Feeding the hungry allies: Canadian food and agriculture during the Second World War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Food is a vital component of modern warfare and during the Second World War Canada used its agricultural capacity to help feed the Allied cause. State direction and the application of new regulatory protocols led to increased production and modified food habits. Canada's food exports increased and farm incomes climbed. Nutritional health was maintained, while economic controls enacted by the Wartime Prices and Trade Board (WPTB) kept Canadian food prices from soaring. The nation's military contributions overshadowed this portion of the Canadian war effort, but food production proved to be a major theme throughout the war and into the peace. Still, feeding the hungry allies was not a painless process. This dissertation examines how the main actors within Canada's food system responded to the exigencies of war in relation to the state policies that sought to maximize the amount of food available. Farmers, hampered by a significantly depleted labour force and lower commodity prices, had to adjust to meet war needs. The war fostered the development of the modern farm lobby in Canada, as the Canadian Federation of Agriculture emerged as a strong campaigner for the nation's farm interests. Consumers enjoyed stable prices but reduced supplies, and experienced a variety of consumption restrictions, including rationing. Called upon to uphold the rules set out by the WPTB, they were enjoined to re-conceptualize food as a communal 'weapon of war' and thus to tailor their eating habits to fit 'patriotic' standards. The majority accepted these codes of behaviour, but obedience co-existed alongside activities such as panic buying, hoarding, and patronizing the black market. This study argues that while Canadians largely accepted and supported wartime food policies, they were also willing to demonstrate their unhappiness with moves that seemed to favour one set of interests over theirs. For the state, navigating this minefield of contending factions was necessary to ensure that Canada's bigger wartime objectives could be realized.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".