World War II and the Quest for Time-Insensitive Foods

Abstract

When one walks around the local supermarket, one is often struck by the proportion of highly processed foods, or what some refer to as “the middle of the store.” Yet to the military in the 1940s and 1950s, these same foods represented the apogee of scientific progress—the creation of time-insensitive foods suitable for the rigors of military combat. This article explores the social and technical development of a system for producing such things for the military in World War II, including the collaborations between the military, American food firms, and university scientists. While at the beginning of the war, military and civilian food systems were quite different, by the early 1950s the two systems had effectively merged. Thanks to the supercharged food research agenda of this period, focused on achieving maximum time insensitivity in military foods, Americans can now quite easily avoid eating time-sensitive foods entirely. Here I will explore the professional networks that made this possible in the mid-1940s, as well as the challenges of standardizing something as alive as fresh food.