SUPERMARKET TOUR - Combat-Ready Kitchen: How the U.S. Military Shapes the Way You Eat(2015)

Combat-Ready Kitchen: How the U.S. Military Shapes the Way You Eat (2015)

Chapter 12

SUPERMARKET TOUR

The Natick Center’s tentacles not only grasp the items we examined from our children’s lunch boxes, they’re everywhere in the American food system. So let’s go to the supermarket. My local Star Market is down at the heels, feeling the pressure of the Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods less than a mile away, although the parking lot is usually full. The shoppers give off a watching-every-last-penny vibe. I usually come here after I’ve dropped off my youngest daughter for gymnastics practice, so I can stock up on cheap packaged and convenience foods. Today is different, though. Instead of shopping for my family, I’ll fill my cart with every item I can identify* that has a military provenance or influence.

Our first stop is right next to the entrance: the produce section. The rainbow heaps of fruits and vegetables in bins in the middle of the floor are close to their natural state, but if we stroll along the periphery, there are lots of items with a military link. I always toss in a bag or two of prewashed salad—there’s nothing easier than tearing one open and dousing the contents with dressing, right? The modified- or controlled-atmosphere packaging systems are an outgrowth of army research into keeping FF&V (the industry abbreviation for fresh fruits and vegetables) in good condition during shipment and storage. In the 1950s the U.S. Navy was among the first to use polyethylene bags to increase the shelf life of produce; by controlling oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, they slowed its respiration, delaying ripening and spoilage. In the 1960s the Quartermaster Corps, working with the appliance manufacturer Whirlpool, began to experiment with a modified-atmosphere container, which replaced the natural atmosphere with a custom blend of gases that helped extend shelf life. The first experiments involved fresh lettuce and celery shipped to Vietnam during the war. In the 1980s this expiration-date-extending tool began being used routinely for individual consumer articles, and it is now, according to the packaging expert Aaron Brody, the food innovation with the greatest impact—at least if measured by the number of supermarket perishables that use it to maintain freshness. In 2005 Fresh Express, an outgrowth of the original Whirlpool project that controls 40 percent of the packaged salad market, was bought by Chiquita Brands International for $855 million.

Nearby are a couple cooler cases of fresh-squeezed juices and smoothies, many of them cold-pasteurized with high-pressure processing, one of several new sterilization techniques spearheaded by the army. Odwalla, the original, is fighting off incursions by newer brands such as Naked Juice (a subsidiary of PepsiCo), Suja, Evolution Fresh (Starbucks), and BluePrint (Hain Celestial Group). The big, pricey bottles have names like Easy Greens, Defense Up, Green Machine, and Protein Zone, all staking their claim—unproven—to a salutary effect on your body. Same deal for that array of chilled prepared guacamoles and salsas. In fact, even that forlorn little display of serving-size bags of ready-to-eat cut fruits and vegetables relies on the new processing technique: Bites, Chiquita’s packaged apple slices and carrots, and Reichel Foods’ Dippin’ Stix, which combine about half an apple’s worth of slices or a handful of carrot sticks with a tub of high-pressure-processed caramel sauce or ranch dressing. No one’s lining up for these, though; I guess they haven’t caught on yet.

The next section, prepared foods, seems to be an unspoken answer to your daily what’s-for-dinner quandary. How about making your “own” pizza? That rack of red-and-green-plastic-encased Boboli crusts never stales thanks to hurdle technology; the same goes for the flatbread and the soft room-temperature tortillas. Or, look over there: heat-’n’-serve meals—short ribs, chicken parmesan, mac ’n’ cheese—just ready to pop in the microwave. Which has a military origin, of course.

