer persecution. As a result his pseudo-scientific agricultural techniques were imposed on the collective farms, which continued to suffer from unrealistic sowing plans and ever-increasing food collection quotas.61 Lysenko succeeded in persuading Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, that the steppe lands could be made fertile. The project ended in a disastrous dust bowl.62 It was not until Lysenko was denounced during a political thaw in 1962 that Soviet farming was released from his noxious influence. While the west achieved prosperity, the east armed and industrialized at its peoples’ expense. The Soviet eastern bloc continued to be characterized by a lack of consumer goods, poor-quality food and shortages.

  Having won the civil war in 1949 the Chinese Communist Party was now ready to implement its land reform policies. Wary of provoking hostility from the peasantry during the war against Japan, the communists had softened their approach. Now that they were in power they pursued class warfare with vigour and during the land reform programme of 1949–50 one million ‘rich’ peasants were murdered. Then, in the 1950s, Mao decided to push China’s modernization forward with a vigorous programme for industrialization and agricultural reform. Ignoring the lesson of the disastrous famines caused by collectivization in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, huge communal farms were formed where the labourers ate in common dining halls. They were urged to eat their fill as China would soon be over
flowing with food. Minister of Agriculture Tan Zhenlin asked, ‘After all, what does Communism mean? … First, taking good food and not merely eating one’s fill. At each meal one enjoys a meat diet, eating chicken, pork, fish, eggs.’63 Instead, the application of poor farming techniques, disorganization, impossible food quotas and failed harvests led to famine and the death of around 30 million peasants.64

  THE RISE OF THE NEW CONSUMER

  It was only the western developed countries of the first world that achieved the wartime goal of freedom from want. In these countries a new consumer emerged. This was a profoundly democratic development. From some point in the mid-1950s virtually the entire population in developed countries could afford to eat as much as they wanted. The new post-war consumers ate plenty of the protective foods such as meat, milk, vegetables and fruit and they also ate an increasing quantity of processed and packaged foods. These new patterns of consumption rested upon a series of developments which arose out of the Second World War.

  The first precondition for the development of the new eating habits was the agricultural revolution which began in the United States during the war and spread to the rest of the developed world in the course of the 1950s. After 1945 heavy plant factories switched from making tanks to tractors and combine harvesters, munitions factories from making explosives to manufacturing chemical fertilizers.65 Higher farm incomes meant that farmers were now sufficiently capitalized to apply techniques which had been around since the 1930s, as well as innovations which developed out of research conducted during the war. The development of DDT as part of wartime research into nerve gas allowed farmers to protect cereals planted on newly ploughed grassland from wireworm, which before the war had defeated many farmers’ attempts to convert pasture to arable land. The chemical was used as a coating for the seeds before they were planted. By 1944 scientists had developed sixty-five approved pesticide products.66 Machines, artificial fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and selective plant and livestock breeding made an extraordinary impact on post-war agricultural productivity.67 By 1959 American farm production had grown by 60 per cent of the pre-war average. In 1963 one farm worker could feed thirty people, whereas in 1940 he had been able to feed only eleven.68

  In Europe between 1945 and 1965 agriculture underwent its own revolution in productivity. ‘Output grew more rapidly than in any twentieth-century period before or since.’69 Wheat yields in Britain rose by 75 per cent. By the 1980s grain production in Europe had outstripped population growth and the region became an exporter of grain for the first time since the Industrial Revolution.70 Dairy cows and chickens doubled the amount of milk and eggs produced. In the 1940s roast chicken was a luxury meal and the bird on the table had normally come to the end of its life as a layer of eggs. But in the 1950s a cross-breed of chicken types introduced a new large-breasted bird which matured quickly and was bred to be eaten. This transformed chicken into a cheap and widely available alternative to red meat.71 As a result of this agricultural revolution, food, and in particular the protective foods which had been beyond the economic grasp of the poorer sections of pre-war western societies, became plentiful and affordable. Vitamin-deficiency diseases became a thing of the past.

  This productivity revolution came at a price. In 1967 Tim Swift, the veterinary surgeon for a Suffolk village, recalled the long-since-vanished farm landscape of 1947 with great pasturelands dotted with cows. Each farmer had grown some corn, kept cows for milk, and pigs which produced meat with ‘four inches of fat on it’.72 Now the pastures were ploughed over and the cows ‘no longer graze under the sky. They will be in herring-boned sheds all their lives’.73 It was the same with the pigs. But what horrified him the most were the chickens. ‘They hardly bear thinking about … They are all deranged. Once you get such a fantastic number of birds together in one big room a kind of mass nervousness sets in … They eat each other … The only answer to this is de-beaking – taking off the top part of the beak … we have a new broiler house at the top of the village … the broilers are ready for the fried chicken trade in twelve weeks.’74

  In 1962 Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a study into the pernicious environmental impact of pesticides, in particular DDT. Her work prompted the growth of an environmental movement which has tried to ameliorate the negative impact which intensive farming has had upon the land. It is perhaps only now, when the post-war agricultural revolution appears to have run its course and technological innovations no longer hold out the hope of further increases in agricultural yields, that governments are beginning to acknowledge that while industrial agriculture produces cheap and plentiful food it also leads to the long-term destruction of the environment and the land upon which farming depends.75

  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.76 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.77 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.78

  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* casein and whey. Both these products are now widely used in processed foods.79 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.80 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.81

  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 househo
ld 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.82 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.83

  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.84 In Germany the post-war years of hunger were followed by a period of guzzling.85 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.86