WORLD WAR II, THE SUBSISTENCE LAB, AND ITS MERRY BAND OF INSIDERS - 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 6

WORLD WAR II, THE SUBSISTENCE LAB, AND ITS MERRY BAND OF INSIDERS

Imagine that you’re preparing an intimate dinner for 12 when you suddenly receive word that instead you’ll be feeding 385 people and they’ll be at your doorstep in a matter of hours. This situation is a little like the one faced by the Quartermaster Corps during World War II, when, over the course of four years, the U.S. Armed Forces had to ramp up production to provide three square meals a day for from four hundred thousand to almost twelve million recruits. This enormous task descended on a tiny Chicago laboratory formed almost as an afterthought and headed by a cavalry officer with no professional food-service experience, a B.A. in chemistry, and unproven leadership ability. Over the duration of the war, the organization was transformed. The soldier, valiantly working with almost no resources, enlisted the help of food companies, big and small, and, on a later project, even brought in a couple of university experts to do nutritional and acceptance testing.

But it wasn’t enough. The rations rusted and tasted bad. So the army assigned control of the lab to a consummate businessman who was famous for slashing through red tape and inspiring employees; he expanded the internal research program and set up an external one, under the watchful eye of one of the country’s leading food-science experts.

But it still wasn’t enough. Canned milk jelled; dried potatoes hardened; fats went rancid; preserved meat, eggs, vegetables, and fruits browned. By the end of the war, “to cover all fields of interest to the Armed Forces, but also to stabilize the whole research program on military subsistence,”1 a massive outside science and technology program was begun under a second food scientist coordinating almost five hundred projects spread among university, company, and government labs throughout the country. What had once been a small, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants operation had become a professionalized research juggernaut and the driving force behind the development of processed foods—then and now.

COLONEL ROHLAND ISKER HAD ALWAYS LIKED TO COOK, a passion he’d deepened in the Pacific, where he was stationed in the Philippines from 1919 to 1923, acquiring both a taste for Asian cuisine and, as a token of appreciation for his services, a gift watch from Japan’s Prince Nashimoto. But as a lieutenant in the U.S. Cavalry, the mounted forces even then being made obsolete by armored tanks and trucks, he didn’t have an opportunity to do so professionally until, at the age of forty-four, he was enrolled in the army’s Subsistence School in Chicago, which taught personnel how to purchase and prepare edibles to feed troops. Two years later, in 1939, he was finally assigned a food-related tour of duty: making sure the electricity, water, heat, and refrigeration were running at the Chicago Depot of the Quartermaster Corps, the army branch that provides soldiers with food, water, and other supplies. As a postscript, Isker was also told to manage the newly created Subsistence Research Laboratory because its founders, Colonels Wilbur McReynolds and Paul Logan, had been summarily reassigned to the Washington, D.C., office.

The lab couldn’t have been sleepier: three staff, including the director; a couple of donated pots and pans; and a special projects budget of $750. It had been formed as restitution to McReynolds and Logan, instructors at the Subsistence School who suddenly found themselves jobless when it moved to Philadelphia in 1936. The idea of a lab was part of their impassioned plea for employment: “The Subsistence School … had investigated many promising food developments for the army, but its work, in the main, had not been experimental… . A research laboratory, however, with teaching omitted from its program, might be expected to observe a completely new function.”2 In addition to his nonexistent staff, equipment, and funds, Isker inherited two production-ready projects: a deliberately unpalatable emergency chocolate bar developed after years of fiddling by Logan and then perfected by Hershey, and the C (for combat) ration, a gray and mushy meat stew in a can that was the personal inspiration of McReynolds. Said the colonel of his invention, “It was a radical departure from the previous rations, and, of course, soldiers would rather have steak and gravy and potatoes. But the C-ration eliminated the need for transportation space on ships going abroad and that was what sold it.”3 It was not exactly a plum post.

That all changed on September 1, 1939, when a notorious brush-mustached thug invaded Poland, and France and Great Britain, galvanized by the attack on their ally, declared war. The United States, dolefully watching the unrest outside its window to the east and to the west, went on high alert. On September 16, 1940, Congress enacted a draft, requiring all men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five to register for military service; that year, the army, navy, and Marines added almost two hundred thousand new recruits. Wartime preparations were also under way at the Subsistence Research Laboratory: its special projects budget was increased—by $50 to a total of $800. Isker was undaunted. Under the eye of Logan in the Washington Quartermaster Corps office, he scoured the country for consumer products that could be added as they were, or with minimal changes, to the rations. Sniffing war contracts on the horizon, twenty industry representatives a day were visiting the lab by the end of 1940.

