During WWII, as Canada struggled to provide its allies with food, nutritionists warned that malnutrition could derail the war effort. Posters admonished women and children to “Eat Right, Feel Right” because “Canada Needs You Strong” while cookbooks helped housewives become “housoldiers” through food rationing, menu substitutions, and household production.

Food Will Win the War explores the symbolic and material transformations that food and eating underwent during the war and the profound social, political, and cultural changes that took place in the 1940s. Through official food guides and policies, the state took unprecedented steps into the kitchens of the nation, transforming the way women cooked, what their families ate, and how people thought about food. Canadians, in turn, rallied around food and nutrition to articulate new visions of citizenship for their postwar future.

Ian Mosby is an award-winning historian of food and nutrition who was, alongside Evan Fraser, named one of the “53 Most Influential People in Canadian Food” by the Globe and Mail in 2016. His book Food Will Win the War: The Politics, Culture, and Science of Food on Canada’s Home Front was shortlisted for the 2016 Canada Prize and won the Canadian Historical Association's 2015 Book Prize. He is an assistant professor of history at Ryerson University in Toronto.
 

Ian Mosby's profile page

• Joint winner, Political History Group Book Prize, Canadian Historical Association

Both books [Mosby’s Food Will Win the War as well as well as A Small Price to Pay: Consumer Culture on the Canadian Home Front by Graham Broad, UBC Press 2013] are much needed additions to the historiography of Canada’s Second World War Experience. Too often have the daily lives of those on the home front been overlooked in favour of the stories of the men and women who marched away in khaki. Those who remained behind – 90 percent of Canadians – also had their worlds fundamentally transformed by war, as these books demonstrate. Specialists will certainly appreciate these works, but both are accessible and appealing to a general audience as well.

BC Studies