Forging Europe’s Foodways: The American Challenge

Abstract

The simple yearning for enough food, and the freedom to choose what tastes best: these were among people’s most fervent wishes in war-ravaged Europe. The inhabitants of Nazi-occupied countries—and eventually the Germans themselves—had been forced to adopt the Nazi austerity food regime’s poor diet: cereals, potatoes, and vegetables instead of animal products such as pork, beef, and mutton. Indeed, Europeans’ hope for peace was inseparable from their longing for more—and for better—food.¹ Of the two superpowers that emerged from the Second World War, only the United States possessed the capacity to provide food aid for easing the transition towards peace. In fact, it was during the Second World War that the United States began planning Europe’s food provisions to be made after the projected Allied victory.² The connection between food and peace was complex for the United States. The European need for food aid opened a channel for distributing American agricultural surpluses, a result of the postwar spike in agricultural productivity.³ The American government also responded to European food requirements as a means of shaping Europe’s postwar reconstruction process.⁴ To the United States, this meant much more than exporting surplus agricultural products. U.S. government officials strove to modernize European food chains—the processes by which food was grown and produced, sold, and eventually consumed.