Food Will Win the War: The Politics, Culture, and Science of Food on Canada’s Home Front by Ian Mosby (review)

In Food Will Win the War Ian Mosby argues that during the Second World War, food and nutrition became primary sites where ideals of citizenship, viewed in terms of gender, class, and ethnicity, were confirmed and contested on a national scale. Food, he argues, “created a space for imagining and attempting to enact a different politics and culture of food and nutrition” (211). The book was cowinner of the Canadian Historical Association’s 2015 political history group book prize.

Mosby’s meticulously researched food history moves chronologically through the war and into the postwar period, focusing on the home front. He begins with the political and scientific response to the epidemic of Canadians being rejected for military service due to poor health, mainly based on malnutrition. Mosby next discusses the impact of national food rationing and the new—and increased—nutritional standards. Families found the rationing program to be a positive measure in that it provided a feeling of solidarity with the war effort and a greater sense of equality following the Great Depression. Mosby ends with a discussion of the nation’s postwar nutrition studies—an ongoing debate between education and poverty as fundamental causes for malnutrition in Canadian families—and their overall impacts and failures.

There were two particularly fascinating discussions in Mosby’s book. First, he analyzes the great amounts of unpaid labor, largely of women “housoldiers,” involved in assisting allied war efforts through food production and preparation. Later in the work, Mosby describes a disturbing episode in which the dramatic effects of hunger on First Nations, Metis, and Inuit communities were studied, rather than relieved with additional rations, by nutrition experts as a way to advance their scientific research during the early postwar years.

While the book focuses on urban Canadian food and nutrition surveys and samples, Great Plains Quarterly readers will benefit from the interest in agriculture and rural communities that permeates the work. Mosby, in fact, enumerates how necessary Canada’s agricultural Plains were to the allied forces. For example, Britain obtained 94 percent of its wheat from Canada in 1941 (212n). Food may not have won the war, he argues, but it made a significant impact on Canada’s experience on the home front. Mosby’s book is an engrossing study of food and nutrition in Canada during World War II, and it should find a ready audience with students of twentieth-century Canada, agriculture, and food studies.