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Eating for victory is a cultural history of Americans' eating patterns and attitudes toward food during the 1940s, as World War II disrupted normal life and wartime exigencies prompted the US government to institute rationing policies. Bentley argues that during the war years, most Americans were able to eat better quality food -- and in greater quantities -- than during the Depression. Still, she maintains, the Roosevelt administration's unprecedented and controversial wartime decision to ration food was a defensible, ethical response to massive food production and distribution needs from 1942 to 1945. As her first chapter title, "Rationing is Good Democracy," implies, the wartime commitment of American leaders to send as much as fifty per cent of foodstuffs abroad to the military and the Allies required unusual measures to insure that citizens on the home front would get their fair share.
The arm of the federal government responsible for rationing during World War II was the Office of Price Administration (OPA). Gradually, this agency implemented the rationing of tires, gasoline, and shoes, as well as sugar, coffee, butter, canned goods, and red meat. Bentley presents the OPA in a positive light, noting that it did its work well enough to ensure that rationing served its intended purpose of allocating limited resources. Despite grumbling, most Americans were supportive of the OPA's work.
This is a well-researched history, with major documentation drawn from the National Archives and a special focus on rationing in the city of Baltimore, Maryland. Bentley's primary interest has less to do with the bureaucratic aspects of rationing than cultural responses to wartime changes in food production and allocation, consumerism, gender division of labour in food...