“Conserve Food to Save Yourselves”: The Politics of Religion in World War I Food Conservation

The American food conservation campaign of World War I, intended to maximize the food exported to Allies and American troops in Europe, was ostensibly a secular, federal project. Yet Americans drew powerful associations between food conservation and religion throughout the war. Reformers equated self-discipline around food with moral, even spiritual, virtue. According to this logic, food aid was virtuous not just because it was a good thing to send food to hungry people abroad, but also, crucially, because giving up desired foods was a moral act in itself. Herbert Hoover, the head of the U.S. Food Administration, spoke for many people when he said that he hoped the war would divert Americans’ focus from peacetime materialism to life’s higher purposes. On the American home front, the pleasures of eating went out of fashion as views of self-sacrifice as a form of spiritual purification came in. 

The vocabulary of food saving was evangelical in tone: the gospel of the clean plate, the sins of waste and extravagance, the spirit of sacrifice and self-denial. Capitalizing on the spiritual implications of food conservation, food administrators actively enlisted the involvement of the clergy, sending circular letters to preachers, rabbis, and priests around the country asking – successfully, in thousands of cases – that they devote services to food conservation sermons. Moreover, in spite of the continued abundance of U.S. food supplies throughout the war, Americans from a variety of religions called on the federal government to establish a national fast day, modeled on religious fasts and undertaken as spiritual atonement as much as to save food for the world’s hungry. This paper will explore how Americans during World War I came to make bold associations between self-denial, a distrust of the pleasures of food, and views of the war as a spiritually purifying experience.