![]() The ice-cream maker William Dreyer helped further this sentiment in 1929 when he marketed Rocky Road as a culinary metaphor aimed at helping people cope with the crash of the stock market. By the end of the decade, Americans were consuming more than a million gallons of ice cream per day-and, crucially, associating it with the comfort and diversion formerly assigned to alcohol. When the 18th Amendment outlawed the sale of spirits in 1920, many early American breweries, including Yuengling and Anheuser-Busch, turned to soda and ice cream to stay afloat. That stance would change drastically during the next two decades, however-owing partially to the unlikely contributions of Prohibition and the Great Depression. Instead of bolstering ice cream production, Hoover’s Food Administration ordered a reduction of manufacturing domestically-ruling in the summer of 1918 that “ice cream is no longer considered so essential as to justify the free use of sugar in its manufacture.” There was hardly any sugar left for America, let alone for allies in France and England-and the promotion of ice cream as a wartime cure-all wasn’t helping. Worse, Hoover had downplayed the scarcity of domestic sugar supplies, hoping to avoid a panic. The ice-cream industry didn’t have much lobbying power. It clearly is the duty of the Surgeon General or some other officer to demand that a supply be forthcoming. But what of our wounded and sick boys in France? Are they to lie in bed wishing for a dish of good old American ice cream? They are up to the present, for ice cream and ices are taboo in France. In this country every medical hospital uses ice cream as a food and doctors would not know how to do without it. ![]() An editorial in the May 1918 issue of The Ice Cream Review, a monthly trade magazine, spooned out sharp criticism for the scant availability of ice cream overseas: “If English medical men knew what ours do every hospital would keep ice cream on hand for patients.” It cried for Washington to intervene by subsidizing Allied ice-cream factories throughout Europe: The crew abandoned ship-but not before breaking into the freezer and eating all the ice cream.īut the ice-cream industry, still in its infancy, demanded even more for the boys overseas: not just calories, but comfort. The result was a rapid tripling of food exports, yielding more than 18 million tons of food staples for the war effort in America’s first full year of war alone. He succeeded on the platform that “food will win the war,” persuading American households to “Hooverize” meals by sacrificing wheat, sugar, meat, and fat (the origin of Meatless Mondays and Wheatless Wednesdays). ![]() ![]() During the First World War, this was the job of Herbert Hoover, the first administrator and wartime consigliere of the U.S. Ice cream in fact played a significant role in the nation’s wartime efforts-and would be used for support in the military-industrial complex for decades.īefore World War II, the military’s food concerns were largely relegated to ensuring that soldiers consumed enough calories to march (and that civilians and refugees consumed enough to endure). One thing it does get right, though, is the notion of ice cream “booming” as America’s secret weapon during the war. The dialogue includes racial epithets and the animated Japanese soldiers are depicted as yellow-faced. There’s a lot wrong with this infamous cartoon. Marooned in the Pacific under Japanese attack, Bugs commandeers an ice-cream truck and begins handing out “Good Rumor” bars, which turn out to be chocolate-covered grenades. cartoon euphemized World War II through Bugs Bunny and ice cream.
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