Nourishing Survival: Food During WWII

World War II is often described as a clash of civilizations, but like all international conflicts, it was also a war of resources. Combatants competed to sustain soldiers overseas and across borders and to maintain morale and train troops at home. Attitudes toward the enemy differed among the major players in the war. While the Allies mostly provided prisoners of war with decent, if second-class, fare, starvation was used as a military tactic by the Axis. Civilians and POWs suffered the consequences.

This exhibition explores the effect the war had on individuals relationships with the production and distribution of food. It touches on topics such as the role of propaganda on the home front in conserving resources for those on the war front, the ingeniuty of individuals who came up with recipes and grew Victory Gardens in an attempt to offset this lack of resources, and how talking about recipes and food in the concentration camps helped to sustain victims of the Holocaust.

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