The microwave oven is a descendant of the magnetron, an electromagnetic oscillator that made radar much more efficient by reducing the size of the equipment so that it could be installed on ships and in submarines. The devices were produced by the longtime defense contractor Raytheon. An apocryphal story is told about the appliance’s invention: One day in 1945 a technician testing the equipment found that his chocolate bar had melted. The Quartermaster Corps immediately seized on the idea as a way to “defrost and heat a pre-cooked meal in one minute… . Of foremost importance will be the problem of feeding heavy bombers’ crews likely to be traveling for 10,000 miles,”1 and helped to fund the development of the microwave oven. Licensing the technology a decade later, the stove manufacturer Tappan (now part of Electrolux), and appliance giant Westinghouse produced the first ridiculously expensive—$2,000 to $3,000 (in 1950s dollars)—and clunky wall-mounted machines. Eventually, after the price and size came down and the public got comfortable with the concept, the ovens became standard kitchen gear.

Here we are at the meat department. I usually get a couple of packages of something mild-flavored and quick-cooking: chicken breasts, sirloin strips, every now and then a pork tenderloin that I make in the toaster oven. The Natick Center owns this section; its handprints are so numerous it’s hard to begin. I see boneless meat shipped in boxes and restructured meat products, which line the deli and freezer cases and—stepping outside the grocery store for just a moment—the walk-ins of fast-food restaurants. The army even had a role in developing the process for eviscerating the poultry that goes into your favorite cutlets, patties, and nuggets. And let’s not forget high-pressure processing; because it sterilizes with little or no cooking, it allows you to enjoy your favorite heat-’n’-serve precooked entrées—fish, chicken, beef—as well as additive-free deli meats.

A little farther along is the wall of refrigerators housing an array of dairy products. We can bypass the traditional cheeses and pasteurized milk, but we can thank the military for helping to spread the acceptance and use of processed cheese far and wide with an assist from its longtime collaborator Kraft; for developing lactose-free powdered milk with the USDA; and for figuring out how to sterilize, stabilize, and extend the life of egg products. I’m still on the perimeter of the supermarket, however, where nutritionists say the healthy, “unprocessed” food resides. It’s time to venture into the hinterlands, the dozen or so aisles glutted with packaged room-temperature foods, many of which owe their existence to the food science funded or supported by Natick in its never-ending quest to provide durable rations that can survive unrefrigerated for years in a range of climates.

Let’s hit the bakery section first, where way back when, the army helped to develop active dry yeast; then funded the trial runs for bacterial enzyme-softened bread; and, most recently, figured out how to forestall staling with humectants and starch recrystallization inhibitors. Another major war-related contribution to the supermarket loaf is enrichment, which dates to the early 1940s, a time when diseases and conditions such as goiters, pellagra, beriberi, and anemia, all caused by dietary deficiencies, were common, and the service branches were forced to reject almost half of the first two million war recruits for health issues related to malnourishment or poor medical care. To address this shocking deficiency, President Roosevelt convened a National Nutrition Conference for Defense. At the May 1941 meeting, which was attended by more than eight hundred people, it was decided to develop a universal rubric for daily caloric, nutrient, vitamin, and mineral needs. The task was given to the Committee on Food and Nutrition, whose work eventually led to the founding of the bread enrichment* program, which mandates the addition of B vitamins to all commercial loaves.

For those who prefer the joy of homemade baked goods but just don’t have the time—and who does?—the Quartermaster Food and Container Institute developed all kinds of mixes, from cakes to quick breads, in the 1950s. In fact, one of the brand names most associated with housewifery, Betty Crocker, has been a major beneficiary of military technology; the easy meals in its latest product line, such as carne asada, garlic chicken, and beans, come in retort pouches. Why, it’s even started selling shelf-stable mashed potatoes, the army’s first low-acid pressure-assisted thermal sterilization (PATS) food. The mother lode of military influence is the ready-to-eat staples of dorm rooms, offices, and, increasingly, because you are, of course, “crazy busy,” your larder. Breakfast pastries. Energy bars. Big, toothy chocolate chip cookies. All of them are intermediate-moisture foods, often a packaged bakery treat or one that has a baked component with a soft and chewy texture.

