When the U.S. was in all out war mode during World War II, the country faced many problems at home. Who would make the bombs? Women. How would we pay for everything? Bonds. What are we to eat when all the meat goes abroad? Organs. Everyone in the country was fine with all of these changes except for the last one. No one in America wanted to eat or cook organ meat. However, with so much meat leaving the continent to head overseas to feed troops, the U.S. government decided to make a strong push in support of organ meats. This lead to a full-blown campaign meant to shift what our society ate, a task that is ridiculously hard to do.
According to Mary Roach in her best-selling book Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, the National Research Committee (NRC) was at the helm of this push to make Americans discover the benefits of organ meats. To do so, they hired a team of anthropologists, led by Margaret Mead, to figure out why people eat certain things but flat-out refuse others.
The NRC came up with two novel ideas. The first was to make organ meats sound more appealing. This meant coming up with terms like “tidbits” and “variety meats.” The hope was to use these new names to make the foods seem more appealing and palatable to a society that had never had a strong history with eating them. They also decided that French was a great way to make things sound fancier. As Roach puts it:
A little French was thought to help things go down easier. A 1944 Hotel Management article included recipes for “Brains á la King” and “Beef Tongue Piquant.”
One of the biggest problems the NRC faced was the fact that many Americans viewed organ meats as something that only poor people ate, reports The Atlantic. In order to change this, they needed to make eating organ meats patriotic, which meant a propaganda push was in order. The NRC made posters, pamphlets and all kinds of other media to share with the masses, mainly mothers who did the grocery shopping.
One of the most successful ways to get people to try organ meats was to have them give a pledge. According to Roach, there were many pledges back then. People often pledged to do many things to help the war effort including to drive slower to conserve rubber and get to class early to conserve paper tardy slips. A pledge seemed to make people understand that what they did at home directly influences the war abroad.
The NRC was successful in helping the meat ration. However, as you can tell by our dinner plates, organ meats never really caught on with the masses after the war had ended. Instead, many people resumed eating the prime cuts that they were used to, which is kind of sad because organ meats pack a ton of nutrients that prime cuts don’t.
