Food Propaganda Posters: From War-Time Rations to Post-War Indulgences 🍔🥩🥧
Food propaganda posters of World Wars I and II rallied the public around wartime efforts, such as home gardening and rationing. But did they shape our post-war diets? Let's explore.
Garden-to-Freezer Revolution 🍡
Victory Gardens, immortalized in posters like these, epitomized wartime self-sufficiency. The advent of post-war technology led to a surge in frozen foods, replacing these gardens with ads for TV dinners.
Meat-Centered Diet 🥩🍖
Wartime posters urged citizens to explore meat alternatives. Post-war advances in farming made meat more accessible and led to a meat-centered diet.
Tin Culture 🍱
Canning, vital during the wars for preserving homegrown produce, transformed into a culture of pre-packaged canned foods.
Sugar Surge 🍨🍭🍬
Rationing sugar was a wartime staple, but in the 1950s, sugary foods and drinks exploded onto the scene, illustrated by soda pop advertisements.
While food propaganda posters influenced wartime diets, the post-war era saw a drastic shift towards convenience and indulgence, as mirrored in the advertising of the time.
I didn’t learn my grandfather’s birth name until I began researching the family many years after his death. I knew him as Walter A. Balling. He was born in Denmark in 1889 and named Valdemar Arnbjørn Griffenfeldt Dagobert Tordenskjod Balling. He came to the US at 21, and joined the US Army as soon as he could. He served for many years including in World War I.
A beautiful memorial page was established for him by Charlotte Raley McConaha, who lives the belief that no one should be forgotten.
In grateful memory of all who have served our country throughout our long history. Thank you.
This first image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail. Thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared – have appeared in Webb’s view for the first time. This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.