Mac & cheese and wartime rationing

 

An interesting article in the Smithsonian Magazine reveals how one of America's favorite processed foods, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, came to be - and why it became so popular, so quickly.

Boxed macaroni and cheese was one outcome of the quest for ways to keep cheese longer. Some cheese gets better as it ages—a well-aged cheddar is one of life’s delights—but once most cheeses hit their prime, they tend to quickly go bad. Before household refrigeration became common, many retailers wouldn’t even stock cheese in the summer because it spoiled so quickly.

Processed cheese solved this age-old problem.

Credit for inventing processed cheese should go to a pair of Swiss food chemists named Walter Gerber and Fritz Stettler who, in 1913, were looking for a way to improve the shelf life of Emmenthaler cheese using sodium citrate. When they heated up the treated cheese, they noticed it melted better as well. But Chicago cheese salesman James L. Kraft was awarded the first patent for processed cheese in 1916.

Kraft understood the spoilage problem and had tried various solutions to it. He tried putting it tin foil packages, sealing it in jars, even canning it. But none of these solutions caught on with the public.

He eventually realized that the same bacteria that made cheese age nicely was also the bacteria that ultimately caused it to go bad. So he took some cheddar cheese scraps, heated them to kill the bacteria, ground them up with some sodium phosphate as an emulsifier and voila—Kraft processed cheese was born.

These early processed cheeses were similar to the processed American cheese slices we see in the stores today, though wrapping slices individually didn’t happen for another 40 years. Kraft’s first big customer was the U.S. Army, which bought more than 6 million pounds of the stuff to feed soldiers in World War I. A number of variations appeared in the following years, including Velveeta and Cheez Whiz.

The product was a hit, but Kraft wanted to find more ways to sell processed cheese, and eventually came up with the idea to make a powdered base. The packet in the box of macaroni and cheese is essentially a cheese sauce that has been partially defatted and dehydrated. When you make it, you’re adding back the fat and the liquid when you mix in the milk and butter.

In 1937, Kraft debuted its boxed macaroni and cheese, which it sold for 19 cents and contained four servings. Its slogan was “make a meal for four in nine minutes,” and the product got a big lift with American consumers during World War II because you could get two boxes and spend only one ration point. With meat hard to come by, the cheap main dish substitute was a hit.

There's more at the link.

Rationing was a fact of life for my parents in Britain during World War II.  It had a dramatic impact on overall health;  my mother used to say that she got sick more often during the war than at any other time in her life, because nutrition deficits meant that people were more at risk of infection.  On the other hand, overall health of the population improved, because what food was available was carefully balanced from a nutritional point of view.  People got thinner from eating less food, but at least they were the "right" foods.  Butcher shops used to supplement the (very) meager rations (4 oz. of bacon and/or ham per week, for example) with "urban rabbit" (cats - if you wanted real rabbit, you had to ask for the body with the head attached, which showed what it was) or "mystery meat" (usually horse, sometimes even dog meat).  If you were hungry, you learned not to ask too many questions.  Kraft mac & cheese wasn't on the menu in Britain at that time, but I guess in America it stretched scarce "meat points" a lot further than they'd otherwise have gone.

Mom said that American servicemen arriving in England cut a swath through local women simply by bringing American food out of the camp with them.  A canned ham, or even a can of Spam, was an unheard-of luxury in England during the war, and canned chicken or turkey was unknown.  GI's could get them easily enough from their camp kitchens, or have family and friends in the USA send them over (nylon stockings, too, also very hard to find in Britain at the time).  She says GI's made ruthless use of the bounty they could offer.  If a woman wouldn't "put out", there were plenty of others that would in exchange for food and stockings they couldn't get any other way.

After the war, my parents emigrated to South Africa.  Mom used to tell us how she broke down in tears when they arrived (by ship) in Cape Town in late 1945, and were taken to the hotel where a room had been reserved for them.  On the table in the room was a basket of fruit, courtesy of the management, to welcome returning service personnel and their families - but Mom hadn't seen that much fresh fruit for six years.  Apples, oranges, bananas . . . she burst into tears at the sight.  She said she cried for three days, walking around the shops, to see clothing, food and every other desirable thing unrationed and freely available to anyone with the money to buy it.  Meals in the hotel dining room featured as much meat as anyone wanted, carved off roasts laid out ready on a big sideboard - pork, mutton, beef and a few other things as well.  She said it was like a whole new and very different world after the barrenness and lack of choice of wartime rationing.

I guess we've had it easy by comparison.

Peter