Ian Mosby.<i>Food Will Win the War: The Politics, Culture, and Science of Food on Canada’s Home Front</i>.

Ian Mosby’s Food Will Win the War: The Politics, Culture, and Science of Food on Canada’s Home Front is an important piece of historical scholarship in a number of categories, including histories of food and nutrition, gender, and Canadian history. Well written and thoroughly researched, Food Will Win the War is based on a wealth of archival sources that consist of federal, regional, and municipal documents, cookbooks, periodicals, and visual materials, all well-informed and supported by secondary sources. In his introduction, Mosby lays out the broadest of arguments, asserting “The government . . . set out to transform Canadians’ dietary habits through a range of both voluntary and coercive means” (5). Moreover, he notes, mobilization “not only led to very real changes in the way Canadians shopped for, cooked, and consumed food but also transformed the broader symbolism of food and eating” (5). Gender is central to Mosby’s analysis, given that women were primarily responsible for food procurement and preparation. “[T]he state mobilized women’s unpaid labour on a scale that has gone largely unrecognized by historians,” writes Mosby, “but also that food production, consumption, and service played an essential role in determining the boundaries of gendered notions of wartime citizenship” (8). Women took it upon themselves to perform food work, including providing meals at Red Cross canteens for servicemen and women, creating and shipping food packages for prisoners of war overseas, and participating in domestic food production and conservation by growing victory gardens and preserving fruits and vegetables. Government educational materials as well as popular culture created gendered assumptions about cooking and other wartime food-related responsibilities. Cultural mores were embedded into wartime programs and propaganda material: “What was being taught in most wartime nutrition classes and in wartime educational materials was not so much the science of nutrition,” explains Mosby, “but rather a particular idealized middle-class vision of domestic life and the progressive ideal of educated, scientific motherhood” (57–58).

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