Book Review

Amy Bentley prefaces her study on rationing in World War II America with the following quote: "The destiny of nations depends on the manner wherein they take their food." A professor of nutrition and food studies, Bentley has a broader interest in the anthropology of eating beyond World War II. As she puts it, scholars need a deeper appreciation of "how profoundly food shapes who we are both as individuals and societies" (8). To her, food plays a central role in forming what she calls the politics of domesticity. Food not only reflects cultural practices but also plays the important function of mediating social relations. This is true, Bentley would argue, in all societies at all times. In the context of World War II, food became central. Bentley's basic argument stems from the proposition that World War II generated social and cultural chaos. She argues that in response to destabilizing racial and gender transformations on the home front the government needed to build unity and thus turned to propaganda to render a more stable orderly society. The preferred medium centered around images of food, particularly what Bentley calls the "icon of the ordered meal." At the centerpiece stood Norman Rockwell's famous Freedom from Want, which depicted a white middle-class family with the father at the head of the table, the mother serving the food, and the family enjoying a succulent Thanksgiving meal. This image, Bentley asserts, papered over disruptive wartime changes such as the decline in African-American domestic workers, male heads of households off at war, and white middle-class women in the factories. Bentley claims that by constructing a vision of order, stability, and abundance through the family dinner, the government helped to reinforce gender and racial hierarchies and maintain morale.	1
As Bentley shows, wartime agencies like the Office of Price Administration and the Committee on Food Habits aimed their propaganda specifically at women and also recruited their services in assuring the success of rationing. These agencies embraced the Wartime Homemaker as an important cog in the country's war machine. By appealing to her as the domestic counterpart to Rosie the Riveter, the government sought to imbue each meal preparation with patriotic symbolism. According to Bentley, "Every meal served was a political act" (31). These propaganda campaigns, Bentley argues, simultaneously invested women's roles with public utility while reasserting traditional gender roles. In addition, this image of the Wartime Homemaker as blond, white, and well-groomed also helped to reinforce a racial hierarchy. These messages, Bentley implies, translated into social practice. As she states, "Faced with social upheaval at home as a result of the war, many middle- and upper-class white Americans (consciously or unconsciously) used food and the serving of food as a way of maintaining hierarchies of gender and race" (82).	2
Bentley explores the relationship between food, government propaganda, and social construction more closely through an examination of wartime meat and sugar. Asserting the primacy of meat for American men on the home front, Bentley explains that "eating a juicy beefsteak and seeing it on the family dinner table reaffirmed one's masculinity" (110). More generally, the availability of red meat "symbolized that the United States was strong, virile, and abundant" (95). Essentially, she posits, "citizens felt well-fed if they could get red meat; without it, morale went down" (94), and thus it was essential to continue the domestic supply. Sugar, too, became important as women homemakers were asked to take up canning as a patriotic act. And, in addition to their real nutritional value, Bentley suggests that both sugar and meat served as "opiates . . . to keep the masses at bay" (111). Yet American women competed unsuccessfully with commercial consumers of sugar. As Bentley explains, the rendering of meat as masculine and sugar as feminine, what she calls the "male/meat-female/ sugar dichotomy" (88), influenced the relative importance and thus the availability of these different commodities.	3
Overall, Bentley challenges the historiographic trend toward seeing war as a watershed. To her, World War II was a profoundly conservative moment. She does acknowledge the social upheavals stemming from larger numbers of African-Americans in cities and industrial jobs and more women in the work place. But overall, she sees these changes as simply engendering a conservative backlash, the need to police former boundaries. Though she never quite makes clear the relationship between government programs and real social practice, Bentley seems to believe that rationing functioned to keep women in the kitchen. She concludes, "This was not the time to tinker with the social and political order, which rested partly on gendered assumptions about who was to assume the role of warrior and protector and who was to keep the home fires burning" (44).	4
But World War II transformed American society and law. The language on the ration books captures that nicely: "This is your Government's guarantee of your fair share of goods made scarce by war" (1). That claim signaled a dramatic development in the history of American state building. By her own evidence, the war programs led to real redistribution. That was not an accident nor just a necessity of war nor even solely a product of labor shortages and the resulting higher wages. Rather, the New Deal policymakers in charge of rationing and price control came to their job with a specific political economic vision that both predated the war and put a premium on equity. Moreover, many programs relied on women not simply because they were homemakers but also because the policymakers had a vision that sought to balance bureaucracy with grassroots participation. In her study, Bentley chose to focus little on state-making and law. As she notes, she prefers to examine the "cultural and symbolic dimensions of food in wartime" rather than "explore the bureaucratic operations of World War II government rationing programs" (1). But by not investigating what she calls the "traditional institutional way of recounting history," she misses out on some of the most exciting aspects of the story. Though she has produced a well-researched cultural analysis, she has a rather flat portrayal of politics. Indeed, the history of World War II is a significant moment for the way in which the growth of the state and the high politics that structured that expansion reshaped, and not simply refracted, everyday life. In the end, Bentley's politics of domesticity without the politics is like the trimmings without the turkey.	5
Meg Jacobs Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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