I stop at the end of a middle row for a moment to stare at what appears to be a commemorative display of old C rations. Here, almost as if they were deliberately assembled, are the consumer versions of World War II soldier food: Underwood’s Deviled Ham Spread, Hormel’s Dinty Moore Beef Stew and Spam, Swift’s Vienna Sausage and dried chipped beef in all its glory. I pause for a moment to pay homage to the technology that began it all, first promulgated by Napoleon and relied on in most of the American wars fought in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (On another occasion, as part of my research, I brought home some to try. Reactions were mixed. The kids said the deviled ham looked like cat food and ran shrieking from the room. My husband waved away my proffered Vienna sausage with “Sometimes we had to eat those in Cuba.” My mother, on the other hand, polished off her plate of chipped beef on toast, although she said, with a sigh, “My mother’s cream sauce was thicker.”) As I continue walking down the aisle, the cans come in waves organized by food type: soups, fruits, vegetables, beans. Finally the shiny cylinders give way to rows of plastic-and-foil-laminated retort pouches—the culmination of almost two decades of army and contractor work, including an Institute of Food Technologists prizewinning collaboration between the Natick Center, Reynolds Metals, and Continental Can. Here I find items such as tuna, pet food, rice dishes, heat-’n’-serve entrées and sides, sauce packets, juice pouches, and squeeze yogurts. Campbell’s is obviously seeking a younger, hipper market with its new pouched Go Soups; black-and-white portraits of “real people” grace the Chicken & Quinoa with Poblano Chilies and Moroccan Style Chicken with Chickpeas.

Blink and you’ll miss the display of cinnamon, pepper, and marjoram in little glass or plastic bottles—the greatest scientific breakthrough ever, the splitting of the atom and the harnessing of the tremendous energy that generated the atomic bomb, relegated to the spice rack. After the Manhattan Project, which had employed 130,000 people for four years straight with an investment of $2 billion ($26 billion in current dollars), was shuttered at the end of 1946, the United States was left with a network of nuclear reactors. So the army and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) began experiments with the application of gamma rays (electromagnetic waves considerably shorter than the diameter of an atom) to sterilize food. Because very little escapes their tiny wavelength, bombarding anything with gamma rays is guaranteed to kill what hides inside, including bacteria and their almost indestructible spores. The Manhattan Project’s spent fuel assemblies, which still emitted “quite deadly” gamma rays, according to Charles Horner,2 an AEC official, were recycled into food irradiation facilities constructed around the country, the first in Dugway, Utah.

The Quartermaster Corps’ radiation sterilization project, which a few years after it began received the ringing endorsement of President Eisenhower as part of the Atoms for Peace program, would eventually cost the U.S. taxpayer $80 million. By the mid-1950s it had an enormous cast from government, academia, and business, including the Atomic Energy Commission, the USDA, Swift, General Electric, the American Meat Institute, and dozens of universities—a list that would over time number more than 120 institutions.3 MIT’s participation was led by Bernard Proctor, who had managed the Subsistence Research Laboratory’s outside research programs during World War II.

From the start, the food irradiation program was plagued by problems. The energy of the beams left in their wake all sorts of chemical reactions: many deteriorated the food’s flavor, texture, and nutritional quality; others seemed to create new substances called unique radiolytic products, about which little was known. Despite the Natick Center’s assurance that it “would not induce radioactivity in the foods, above the background level,”4 the public was wary. Why, if a nuclear explosion was so devastating to human life and health, would we use atomic energy on our food? The army was forced to undertake numerous health and safety studies; in fact, it’s said that effects of food irradiation have been scrutinized more than any other food technology. Then the 1958 Food Additives Amendment to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act defined a source of radiation as a food additive, which triggered regulation by the FDA.