The Germans had taken the world by storm not only with military prowess but also by scientific supremacy. Borrowing a page from their book, the United States, whose armed forces enrollment had now tripled to more than 1.6 million, elevated the role of science in its war strategy, in 1941 establishing the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) to fund research into weapons, explosives, communications, equipment, and soldier support, among other things, and appointing a former MIT vice president, Vannevar Bush, to head it. The Subsistence Research Laboratory also grew, albeit modestly, to a staff of twenty-two and developed multiple labs, including a chemistry lab, a vitamin lab, a kitchen, and a dining room. Still, research and development dollars were short, and Colonel Isker continued to make up the difference by working with “civilians and scientists who were drafted from large food companies,” according to Research and Development Associates, the organization he founded after the war. The day-to-day work of the Subsistence Research Laboratory was mostly standardization: developing set menus, writing instruction manuals, figuring out nutritional content, testing items, and creating detailed specifications for the manufacture of countless products and packaging, according to Kellen Backer, who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the topic.4

Isker also began work on the first Subsistence Laboratory item to rely on university researchers in its development, a lightweight emergency ration for those deployed in planes, helicopters, motorcycles, and tanks. Complaints had been received about the C ration, specifically that its six twelve-ounce cans were awkward, heavy, and at times downright dangerous for soldiers to carry. MIT offered an updated recipe for the pemmican-in-a-can (the mixture of dried meat, fat, and berries used by Native Americans) that had been used in World War I, which would have reduced the size and weight, but struck out. Field tests done by Ancel Keys at the University of Minnesota found that soldiers refused to choke down more than one repast based on the unappealing blend. Keys then quickly proposed his own version of the “shirt-pocket meal,” culling the ingredients from the shelves of a nearby grocery store: dry sausage (later a small can of processed meat), soy-flour biscuits (these gave a major leg up to the soybean industry after the war), a chocolate bar, and hard candy (later jazzed up with cigarettes, chewing gum, and toilet paper). Everything except for the meat was wrapped in cellophane, a transparent, cellulose-based packaging film invented in Switzerland at the turn of the century, and then packed into a flat cardboard box; the whole thing weighed only twelve ounces. This became the K ration, notable for being the first army food not universally reviled by soldiers.

Thus, when the United States officially entered the war on December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese, the Quartermaster Corps was ready. Sort of.

Troops, their numbers climbing to almost four million, were dispersed to practically every corner of the globe: the Pacific islands, North Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and even the Alaska Territory. This put American-made military supplies to the test, which they didn’t always pass: tents rotted, boots felt apart, and canned rations rusted. Moreover, poor food allegedly had a role in one of the war’s most devastating defeats. In the Philippines, seventy-six thousand U.S. and Filipino troops, low on rations and ammunition, surrendered to the Japanese in April 1942 and were forced to march across the Bataan Peninsula to prisoner camps. At least fifty-two hundred Americans died during the journey. One soldier who survived, an MIT graduate named Samuel Goldblith, helped to keep himself and fellow inmates healthy by drinking juice squeezed from grass and devised a vitamin A deficiency test by measuring a subject’s ability to see light through sheets of toilet paper. He later became a professor in MIT’s Department of Food Technology.

In the hand-wringing and finger-pointing that followed, the Quartermaster Corps’ entire research program (or lack thereof) came under fire. Until then, new items had been developed sporadically and without coordination at four separate depots—shoes in Boston, clothing in Philadelphia, tents in Jefferson, Indiana, and food in Chicago. Responsibility for research was abruptly wrenched from the drowsy depots and centralized in Washington, D.C., at the Research and Development Branch of the Quartermaster’s Military Planning Division, a new agency created in July 1942 to streamline planning, production, and distribution.

IN 1940 GEORGES DORIOT, a Harvard Business School professor of French origin, was looking for a way to contribute to the war effort. So when Quartermaster General Edmund Gregory, who’d attended one of his classes a few years earlier, invited him to join the corps, he jumped at the chance, relocating to the nation’s capital for the duration. In 1941 he was assigned to his first post, overseeing vehicle manufacturing, a familiar enterprise because Doriot had been groomed to take over his father’s car-manufacturing company, a plan derailed by his studies at Harvard and subsequent recruitment to teach a manufacturing course there. He was quickly promoted, and when the Quartermaster Corps revamped in the wake of Pearl Harbor, it was clear that he was the man to run the new Research and Development Branch.

