University of British Columbia Press
Release Date: 5/21/2014
During the Second World War, as Canada struggled to provide its allies with food, public health officials warned that malnutrition could derail the war effort. In response, the state asked citizens to put their diets on a war footing through food rationing, menu substitutions, and household production. Posters asked women and children to "Eat Right, Feel Right" because "Canada Needs You Strong" while cookbooks helped ordinary housewives become "housoldiers."
Food Will Win the War explores both the symbolic and material transformations that food and eating underwent on the home front and the profound social, political, and cultural changes that took place in Canada during the 1940s. Through the development of nutritional policies and official food rules and guides, the state took unprecedented steps into the kitchens of the nation, transforming the way women shopped and cooked, what their families ate, and how people thought about food. Canadians, in turn, rallied around food and nutrition to articulate different visions of citizenship.
By focusing not only on the production, consumption, distribution, and regulation of food but also on its symbolic and cultural meaning, this incisive account of the formative years of nutrition in Canada links the gendered politics of home life to the wartime policies of the state.