Wartime Rationing Changed How America Ate for a Century. The Pandemic Will Do the Same.
BY THE THIRD week of March 2020, visiting the local grocery store had become a precarious undertaking. Part of it was the sheer strangeness of distanced shopping. I had become acutely aware of my physical distance from other people. Soon I noticed them eyeing me from behind their carts with a similar wariness.
In the produce section, I hovered a body length or two behind fellow shoppers, waiting for them to bag their bundles of bok choy, unsure how much buffer was considered polite. Nobody wanted to risk the skirmishes over the last rolls of toilet paper we’d seen in videos circulating online; purchasing small cabbages should never be an event that goes viral.
Things grew even stranger in the meat section, where paper signs affixed to refrigerated cases told customers they could have only a few pounds of ground beef and pork at a time. Likewise at the milk case. When I finally got to the canned beans section, it was picked clean; my neighbors had apparently decided legumes would get them through the biggest, weirdest public health crisis any of us had ever seen.
Across the country, the story was the same: Once-common food items became difficult to obtain. Grocery delivery services were suddenly impossible to book and rarely yielded a full order when they did arrive. Grocery stores shelves weren’t completely bare. But they were short on many items I’d come to expect would always be available.
The quantity limits and distancing rules were an inconvenience for office workers confined to work from home. For those already struggling with poverty and those who had abruptly found themselves unemployed, the situation was more dire.
For the first time in nearly a century, Americans across the income spectrum were dealing with widespread food shortages and uncertainty brought on by a crisis. Widespread fears and state-enforced lockdowns combined to shutter production facilities and break supply chains to an extent few had ever contemplated.
In response to those closures and the novel challenges they created, Americans changed the food they bought and the meals they ate in ways that are likely to echo for generations to come. As the virus spread and tens of millions of people were forced to stay inside, many of them turned to home cooking projects that would have been unimaginable—or at least unnecessary—just a few months earlier.
Yet as unusual as all this was, it also wasn’t entirely new. Just as pandemic lockdowns and COVID-driven shortages reshaped food culture in 2020, government rationing and food restrictions during World War I and World War II changed how Americans shopped, cooked, ate, and thought about their meals for a century after. For better or worse, the same is happening today.