In addition to instituting his management philosophy of leading through inspiration rather than exhortation and surrounding himself with a cadre of “high-ranking civilians”5 to bypass typical hierarchical military decision making, Doriot took a new tack in product development, placing the soldier front and center. He talked to those who’d experienced extreme conditions—say, for example, to Arctic explorers about sleeping bags. He then consulted with scientists and engineers to best understand technical requirements and limitations. And after a prototype had been made, he gathered evaluations from users and firsthand observers. During Doriot’s first year on the job, he replaced tin with plastic in clothing, shoes, and gear; set up a climatology lab; and sent gear testers for a ten-week camping trip to Mount McKinley in Alaska. Then, in December 1942, he was given the responsibility for developing food, a move that effectively demoted Isker. Doriot’s new Subsistence Section in the Washington office and its oversight committee, the Subsistence Research Projects Board, would from now on direct research activities in the Chicago lab.

For the army, it was none too soon. By 1943 the number of enlisted men and women reached almost nine million, still island-hopping in the Pacific and finally starting to push back the Axis in Europe. For the Quartermaster Corps, it was a time of firsts: the first time warfare had been so mobile, the first time a war was fought in multiple climates, and “the first time in history large groups of men lived for long periods of time solely on commercially produced and processed foods.”6 These were not faring well. Reports were filtering back of soldiers who would rather go hungry than eat rations and of uneaten rations piled in trash heaps and littering roadways. “It is our opinion that the most critical and urgent problems are in the food field,” said Doriot, in a 1944 speech to the National Academy of Sciences, “and it is there that the bulk of our attention will be focused.”7 In time-honored pass-the-buck fashion, he then blamed the food industry: “It is because so little has been done in a scientific way on foods before the war [by his calculations, the industry spent just 2 percent of revenues on research], that we now find that so many unsolved problems confront us.”8 Applying the methods of good manufacturing—the very things he’d taught to future captains of industry at Harvard Business School—to army food became his mantra, one fully supported by the Subsistence Board, which included the chastened Isker as well as Bernard Proctor of MIT, Ancel Keys, and many others from academia, government, and industry. “In carrying out its mission the laboratory would act ‘as the hitherto missing military link between research groups and production groups,’”9 averred Proctor, the man who would become its supervisor.

BERNARD PROCTOR WAS A CLASSIC MIT GEEK. Born in nearby Malden, he headed to Cambridge to rack up an S.B. (1923), a Ph.D. (1927), an assistant professorship (1930), and an associate professorship (1937), all in food technology, which was at the time a subdiscipline of the Biology and Public Health Department. In 1913 MIT had been one of the first two universities nationwide to offer courses in food science; the other was Oregon State University. (More than two decades later, that number had increased only slightly to five.) In 1937 Proctor published the first book on the subject, the rather unimaginatively titled Food Technology, with Samuel Prescott, whose seminal work on thermal death times, which established the time and temperature needed to kill different kinds of food-borne bacteria, had finally relieved consumers of the nagging fear of loss of life and limb from exploding tins of lobster and tomatoes. That same year, he and Prescott also organized the first meeting of what would become food science’s most important trade association, attracting more than five hundred people. At the second conference two years later, attended by an even larger crowd, the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) was formally established and its first leaders elected—Prescott as president and a Swift research scientist, Roy Newton, as vice president. Nonetheless, MIT’s food technology division, housed in the nation’s foremost factory of serious science guys and eager-beaver engineers, suffered from an inferiority complex.

Then came the war. In addition to his appointment to the Quartermaster committee, Proctor was enlisted to travel the country in 1943 as an expert consultant on food to Henry Stimson, the secretary of war. A year later, he was made full professor at MIT and was offered a job as director of subsistence and packaging research in Washington, with responsibility for “all food supply and ration development for the Army.”10 This meant supervising the Subsistence Research Laboratory—for which “creating [product] specifications was one of the most important and time-consuming tasks”11—running field and nutritional tests; overseeing research projects at universities and federal agencies and in industry; and coordinating with the food agencies of the Allies. While there, however, he didn’t neglect his buddies back home. From July 1942 until after the end of the war, the Division of Food Technology did nothing but work on Quartermaster Corps contracts, including ones for dehydrated mashed potato powder; high-calorie, long-shelf-life emergency biscuits; precooked, frozen foods; a liquid ration for life rafts; and synthetic vitamin A.