By the early 1960s although Natick had made great strides in both figuring out how to maintain palatability by excluding oxygen from the environment and using heat to deactivate enzymes before processing, the army was having second thoughts about using radiation to sterilize food, doubting its cost-effectiveness. Around the same time, a study by a trio of Cornell scientists on the use of irradiated nutrient sources—coconut milk, which offers an exceptional growth medium, for carrot plants and sugar for fruit flies—found that they induced genetic mutations. These two developments attracted the attention of the press and brought an onslaught of articles about the effects of eating radiation-sterilized food. Despite this, the FDA felt convinced that at least low-dose treatment was safe, and approved it for disinfecting wheat and preventing sprouting of potatoes. Confident that approval of irradiated meat was just around the corner, Allen Products Company (a manufacturer of optical equipment), Martin Marietta (a heavy building materials supplier), and Uniroyal (a tire company) began to plan a radiation sterilization facility large enough to satisfy both military demand and—they hoped—the new commercial market.

Those hopes were dashed in 1968, when, after requesting and reviewing additional DOD-sponsored studies that seemed to show drops in fecundity and increases in stillbirths in rats and dogs fed irradiated meat, the FDA denied the Defense Department’s petition to radappertize (their term, combining radiation with appertize, in honor of Nicolas Appert) ham. At the same time, the agency also rescinded the approval for canned bacon it had issued in 1963. The army was not deterred. “The Committee on Radiation Preservation of Food, in Executive Session, unanimously and forcibly recommended that the Army Food Irradiation Program be continued and funded at the level needed to result in the issuance of regulations for at least four foods … [:] ham, chicken, beef and pork.”5 To ease the way, the committee proposed that the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council (NAS-NRC) be charged with undertaking a review of all the safety studies of irradiated food and set criteria for its wholesomeness “to assist regulatory agencies in the U.S. and elsewhere whose responsibility is to approve to use of irradiated foods for human consumption.”

A new set of studies was done by Natick under the oversight of NAS-NRC and “in close cooperation with the FDA,” and in the early and mid-1970s reports were issued declaring irradiated food to be “toxicologically safe.” In 1984 the FDA approved low-dose radiation sterilization of fruits and vegetables, which allows importers to omit lengthy and expensive quarantines, and high-dose radiation sterilization of spices. A full thirteen years later, the FDA finally approved radiation sterilization of meat, which can be done with not only gamma rays but also electron beams and X-rays, and many other foodstuffs. But although these products finally made their commercial debut in 1997, they were never widely accepted by consumers.

Down the same aisle are some familiar foods made with a military technology that had a bit more traction than food irradiation, but not much. Instant coffee, instant soup, powdered beverages, the little nibs of fruit in cereals, and the vegetables and herbs in flavoring packets for rices and pilafs are descendants of the freeze-dried blood products and vaccines delivered to battlefield medics during World War II. The industry that “grew almost spontaneously under the stimulus of either patriotic duty or adventurous speculation” foundered in the 1950s, however, with most firms going bankrupt.6 The armed forces persevered, but finally, after decades of research, closed the chapter on freeze-drying, restricting its use to extreme situations, such as Arctic expeditions and long-range patrols, where reduced weight is imperative and appetites are honed by exertion and deprivation. Nonetheless, in their work on the project, Natick-funded scientists made important breakthroughs that have contributed greatly to other areas of food science; for example, prediction and control of water activity, nonenzymatic browning, and lipid oxidation.

Before I leave the pantry staples, I grab a box of converted rice, which has been parboiled so that the starch absorbs many vitamins and minerals, then hulled to make it more palatable to consumers. First served to soldiers during World War II, the grain was the brainchild of Eric Huzenlaub, an English chemist who had labored for ten years to perfect the process (used for centuries in India), but failed to bring it to market. It would have died on the vine but for a plucky proposal by Gordon Harwell, an aspiring American entrepreneur, who shamelessly hounded the Quartermaster Corps brass, waving a copy of a University of Arkansas study that found converted rice kept its nutrients and imploring them to give him a chance. By the end of the war, the two partners’ plant in Houston, Texas, was humming, as were four more throughout the South. “The new rice was classified by Col. Rohland A. Isker, research director of the Quartermaster Corps, as one of the most significant scientific developments of World War II.”7

