Book Review

Canada and the United States

As World War II reached its fiftieth anniversaries during the past decade, historians produced a flood of scholarship on the domestic face of war, examining racial and ethnic groups, children, business, sexuality, advertising and propaganda, film, civic obligation, and sacrifice. In her compelling study of food policy and behavior in the United States, Amy Bentley has drawn upon most of these works and voluminous government and other records to elucidate the meanings attached to how American government officials, business elites, and citizens managed the distribution and consumption of food in wartime.

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The book is organized around six elements of food activity, with Baltimore serving as the site for in-depth investigation. Bentley looks first at policy, examining Americans' wartime anxieties about food and government efforts to alleviate that worry, principally through price controls to limit inflation and rationing to ensure equitable distribution. Next she focuses on what she calls the "Wartime Homemaker," an ideal fashioned by the government and media to mobilize women's support for rationing. Bentley then dissects the content and ritual of the family meal, idealized in Norman Rockwell's "Freedom from Want" and promulgated in government propaganda that instructed Americans not only about nutrition but also about family, gender, and racial relationships.

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