by Krista Walters
University of Manitoba
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Ian Mosby, Food Will Win the War: The Politics, Culture, and Science of Food on Canada’s Home Front, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014, 284 pages. ISBN 9780774827621, $32.95 (paperback)
The Canadian historiography on the Second World War tends to focus on military operations, with few works of social history making much needed contributions. Ian Mosby makes a critical intervention into the field with his first book, Food Will Win the War: The Politics, Culture, and Science of Food on Canada’s Home Front, a history of the centrality of food and nutrition in Canada’s War effort at home. Mosby’s work contributes to the growing list of recently published work on the impact of the war’s nation-building and patriotism projects on postwar Canada, emphasizing women’s gendered experiences, prescriptively guided through their role as “housoldier” on the domestic battleground, by the emergent science of nutrition and its experts.
Mosby shows the multiple ways in which citizens and the state engaged engaged food to win the war. Whether saving bones and fat from cooking for munitions, filling Red Cross POW care packages, growing Victory Gardens in front yards and communal lots, or sharing recipes with tips on how to stretch ingredients on a tight budget, women, men, and children participated in doing their patriotic duty on the home front. Through exploring food as a useful window into the social history of family life on the home front, Mosby provides a history of nutrition, a science that developed dramatically during the Second World War and served as the basis for much government propaganda. He details nutrition education materials and the process of establishing nutrition as a science, with attention to specific experts in the field who worked to develop professional standards and national guidelines. This science focussed on food and rationing, and emphasized good eating for strong bodies based on quantifying and evaluating food and bodies to determine “nutritional status.” Mosby shows how a convincing national program was built on evidence from a few small regional studies that generated claims of widespread malnutrition, yet held sway with Canadians into the postwar period.
Mosby thus frames food—how it was grown, bought, prepared, shared, and eaten—as a site of patriotism and citizenship. He has successfully written, as intended, “first and foremost, a work of food history” (p. 10), and his emphasis on the importance of nutrition during the Second World War and the post-war decades makes a significant contribution to a small sub-field in which he is one of only a few Canadian historians. Consistent with the Canadian field of food history, one of the things Mosby does best here is write a gender history of Canadian families in the war, which he has achieved by looking at the home front and how families, especially women as wives and mothers, navigated new nutrition guidelines under wartime rations. Those interested in women’s and gender history will find this an important work, which avoids the expected narratives of men heading to the front while women entered the paid workforce, but shows how women participated in the war as a patriotic project more broadly. Food Will Win the War demonstrates that women took from prescriptive literature what worked for them, such as “exotic” and “thrifty” recipes from Chatelaine, and invited an increased state presence into their lives, participating in state programs like the Wartime Prices and Trade Board’s Consumer Branch, or monitoring and petitioning for greater price controls with groups like the Housewives Consumer Association. Women are regularly the focus of the book, and Mosby makes important distinctions between lived experiences and the prescriptive literature produced by nutrition experts. Quoting a woman who lived through the depression and the war, and who was critical of newspaper supplements that explained how housewives could maximize use and value of every ingredient, Mosby illustrates the experiential divide between the state and its citizens: “You’d think the idiots in their big offices in Toronto and Ottawa didn’t know about the Depression we just went through” (p. 148). Canadian women were therefore regularly united through their shared histories. His Chapter 4 discussion of wartime “Canadian” cuisine, looking at rationing recipes and community cookbooks compiled by women’s organizations, explores women’s expectations and experiences as opposed to those prescribed for them and their families by the state. Despite this, his goal of illuminating the experiences of “ordinary women” as consumers tends to be less about individual women’s experiences, and instead focusses on their communal involvement as “kitchen commandos” through volunteering in church, school, community, and consumer groups. A stronger study of gender history is found in Chapter 3, where Mosby shows how patriotism involved reconceived gender roles for men and women. He argues, for instance, that the government was reluctant to promote Victory Gardens, and only legitimized growing vegetables on front yards as a patriotic act when it was reframed as a husband’s patriotic duty. Because so many men were rejected from service due to malnutrition, redefining masculinity in terms of the new science of nutrition became powerful government propaganda.
Mosby concludes by considering the impact of wartime policies and practices on postwar era nutrition and social programs in an expanding welfare state. He looks at postwar social programs, such as the Family Allowance, arguing these were contested terrain on which opponents formed sides around nutrition-based debates. Moreover, as Mosby touches on in his final chapter, nutrition experts who visited First Nations communities and found starvation, used it as an opportunity to study and hone their new science, perpetuating a cycle that created hunger and malnutrition to begin with. Ultimately, then, much of the work done on the home front during the war was misapplied in the postwar years, as even when these types of “verifiable cases of malnutrition” were quantified, they served as opportunities for further testing instead of “evidence of the need for larger structural political and economic changes” (p. 202). Mosby does argue, though, that despite divisions amongst nutritionists and physicians, along with those following their divided camps, the nutrition standards developed as a wartime measure served as the basis for postwar dietary guidelines, including the current Canada’s Food Guide.
Perhaps because Mosby’s work takes a national approach, in his aim to present a “social and cultural history of everyday life on the Canadian home front” (p. 16), middle class Anglo-Canadians tend to serve as default representatives of the national citizenry. When he includes discussion of French-Canadians, or more recently immigrated eastern Europeans or Japanese-Canadians, these seem to be treated as separate and exceptional rather than as “everyday” experiences, effectively centreing the experiences of Anglo-Canadians. Another example of this is Mosby’s treatment of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people, dropped in for a few paragraphs in the middle of Chapter 1, and again at the end of Chapter 5, where there is a brief overview of the widely disseminated 2013 article detailing nutrition experiments on Manitoba residents, for which Mosby is known.1 In what should have been recognized and dealt with as a traumatic subject, Mosby might have more carefully considered the implications of exposing these dehumanizing studies in this way. They are clearly something different from the other examples of more benign prescriptive nutrition regulations, but are people’s wartime experiences in Canada no less than those of Anglo-Canadian mothers, which he neglects to make clear in his discussion.
In spite of a few shortcomings, by detailing experiences of war on the home front through food and nutrition, Mosby’s Food Will Win The War is a refreshing look at Canada’s history in the Second World War. Those interested in histories of food, health, and nutrition—the areas in which Mosby specializes—or in social histories of women, gender, and family would appreciate this book. It will also engage those looking for innovative approaches to histories of war, as Mosby offers a good example of how to write an accessible social and intellectual history that both expands on and challenges the field. Mosby provides an important and thorough history of nutrition in Canada that will serve as the foundation for forthcoming works.
We thank Clara Bachmann for assistance in preparing the online version of this article.
We thank S. Goldsborough for assistance in preparing the online version of this article.
Page revised: 15 April 2020
