The Specialists

Last week I mentioned the rationing that took place during WWII. It’s difficult for most people of my generation to imagine that kind of scarcity. I’m too young to even remember the gasoline shortages of the 70s, and my ample gut is proof that I’ve never gone hungry. But it was a different world on the WWII home front, and people had to find creative ways to make ends meet.

Since food was rationed, the government encouraged people to plant “victory gardens” to supplement their food supplies. It was estimated that twenty million gardens were planted during the war, and they provided 40% of the nation’s produce.

Scrap drives were a common way to collect scrap metal, which was used to manufacture planes, tanks, weapons, and ammunition. People even gave up “non-essential” components of their cars, such as the bumpers (!), for programs called “bumper crops”. (Apparently the only abundant thing during the war was clever wordplay.) The scrap drives served a dual purpose: in addition to shoring up supplies of raw materials, they improved peoples’ morale by allowing them to feel like they were contributing to the war effort. This was not an accident; the drives were a sort of interactive propaganda.

My favorite example of the way that people coped with the rationing is leg makeup. Nylon stockings were taken off the market just a few months after they had been introduced. The nylon was needed to make parachutes. Resourceful ladies used leg makeup to shade their legs, giving the impression of stockings. (This was not an entirely new practice. During the first World War, when silk stockings were in short supply, women would draw a line up the back of their legs with an eyeliner pencil, to simulate the seam.)

We’re resourceful people. It’s pretty unlikely that we’ll be faced with the kind of shortages and rationing that existed during WWII, but if we were, I’m sure we’d find clever ways to get by. (Just in case, I’m stocking up on L’eggs.)

Shawn