Detouring into the freezer section for the armload of frozen pizzas at which my children now glare mutinously when I bring them home, I pass the TV dinners. Turns out Swanson was the second manufacturer of the reheatable meals; the first was an army contractor, Maxson Food Systems, which invented Strato-Plates—meat, vegetables, and potatoes frozen in a tray—to serve to troops on overseas flights. A few steps down from the frozen dinners are cans of orange juice concentrate. Starting in 1942, a team of USDA food scientists in Florida worked feverishly to invent a method to reduce the water content of orange juice but still leave it tasting like just-squeezed fruit to ensure that troops got enough vitamin C; their low-temperature evaporation process, which reduced water by 80 percent, was perfected as the war ended in 1945, just in time for the Quartermaster Corps to place its first order with a supplier—and cancel it. The company quickly revamped the product as a consumer convenience food, Minute Maid frozen concentrate.

It’s a good thing I lift weights; my cart is getting awfully heavy, but we can’t leave before visiting the laundry, paper, and cleaning product aisle. Bet you didn’t know the army has had an outsize impact on the way you store, prepare, and clean up food at home. For example, almost every appliance in your modern-day kitchen has a military lineage. We already covered the microwave, but the army also had a hand in the development of safe coolants for refrigerators, although their interest was primarily in preventing fires in aircraft engines. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were originally hailed as an alternative to explosion-prone ammonia-based refrigeration systems—their destructive effect on the ozone layer was discovered much later. (And it would be remiss not to mention the War Department’s invention of aerosol sprays, which originally expelled not cheese sauce or whipped cream but CFCs as an insect repellent.) Dishwashers, although invented by Josephine Cochrane, a socialite, in the late 1800s—the originals were hand-cranked—were the realm of restaurant and institutional but not home kitchens until the Quartermaster Corps redesigned them during World War II and afterward, making them cheaper and more efficient, to prevent the transmission of food-borne illness in mess halls. In addition, the military sponsored the study and improvement of no-rinse detergents and other cookware cleaners. Or, for those who’d rather omit the cleanup and eat picnic-style, you can thank the army for laminated paper plates and plastic forks, spoons, and knives. And after the meal is done, store the leftovers in cling wrap, now mostly made from linear low-density polyethylene instead of vinylidene chloride like the original Saran, or aluminum foil, which entered the consumer market after the Surplus War Properties “cannibalized” World War II’s 150,000 surplus combat planes—that’s more than fifteen times the number of U.S. commercial aircraft flying today8—by melting them down into aluminum ingot, a cheap raw material that Reynolds and other tin companies then turned, for the first time, into a foil for home use.

And finally, I shouldn’t forget what, by law, must be printed on every box, bottle, or bag: nutritional information. World War II was the first time the diet of soldiers in the field differed dramatically from that of civilians, being composed almost entirely of rations made from processed foods. Not only did the army struggle with the issue of palatability and monotony, which sharply affected the caloric intake of recruits, but by necessity it was forced to ask the questions: Is this diet equivalent to home-cooked food? Does it have the right types and amounts of nutrients for optimal health? Until then, the Surgeon General of the Army had dictated the contents of rations, basing his guidelines on what was considered to be a healthful diet: so many portions each of fresh or salted meat, peas or beans, fresh and dried fruits and vegetables, grains, and hardtack or fresh bread. Faced with the new canned or packaged C, D, and K rations, this was no longer feasible. As part of its extensive wartime research and development program, the army first reviewed the available literature, studied in its own labs and those of its university and industry contractors, and then determined the exact set of nutrients—chemical substances such as proteins, fats, carbohydrates, minerals, and vitamins—that were required to maintain health. In the intervening years, these have been updated many times, with new information provided by government agencies, medical researchers, and nutritionists. This shift, though it seems slight, had monumental consequences: thinking in terms of nutrients, rather than foodstuffs, allowed people to divorce the concept of a good diet from eating foods in their natural state and believe that this could, at least in theory, be achieved by consuming the allotted RDAs from processed foods.