The C; the D, a deliberately unpalatable chocolate bar for emergencies; and the K rations (both the A, fresh foods, and the B, prepared foods for consumption in camp, were not field rations) were microbiologically safe, but they looked and tasted awful. The canned meat and vegetables turned gray. The fat separated and went rancid. The meat tasted as if it had been cooked for months. Eggs and dairy were downright stinky. The cans themselves were weighty and unwieldy; light and flexible cellophane could only be used for dry foods. And provisions that might have been gobbled down without a second thought under normal circumstances became unappealing or even repugnant to soldiers who were agitated, exhausted, afraid, or fighting in extremely hot, cold, or humid conditions. The solution? Another committee.

In response to a request by Doriot, a special advisory group, the Committee on Quartermaster Problems, was formed in 1943 by the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council (NAS-NRC) to address the myriad inadequacies of soldier supplies. (After the war, it became the Advisory Board on Quartermaster Research and Development; later still, as the Advisory Board on Military Personnel Supplies, it oversaw the Natick Center until 1984.) The group had four standing subcommittees for textiles, plastics, leather and footwear, and germicides, and dealt with subsistence projects on a case-by-case basis. (A Subcommittee on Food was added after the war.) As an entity of the National Academy of Sciences, it was supposed to promote good science and high professional standards, a goal shared by Bernard Proctor. The Subsistence Laboratory’s external research program began to reflect this new orientation, favoring academic and institutional research over that of industry.

By 1944, as the tides of war were turning, the U.S. Armed Forces surged to 11.4 million, and on June 6 the Allies invaded German-held France. Although they suffered heavy casualties, they were able to retake Paris. From a larger space, the newly designated Quartermaster Subsistence Research and Development Laboratory had added several menu items and two rations for small groups of soldiers, the 10-in-1 and the 5-in-1—extralarge cans of meat combinations packed with sides, utensils, and condiments—to its wares, which met with a better reception from the troops. Under Proctor’s sure hand, with the help of a new addition to the Washington office, Emil Mrak, and the tireless ministrations of Isker, the lab had grown from the small, ill-equipped office it had been at the start of the war to become the administrative hub for food research undertaken all over the country, as well as a busy center in its own right where chemical, bacteriological, vitamin, and other studies were carried out. A food acceptance laboratory was added, headed by the University of Maine biologist W. Franklin Dove, to work full-time on understanding soldiers’ eating preferences; tracking consumer food habits, one of its practices, has since become an industry standard. “We worked out methods to test for acceptability, involving color, flavor, texture, noise—potato chips have to make a noise, you don’t like a potato chip that doesn’t make a noise—pain—chili con carne—tackiness in peanut butter,” said Mrak. “There were some seventeen factors that would come in, including heat, cold and rancidity, into food acceptance.”12

The climax came the next year. In April 1945 the Soviet Union advanced into Berlin, and Hitler did what all (dis)honorable dictators do when cornered: he fled—in his case, this mortal coil, by committing suicide in an underground bunker and then having his followers burn the remains. Although the battle still waged in the Pacific, the European war was all but over. The number of troops was at its apogee, 11.6 million, as was the size of the Subsistence Research and Development Laboratory. By July 1945 it had 284 staff, hundreds of food and packaging projects, and innumerable cooperative relationships—both formal and informal—with universities, companies, and other government agencies. Proctor, while continuing to serve as consultant to the army, returned to Boston and civilian life, bringing with him a juicy irradiated food sterilization project that would be his program’s primary source of income for more than two decades. Unperturbed, the army tapped one of MIT’s rising rivals, the University of California, to carry on its food research program.

EMIL MRAK CAME FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS. A farmer’s son, he entered the field of food technology—according to him, the discipline was started to employ jobless enologists during Prohibition—because he didn’t see a future in agriculture. At the University of California, he fell hard—for yeasts, on which he wrote his thesis. After graduation, however, he returned to his fruit-growing roots, becoming a prune fellow, a position funded by the California Prune and Apricot Growers Association. While there, he answered such pressing questions as whether or not prunes had a “laxative principle” (they do) and if they were detectable in the urine of San Quentin inmates (they are; why the association cared remains unanswered). Another of Mrak’s early academic achievements was the substitution of V8 juice for the gypsum blocks used for sporulating yeasts. But his carefree days among the microbes were numbered.

