Here’s another story from the Cornell University Archives. Faculty at the NY State College of Home Economics worked closely with the federal Food Administration to develop and manage food rationing during the First World War.
Home Economists taught people how to use underutilized foods, but in calling on citizens to “do their fair share” in rationing, they inadvertently turned America’s housewives into an army of informants. Mrs Devereux, of New York City, complained that her neighbors were too fat and didn’t deserve ration cards: “The over-heavy fed person (and he is numerous) could be sharply reduced in quantity and compelled to live on his own flesh, until he is in a normal condition.”
Another woman, writing from Florida, alleged that German agents were under orders “to buy and eat and hoard all the wheat they possibly can.” The letters offer a worrying vision of self-radicalization. Women (and a few men) suggested all sorts of inventive ways to spy on, shame, cajole, and punish their neighbors for not rationing food effectively. Letters started to arrive within a few weeks of the declaration of war in April 1917.
(box 17, folder 41, NY State College of Home Economics records, Cornell University Archive)
Jonathan Robins 