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

Ian Mosby's first monograph, Food Will Win the War, is a carefully researched study of one small part of Canada's Second World War experience. It is also a wide-ranging synthesis of the ways in which nutrition science, food, and Canadians' relationships to food helped transform, and were transformed by, the decade of the 1940s. The book is prefaced with two lengthy quotations about the significance of food in human history – a gentle but firm assertion on Mosby's part that food is both vital and special and is deeply entwined with ethnic and national cultures, family and community life, memory, and emotion. These themes are elaborated upon in the introduction and buttressed by a helpful review of the interdisciplinary literature in this rapidly growing field. One suspects that Mosby may have had to justify his interest in food history many times over the course of researching and writing the dissertation upon which his book is based. Any lingering skepticism about its legitimacy is unwarranted. The Political History Group of the Canadian Historical Association awarded Food Will Win the War its 2015 prize, and Mosby's highly publicized research into nutrition experiments on Aboriginal students in the residential school system (a subject that first appeared in this book) earned him a spot as one of the leading thinkers about Canadian food in the Globe and Mail's "Food 53" of Summer 2016.

The acclaim is well deserved. Food Will Win the War ambitiously tackles the politics, culture, and science of food and nutrition during the Second World War. This translates into five central chapters organized in a combined chronological–thematic structure. Mosby introduces the framework of nutrition science and professional ambition that shaped wartime society with respect to food in the first chapter, deals with that wartime food culture in three thematic chapters, then follows the wartime framework into the early postwar era of welfare state construction in the fifth chapter. The structure works well as a complete book, but individual chapters would also lend themselves well to course reading lists in gender, wartime, health, or food history courses.

The first and fifth chapters are in some ways a matched pair since both focus on nutrition experts and their understandings of how healthy Canadians were in the late 1930s and 1940s, particularly with respect to a perceived (and then disputed) malnutrition crisis in the Canadian population. These two chapters will be of the greatest interest to health historians because they trace familiar themes. The realms of nutrition research and public policy, it turns out, are rife with examples of medicalization and normalization, tensions between educational approaches and socio-economic interventions where public health is concerned, questions of individual versus social responsibility for less-than-perfect health, and the drive for professionalization. Without explicitly labelling his study as health history, Mosby has made a valuable contribution to the field, particularly in his unpacking of the assumptions (scientific, economic, and ethno-cultural) behind the creation of Canada's Official Food Rules in 1942 and their lingering traces in the more familiar Canada's Food Guide of today.

Sandwiched between these chapters, focusing on science and public policy, are three chapters that take a close look at food in the war years themselves (1939–45). Mosby's exploration of coupon rationing, price controls, consumer advocacy groups, Victory Gardens, fats and bones salvage, food-related propaganda, wartime recipes and cookbooks, prisoner of war food parcel packing, the Jam for Britain campaign, and servicemen's canteens all bring these wartime standbys vividly to life. Each offers fresh evidence of the highly gendered ways in which Canadians were urged to fight the war (women were celebrated as "kitchen commandos" and "housoldiers," for instance) as well as of the ways women manipulated and extended these notions of patriotic citizenship into forms that suited their own interests and concerns. These chapters...