I push my overflowing cart to register 7, which is operated by an old man wearing the garish store uniform of bright blue polyester shirt and black vest. His back is so bent his nose practically rubs the scanning machine. There on the impulse display rack are a few more items. M&M’s, Mars’s iconic candy, was invented just in the nick of time to be under exclusive contract to the U.S. military during World War II—there was no need to advertise when sixteen million soldiers returned home craving the “chocolate that melts in your mouth, not in your hand,” and Wrigley’s gum, another 1940s ration add-in, received a permanent upward bump in market position. Or to tempt the salt-loving, bags of Frito-Lay’s Cheetos or other cheesy snack foods made from surplus cheese powder, or tubes of perfectly shaped Pringles chips made from dehydrated potatoes, a 1950s army project with the USDA.

Beep. Beep. Beep. My cashier slowly but steadily runs my items past the laser scanner. He stops for a moment, and his white eyebrows shoot up quizzically, his magnified gray eyes suddenly alert. He waves my six-pack of 21st Amendment Brewery’s Bitter American beer at me, pointing to the chimpanzee in a space suit that’s drawn on the carton. “Do you know where that’s from?” he demands, obviously prepared to tell me.

“Yes. That’s Ham, the chimp that was sent into space just before the first manned Mercury flight in 1961.” He looks surprised, then impressed. It’s on the tip of my tongue to go on. I think, “Actually, my cart is full of combat rations and astronaut food. The technology that went into producing them is here in my instant coffee, in my package of granola bars, in the ‘all natural’ minimally processed packaged pastrami.” But instead I bite my tongue—hard. Lately, I’ve started to teeter precariously on the line between fun-fact-filled friend and deadly dinner pundit. Like an anger management graduate, I’ve had to learn to recognize my triggers. And one of mine is that treacherous little corrective “actually.”

OF COURSE, my overladen shopping cart contains only the military influence on our food system that you can see, touch, and taste. There are many others that affect everything from transportation and storage to government policy and programs, to food research and marketing, and more.

The military has had a decisive hand in many of the innovations that form the modern-day distribution system. Although it did not invent the ISO (International Standards Organization) container in which all the world’s goods are now shipped, it gave the then-radical concept of a steel box that could move from truck bed to train to ship without being loaded and unloaded the major boost it needed to enter and dominate the market by adapting it for all DOD shipments starting in the early 1970s. The efficiency gained from using containers reduced shipping costs by a stunning 90 percent. Inside the container, the standard-size four-way pallet placed by a forklift is another invention that owes its existence to military ingenuity during World War II. Vastly improved corrugated fiberboard boxes, another material-handling staple, was a long-term cooperative project between the Quartermaster Corps and Forest Products Laboratory, a Wisconsin-based USDA research lab that develops new or better industrial uses for wood. Their design for boxes able to withstand high pressure, stress, and moisture was disseminated in the public realm during the 1950s, free for use by any takers.

One of the military’s most important unseen contributions is to food safety, through the internationally accepted protocol for reducing contamination risks, Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP). The system was invented during the Space Race—because if there’s a time you definitely don’t want to be felled by stomach cramps, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, or worse, it’s hurtling at 17,500 mph in a tiny capsule with two other human beings. NASA set its sights high, adopting a “zero-defect” acceptance policy for astronaut provisions. Remembered the biologist and nutritionist Paul Lachance, a project leader for NASA, “The U.S. Army had already dabbled in this field, and they, as a matter of fact, had developed a document, which I don’t know the name of, but they had a document for a procedure for trying to minimize military feeding contamination.”9 This was the Natick Center’s “modes of failure,” a system for ensuring the safety of medical supplies. Using the army’s approach as a model and the safety standards developed in its laboratories, Quartermaster Corps contractor Pillsbury, led by the microbiologist Howard Bauman; Natick; and NASA came up with HACCP, a seven-point plan that begins with an inventory of the food manufacturing process, from raw material to finished product, and identifies all the junctures at which microbiological contamination could occur. A protocol is then set up, with careful record making of measurements at all the control points and limits beyond which corrective action is required. Spontaneous and long-term monitoring of this data allows managers to control the quality of their products and government officials to verify that the procedure is working correctly.

