‘Housoldiers’ helped cook up victory over Nazis

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When it came to winning the Second World War, the Allies needed all the weaponry they could muster: rifles, artillery, tanks, ships, planes.

And bread.

Food’s role in fuelling the fighting is often overlooked by historians – but not McMaster’s Ian Mosby.

The Wilson Fellow and food historian’s book “Food Will Win the War” tells the story of the transformation that food and eating underwent on the Canadian home front in the 1940s.

During this time, public health officials warned that malnutrition could derail the war effort, prompting the government to ask citizens to ration food and grow their own produce.

Posters asked women and children to “Eat Right, Feel Right” because “Canada Needs You Strong,” while cookbooks helped ordinary housewives become “housoldiers.”

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.

The book has been nominated for a $2,500 Canada Prize in Humanities, which recognizes the best scholarly books that have received funding from the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program.

The winning books make an exceptional contribution to scholarship, are engagingly written and enrich the social, cultural and intellectual life of Canada.

Past Wilson Fellow Jennifer Bonnell is also nominated, for her book “Reclaiming the Don: An Environmental History of Toronto’s Don River Valley.”

The winners will be announced on April 11 and celebrated at the 2016 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

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