Sugar and Snails: Consumption, Rationing and the Gendered Perception of Wartime Food Deprivation* Amy L

ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH Labovitz School of Business & Economics, University of Minnesota Duluth, 11 E. Superior Street, Suite 210, Duluth, MN 55802 Sugar and Snails: Consumption, Rationing and the Gendered Perception of Wartime Food Deprivation* Amy L. Bentley, University of Pennsylvania [to cite]: Amy L. Bentley (1991) ,"Sugar and Snails: Consumption, Rationing and the Gendered Perception of Wartime Food Deprivation*", in GCB - Gender and Consumer Behavior Volume 1, eds. Dr. Janeen Arnold Costa, Salt Lake City, UT : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 209-222. [url]: http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/15559/gender/v01/GCB-01 [copyright notice]: This work is copyrighted by The Association for Consumer Research. For permission to copy or use this work in whole or in part, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at http://www.copyright.com/. Sugar and Snails: Consumption, Rationing and the Gendered Perception of Wartime Food Deprivation* Amy L. Bentley, University of Pennsylvania From our earliest moments to our last, humans preparation and consumption of highly valued depend on food to sustain life. But food is much foods. To take this exploration to another level, I more than ingesting nutrients for biological will examine how the rationing of symbolically survival. Because all peoples must acquire, important--and symbolically-Iaden--foods was prepare, and consume food--requiring from the experienced and felt along gender lines. I want to majority most of their time and energy--these take a provocative leap by suggesting that a useful activities over time have become intimately woven way to consider wartime rationing and the into societies' cultural practices and beliefs. Food differing wartime experiences of American men helps to designate gender and class, it plays a and women is to study the official rationing of the significant role in social relationships, it is a highly two most highly valued foods, red meat and sugar. symbolic element in religious and magical rites, By looking at the ways in which these foods have and it aids in developing and maintaining cultures' been historically laden with gendered identities. Thus the consumption of food is an "meanings"--redmeat as quintessentially male, and extraordinarily social activity fraught with complex sugar as female--and then by examining the and shifting layers of meaning. In fact, cultural federal government's policies toward the rationing foodways, one of the earliest formed layers of of these foods, the wartime publicity surrounding cuIture, are usually the last to erode.1 this rationing program, and different individuals' experiences of this rationing, we can get, I think, a During the Second World War food shortages in highly original and important insight into how North America were nowhere nearly as acute as Americans experienced the war, and experienced those in Europe or Asia--a fact United States it differently, according to gender. citizens realized- -but rationing and shortages, for some the only tangible indications of the terrible There is some evidence that men ate more meat war being fought overseas, still altered people's and women consumed more sugar during the war; lives. For those with insufficient inconles, but firmly establishing this phenomenon is not my rationing had little effect, except perhaps to primary intention here. I am more interested in heighten what was already an acute realization of exploring the symbolic and cultural associations their lack of resources for food.2 But for which exist in American society regarding gender, Americans with adequate incomes, food rationing red meat, and sugar. As a cultural historian, I upset their daily patterns and habits of eating, draw from anthropology and cultural studies to from their morning coffee to their traditional explore the associations between gender and meat Thanksgiving dinners. This wartime disruption of and sugar to suggest that at a symbolic level the food habits and rituals decreased the amount of rationing of and deprivation of meat and sugar individual control over these seemingly small but carries significant weight as a metaphor for significant matters of life. For many Americans, wartime Americans' experiences. My ideas are choosing between a steak or chops for dinner was meant to be exploratory, suggestive and evidence of having "made it," and the restriction of provocative. I want to try to identify how the this choice encroached on an important arena for "language"of food functioned to reinforce social control they had over their lives. roles and the social expectations, with their accompanying expectations about power and To learn more about what food rationing meant authority, of men and women during the war. to Americans during World War II it is illuminating to explore the symbolic importance of Gender and food food in general. I am especially interested in exploring the psychological nleanings of being In part because of the early division of labor deprived of important rituals surrounding the according to sex, in many cultures certain foods 209 _......