Mrak’s first Quartermaster Corps project was studying how to dehydrate fruits and vegetables without deterioration from yeast, mold, or browning, an assignment given to the university because his mentor and thesis adviser, William Cruess, was a pioneer in the field. He also participated in the Quartermaster committees and was eventually invited by Proctor’s colleague W. Ray Junk to “come on back and work with us.”13 After Proctor’s departure at the tail end of 1944, Mrak moved to Washington. “I was asked to assume chairmanship of a newly created committee, entitled the Committee on Food Research, which was to develop external research programs relating to various foods used in rations, to hold symposia, to call on scientific personnel throughout the country for help, and so on… . [The office was] probably 250 feet long, and fifty or sixty feet wide, with tiny little desks about half the size of an ordinary desk so you always had to have stuff on the floor… . It was a temporary—what I call a permanent temporary building… . There must have been twenty or thirty people in this office, and at one end was a little office—a very small one where Ray Junk was (then it was Captain Junk)—and beyond him was Dr. Bernie Proctor’s office. Upstairs was the same setup, but up there was Colonel McClain… . Colonel McClain was the guardian, or the gatekeeper for the General [Doriot]. So, if you wanted anything out of the General, you had to go through the Colonel.”14 By midyear 125 projects in eighty-four laboratories had been begun; seven conferences on topics such as the deterioration of fats and oils, food habits, developing concepts of protein metabolism, metabolism of low-caloric intake, bread staling, microbiology, and dairy chemistry had been organized; and numerous publications had been issued.

By July 1945 the Americans had retaken the Philippines, but heavy casualties were predicted for the final assault on Japan. Weary of the bloodshed, the United States decided to detonate the deadly flowers of its war science program. World War II ended with two giant booms: the vaporizing blasts in Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9.

Victory was ours, but it had been a herculean effort. It wasn’t that the United States had been unprepared for a global war. After being caught almost empty-handed when World War I erupted, the army had spent two decades coming up with the rapid, large-scale mobilization plan that had guided the country’s efforts as it scaled up to join the multinational scrum. But even this preparation hadn’t been enough to forestall or curtail the unprecedented cost and loss of human life.

The lesson of World War II was clear: We needed more. Bigger budgets. Longer time lines. Better training. Closer cooperation. In a word—one originally proposed by President Theodore Roosevelt—more preparedness. (The concept also does a great job at keeping the military employed during interwar periods—the five American wars since 1945 only kept the Defense Department busy about half the time.) The immediate postwar period may have seen a military demobilization, but in the sciences, the government was already building up for the next big engagement—by order of Army Chief of Staff Dwight D. Eisenhower. “The Army as one of the main agencies responsible for the defense of the nation has the duty to take the initiative in promoting closer relations between civilian and military interests. It must establish definite policies and administrative leadership which will make possible even greater contributions from science, technology, and management than during the last war.”15

This postwar science policy fit perfectly with the army’s already greatly increased investment in basic and applied food research—all it had to do was make the program begun in early 1945 and spearheaded by Mrak known to the public. Army public relations experts placed articles in papers around the country explaining the program’s mission to find solutions for things like gray hash and stale bread. “The war produced atomic fission and radar, but no substitute for hardtack, it turns out.”16 An investment in food research was especially politically appealing in the wake of wartime and postwar food shortages in the United States and abroad. Forty-four years later, Samuel Goldblith, the Bataan Death March hero who became an MIT food technology professor, commented, “This external research program was really the beginning of the major external R&D support at universities throughout the country, with federal government funding. A number of leading lights (and others who would become leading lights) in food technology were on temporary duty spearheading the Quartermaster Corps research and development effort. These men, who were then in their forties, included such luminaries as Bernard Proctor, Emil Mrak, W. Ray Junk, Samuel Lepkovsky, Rohland Isker, and M.L. (Tim) Anson, to name but a few. The Quartermaster Corps’ R&D effort was important per se, but it also assumed long-range importance by being an important catalyst to the emergence of food science as a discipline in the United States.”17

