Out and About: Back to the National Archives

The National Archives is currently my go-to museum.  After going to the White House Garden Cookbook event, I decided to go back to see the "What's Cooking, Uncle Sam" exhibit...and I went back again to see "From the Vaults: Walt Disney, Food, & the Government Film."  The exihibit and its accompanying events do a great job of providing historical context for Americans' relationship with food, and outlining the huge impact the government has had on what we eat.

The exhibit examines the impact of goverment on farms, factories, the kitchen, and the table.  For well over 100 years, the government has impacted almost everything Americans have eaten, from what crops are grown to how food is labeled to the foods that are recommended for a balanced diet.  I think the most interesting thing I learned from the exhibit was that America's "bad eating habits" have been a concern for quite a while.  I found it interesting that our affinity for sugar and processed food has NOT appeared in just the past two or three decades, and has been been cause for the government's concern.  Since our obesity epidemic has only gotten worse, I would say something seems not to be working...

Which brings me to the film event.  It featured six films produced by Disney in conjunction with different components of the US government from 1942 to 1946.  Some focused on the war effort, while others focused on health and nutrition.  I think my favorite film was "Out of the Frying Pan Into the Firing Line," which encouraged people to save their used cooking fat for the war effort.  They could sell the fat to the government (via "meat dealers," which I assume meant butchers), and it would be used to make glycerine, which was then used to make explosives.  The film featured Minnie and Pluto and was adorable.  It really got me thinking how the public was so much more personally involved with the war effort during WWI and earlier, than we are now.

I found the film "The Grain that Built a Hemisphere" fascinating.  It provided a history of corn and its importance to Native Americans in Central and South America, and a little bit of information about breeding corn.  I thought the really interesting part was at the end, however, when the narrative started explaining the multiple uses chemists had been developing for corn (the film is from 1943!).  Getting back to the ongoing obesity epidemic and our love for processed food...some things really never change!  Even in the '40s, we were extolling the virtues of corn and its many uses, and at the same time lamenting the state of our health.  It really puts modern films like King Corn into a historical perspective. 
Anyway, back to the '40s films, they were wonderful to watch.  It was incredible to see how far our understing of health and nutrition have come in almost 70 years, and at the same time, it was fascinating to see how much our culture has changed (or not).