_------------------- have become svmbolically linked and hence using other foods, especially sugar, to make up culturally associated with one sex: most commonly the caloric differences. Even with rising industrial meat with n1en, and "non-meats"with women, wages that increases the amount of money that especially grains, vegetables and sugars. In can be spent on food these patterns tend to hold. Eastern thought, yin and yang associate meat with Mintz argues that "Everybody eats more sugar, the masculine yin and vegetables with the but women and children eat relatively n10re than feminine yang while as children in our own adult men; everybody gets some meat, but adult Westernized culture we learn that little boys are men get disproportionately more than women and made of "snails and puppydog tails" while little children.,,5 girls are made of "sugar and spice and everything nice." Numerous anthropologists have speculated Of course, this "hierarchy of meat distribution" about these cultural associations and, from both exists not only by sex, but by race and class as mentalist and _materialist orientations, have well. Meat products like pigs feet, ham hocks, documented strong cuI tural identifications chitterlings, chicken backs and giblets which are between women and sugar, and men and meat. associated with soul food, the African- American Noted anthropologist Sidney Mintz, for instance, cuisine that evolved under slavery, have been in his research found: usually historically regarded as inedible or "throw-aways,"and in fact were the leftovers that One (male) observer after another displays the white slave-owners discarded.6 Further, it has curious expectation that women will like sweet been well-documented for centuries that wealthier foods to achieve otherwise unattainable objectives; classes consume much larger quantities of meat and that sweet things are, in both literal and than do the poor.? figurative senses, more the domain of women than of men. Of course these frequent references are A Gallup poll taken in January 1945--perhaps the interesting in their own right: that there may be leanest time for Americans during the war--asked: links between women and sweet tastes is a "What one product that is now rationed do you research problem in itself.3 find it hardest to cut down on or get along without?"The top two items people mentioned Conversely, in Victorian An1erica women had a were sugar and meat: Twenty percent listed sugar strong, cuiturally predicated aversion to meat, an as being the hardest to do without and nineteen aversion that was powerfully reinforced by strong percent chose meat. What is particularly societal norms concerning femininity. For interesting is that the pollsters recorded that more Victorian women and girls (whose delicate women mentioned sugar than men, and a greater digestive systen1s, it was believed, could only proportion of men mentioned meat. At least in process softer, blander and sweeter foods) red this limited example, the gender associations of meat was especially troublesome; if females ate sugar and women and men and meat held true meat at all it was in small amounts, and it was when it came to food preferences.8 What these cooked until overdone. As Joan Jacobs Bromberg actual preferences mean is unknown, but they relates, "The flesh of animals was considered a raise interesting questions. If the poll is correct, heat-producing food...that stimulated...sexual why did women miss sugar more than men and development and activity [and] was linked to men miss meat more than women? I would adolescent insanity and nymphomania." Thus for suggest women and men missed their respective Victorian America, women's consumption of meat foods for different reasons. In the case of women, caused "great moral anxiety.,,4 I think the strong sense of deprivation was based in a highly symbolically important domestic In addition, there is considerable evidence that in activity that was much curtailed by wartin1e most societies, men eat more meat than do rationing--home baking. Women who baked at women, and women consume more sugar. home used sugar as a primary ingredient; Anthropological studies of both non-industrial receiving important recognition from their families societies and of working-class families in for this "special"contribution to the family diet. western-industrial societies document that in They also received deep personal satisfaction for households with limited resources a large portion providing their families with home-baked goods, of the family's meat/protein supply goes to the and also perhaps because baking was for them a father, while the women and children go without, pleasurable activity. Men, who did not bake nearly 210 as much, did not notice sugar "the ingredient" supplies of meat to keep citizens on the missing as much as they did the baked items homefront mentally as well as physically strong (which were also available from commercial and healthy enough to win the war.

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