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Book Review: Confronting the Colonies: British Intelligence and Counterinsurgency by Rory Cormac

Despite its many strengths – Mosby’s work is, quite simply, food history done well – there are several areas where more could be done. As with most histories of policies, the high-level national perspective may obscure important local differences. In addition, the seeming lack of engagement with the longer historical context is somewhat limiting, and one wonders how developments before the 1930s influenced the evolution of Canada’s wartime food policies, which, at least in some respects, differed from (and had different effects than) those of the United States. This lack of longer perspective also produces some curious myopia. For example, Mosby suggests that the British national school meal programme began in 1944 (p. 193), when he might more fruitfully have traced it to the 1906 Provision of Meals Act. And his exploration of changes to gender roles in response to the dependence of public goals on (once) private domestic practices could be usefully connected to similar trends some fifty years earlier; as the germ theory of disease became widely accepted, for instance, it reinforced women’s traditional roles as housekeeper and food preparer, but also empowered those roles with significance not only for family health but for public health more broadly. How might the developments Mosby explores look differently were they placed in a somewhat longer historical trajectory? Lastly, the constant use of the expression ‘ordinary Canadians’ and similar expressions (e.g. ‘ordinary women’) reflects a certain sloppiness in an otherwise careful and thorough work. What, exactly, does ‘ordinary’ mean, and how did ‘ordinary Canadians’ differ from extraordinary Canadians? No book, of course, is perfect, and one often demands far more from a work of history than it can possibly deliver. Food Will Win the War contributes significantly to the relatively young field of food history, and Mosby’s work is sure to stimulate further work on the influence of the Second World War on Canadian food policy and cultures.