NINE MONTHS AFTER PEACE WAS DECLARED, Rohland Isker retired from the army, and the Subsistence Research and Development Laboratory, newly christened the Food and Container Institute for the Armed Forces, entered its final professional-scientist phase. It may have been that Isker was ready for a change—after all, he’d already served the requisite thirty years to receive a full pension. Or it may have been suggested that there was no longer a need for the sort of impromptu management style he’d perfected during the crisis in comestibles. But the directorship was obviously a role that Isker was reluctant to relinquish, and he quickly turned to his one remaining resource—an address book bulging with important industrial names—to re-create something of the power and excitement of the war years. In 1946, he founded a trade association, the Associates of the Food and Container Institute for the Armed Forces, which, within a year, had 166 food and packaging industry members. The group’s executive officers were from American Can Company, General Foods, Armour, Swift, and others of that ilk and declared their intention to “serve as a clearing house for policy decisions concerning research required for the food and container industry of the Armed Forces.”18 In August 1948 Clarence Francis, chairman of General Foods, who had been Roosevelt’s war production facilities manager, was appointed its chairman. While this organization never achieved the scientific spark-plug role Isker envisioned for it, it’s lasted for sixty years, principally as a way for smaller contractors to win army ration procurement contracts.

When the war ended, Georges Doriot also put to good use his new knowledge and extensive connections, becoming the “Father of Venture Capitalism.” He founded the American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC) to “furnish capital to companies principally engaged in the development of new enterprises, processes and new products”19 and, with an exemption from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), began offering stock in it to the public right away. ARDC, presided over by Doriot, also had on its board of directors MIT’s president, Karl Compton, as well as several other professors from the institute. How important were Doriot’s years in Washington with the Quartermaster Corps to this enterprise? His biographer, Spencer Ante, says, “It was through World War II that he underwent the most significant metamorphosis of his life, transforming himself from a professor of business into a world-class builder of innovative new enterprises. When Doriot became head of the Military Planning Division in the Office of the Quartermaster General, he began running, in a sense, his first venture capital operation.”20

Bernard Proctor and Emil Mrak returned to their respective campuses to found two of the nation’s most important food technology programs—at least until MIT pulled the plug on theirs in the 1980s, due to dwindling federal grant monies for the field. Both men continued to be active in military-funded research—Proctor worked primarily on irradiation of food and Mrak on yeasts—and both rose to become administrators in their universities. Each man served as president of IFT, the organization that Proctor and his mentor Samuel Prescott had helped to form right before the war. Today the organization has more than twenty-one thousand members worldwide; it serves both as a nexus for the industry through its meetings and widely attended annual conference and as an important source of information on food research through its various publications. In addition, after the war, Mrak’s colleague from the Committee on Food Research and editor of Advances in Protein Chemistry, Harvard professor Mortimer Anson, recommended him to his publisher, Academic Press. With this support, Mrak founded the influential Advances in Food Research; many of the studies highlighted in its early issues had been done or funded by the armed forces or other government agencies working in collaboration with them. Marveled Mrak thirty years later: “That Committee on Food Research, the Quartermaster laboratory in Chicago, and now that laboratory at Natick, Massachusetts (one I’m still advisor to), have benefitted the civilian population more than will ever be known. A lot of the foods we have today, the idea of acceptability and convenience, and stability, all came out of the war, the Quartermaster Corps. They’re still producing new things that people use; the average citizen doesn’t know this.”21

IN THE UNIVERSE OF PROCESSED FOOD, World War II was the Big Bang. A blazing maelstrom of particles and energy, impenetrable to the observer, that as they cooled and drifted apart formed stars, planets, moons, and wandering clouds of dust. The sun is the Natick Center (first the Subsistence Research Laboratory and then the Quartermaster Food and Container Institute for the Armed Forces), the source of many, if not most, of the new scientific concepts and major technological breakthroughs that go into making everything from morning coffee to late-night chocolate chip cookies. The planets and moons are the Institute of Food Technologists, the world’s biggest food technology trade association, a streamlined way to disseminate and exchange information, and a broad network of university food technology departments, most of which have been employed directly by DOD on one project or another and all of which teach new generations of students the knowledge mined for decades by the Natick Center. And the clouds of wandering dust? The myriad companies whose products—built on that same knowledge—are the ones we reach for day in and day out in our kitchens, at the mini-mart, and in the grocery store.