Pillsbury and other space program food suppliers were required to use this system for astronaut provisions. Then, in the early 1970s, some of Pillsbury’s baby cereal was found to be laced with glass, and another company had a high-profile case of botulism-infested vichyssoise soup. At that time, some businesses began to spontaneously implement the HACCP principles, including fast-food giant Burger King. Finally, by the 1990s, after the public was outraged by sales of E. coli-laced hamburger meat, the USDA began to require that meat companies have HACCP plans in place. They were followed in the early years of the 2000s with similar regulations by the FDA for fresh juice, mollusks, and alternatively processed foods. In 2011 President Obama signed into law the Food Safety Modernization Act, which, among other measures, for the first time required that all food facilities have in place an HACCP plan.

In war, even with the tastiest rations, fighters tend to lose weight and become dehydrated. Exactly why, after seventy-five years of army research, is still not clear, although the military is a lot better at getting recruits to consume enough calories and nutrients and to stay hydrated. But in seeking to understand the reasons people like and eat one food and not another, the military ended up creating a brand-new field: food acceptance research, which includes the conceptual frameworks and instruments that are standard in the food industry to this day.

The work began during World War II, with the investigations of the National Research Council’s Committee on Food Habits, a wartime group headed by, among others, the legendary cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. Its purpose was to figure out how to persuade people to change their eating habits—vital for consumers when rationing made familiar foods unavailable and unfamiliar ones had to be substituted, as well as for soldiers who would be subsisting on diets unlike those they followed at home. Explained Mead, “It is also necessary to know … how changes may be phrased so that they will be accepted and welcomed, what phrases should be avoided because they will awaken anxiety, mere temporary compliance, or actual resistance.”10 (The specific task with which the committee was entrusted was persuading the American public to eat organ meat.) Over the course of its five-year existence the Committee on Food Habits undertook, funded, or endorsed more than two hundred studies. In 1945 this function was absorbed by the Quartermaster Food and Container Institute, with the founding of the Food Acceptance Laboratory under the supervision of W. Franklin Dove, a biologist who’d done some work on human preferences. One of its earliest endeavors was collecting, through university partners, data on regional likes and dislikes and compiling a master list of national favorite foods. (Apparently hamburger had a surprisingly strong showing; this may have inspired the founders of the first fast-food restaurants.) The investigation was done using paired preferences—choosing which item of two was liked best—and it became the modus operandi of army food research thereafter.

One of the most enduring and important contributions of the Food Acceptance Laboratory was the development, with the University of Chicago, of the nine-point hedonic scale as a way to measure consumers’ reactions to foods. In the instrument, the numbers one through nine correspond to reactions from extreme dislike to extreme liking; it was found the longer scale helped ferret out small but significant differences in overall appeal. Because it’s so easy to use and understand, it has become the standard worldwide. The importance of the Quartermaster Corps’ work on food acceptance research can be judged by the number of its alumni who went on to lead food acceptance research in private industry, including at companies such as Coca-Cola, Pillsbury, Lipton, ConAgra’s Hunt-Wesson, Ocean Spray, and Pizza Hut, as well as numerous Natick Lab graduates who found places in other government agencies and academia.

LOOK BEHIND ME. If we removed every item with an army origin or influence, any grocery store would be at least half empty.* Now do you see how the military’s stranglehold on basic food science and technology research means that the Combat Feeding Program’s decisions about how to feed warfighters become de facto decisions about how to feed you?