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181 epilogue MORAL FOOD AND MODERN FOOD Be a Little Hungry!—Erie Herald, 1918 In the late 1910s, Americans sent soldiers abroad to fight in what many believed was actually a great war, one they hoped would forever vanquish a Prussian system of government that represented autocratic control by the few and the slavish submission of everyone else. In this morally electric context, an unprecedented foreign food aid project turned cooking and eating into intensely political activities on the American home front, and reformers ushered in a new era of scientific food by stressing the moral importance of approaching food rationally. Food reform generally and food aid specifically were quintessentially Progressive projects, bolstered by scienti fic expertise and by moralistic efforts to make daily life more rational. By looking at the modernization of American food, which took place at a time of national transformation and international crisis, this book has considered America’s transition to modernity, a process that continues to shape the nation and the world. Nowhere is this clearer than in the birth of international food aid itself , the firing line of the Progressive quest for rational food. The federal government gained extraordinary influence over eating habits and food production in the United States during World War I, as food administrators encouraged Americans to exercise self-discipline instead of relying on a formal rationing program. Yet such calls to arms from the government were only possible because a remarkable number of individual Americans at the same time were expressing the idea that when people disciplined themselves around food, prioritizing the needs of the state or of science or of the collective good over their personal desires, they demonstrated their 182 / Epilogue fitness for political citizenship itself. In conjunction with Progressive debates over the meaning of democracy, Americans in large numbers boldly associated the capacities for physical and political self-government. The fervency of patriotic food control helped fuel a quasi-religious asceticism that transcended the demands of the war itself, giving rise to an enduring brand of popular self-denial premised on physical and moral mastery of the self. Few Americans would have conserved food without a strong positive motivation to do so. European hunger became a tool of mass mobilization on the U.S. home front, with food administrators claiming that Americans’ food choices would decide the fates of Allied civilians and the course of the war itself. It was a good argument, and Americans voluntarily conserved food so that people elsewhere might eat with a level of commitment they would never equal again. For many Americans, daily food conservation was the most direct and meaningful way they experienced the war, and it inspired an elevated vision of America’s place in the world. The focus on needy Europeans underlined American abundance and power, both widening Americans’ consciousness of the world outside their borders and deepening their confidence in the role they might play in it. In part because of the resounding success of the World War I program, food aid would become a hallmark of U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century, both as a demonstration of American abundance and as a powerful strategic tool. The war also made basic nutrition literacy a distinguishing feature of American middle-class identity. A decade after the war, in the late 1920s, the leading home economist Christine Frederick looked back at the recent leaps in popular nutrition knowledge and gave the war much of the credit. Wartime nutrition education had pushed Americans’ knowledge forward by ten or even twenty years, she estimated, noting that the wartime appeal to save butter and sugar “was the first time that many a housewife knew that there were distinctions between fats or sugars, or that eating a potato was not the same thing as eating a tomato.” After the war, nutrition education had continued through public schools, newspapers, advertisements, and food exhibits, she noted, and it had become hard to find any women’s magazine that did not carry “page after page of material and articles on foods.” The average reader might still not understand just how vitamins worked, but she understood that her family needed them, and she went out of her way to buy foods like oranges, spinach, bran, and liver. Frederick knew that many of the war’s lessons had been forgotten, and she smiled that a 1920s housewife was “no longer interested in making an [3.147.103.8] Project MUSE (2024-04-19...

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