In our premiere episode, co-hosts Anna Van Valin and Lia Ballentine tell us why “Food stories are people stories.” Lia explores the food holiday that sparked her obsession: National Doughnut Day, created to celebrate the phenomenal Donut Lassies of World War I. In our first Deep Dish segment, Anna takes us down a quarantine-inspired rabbit hole into the world of survival food - and something called the US Civil Defense All-Purpose Survival Cracker. Welcome to Every Day is a Food Day!
Connect with us at @FoodDayPod on Instagram & Twitter, join our Facebook Group, and check out our webpage.
More to explore from the show...
Hear "Don't Forget the Salvation Army, Always Remember my Donut Girl" by Arthur Fields
Watch 1950's Cold War film Duck and Cover
Learn more about The Doomsday Diet in Eater Magazine
In our premiere episode, co-hosts Anna Van Valin and Lia Ballentine tell us why “Food stories are people stories.” Lia explores the food holiday that sparked her obsession: National Doughnut Day, created to celebrate the phenomenal Donut Lassies of World War I. In our first Deep Dish segment, Anna takes us down a quarantine-inspired rabbit hole into the world of survival food - and something called the US Civil Defense All-Purpose Survival Cracker. Welcome to Every Day is a Food Day!
Connect with us at @FoodDayPod on Instagram & Twitter, join our Facebook Group, and check out our webpage.
More to explore from the show...
Hear "Don't Forget the Salvation Army, Always Remember my Donut Girl" by Arthur Fields
Watch 1950's Cold War film Duck and Cover
Learn more about The Doomsday Diet in Eater Magazine
with Anna and Lia
A podcast from YumDayCo & Van Valin, LLC
PILOT
LIA [00:00]
Hi Everyone! From Yum Day Co and Van Valin Productions, welcome to the first episode of “Every Day is a Food Day”
MUSIC [00:09]
[Whistling/YumYum]
LIA [00:24]
I’m Lia Ballentine.
ANNA [00:26]
And I’m Anna Van Valin.
LIA [00:27]
On Every Day is a Food Day, we celebrate food stories, from our calendars to our kitchens.
ANNA [00:33]
Today we’re going to tell you a little bit about us, Lia’s going to introduce us to Food Holidays and tell us the story behind her favorite one, National Donut Day, and I’m going to take you on a quarantine-inspired journey into the history of Doomsday food.
MUSIC [00:50]
ANNA [00:59]
Stories about food are just stories about people and the more stories about people we can tell the better we can understand each other.
LIA [01:05]
And in the middle of 2020, we thought that was something we could all use.
ANNA [01:09]
That’s right, we’re saving the world through a food podcast.
LIA [01:13]
We’re heroes!
ANNA [01:16]
You’re welcome, world!
MUSIC [01:15]
Crowd Yays
LIA [01:19]
We also wanna know what you're thinking, cooking, and eating. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter @FoodDayPod, and join our Facebook group.
ANNA [01:28]
And if you want the recipes or more info about the foods you hear about today, check out our website, yumday.co/podcast. Lia, are you ready?
LIA [01:37]
I'm so ready. Let's save the world with a podcast!
ANNA [01:41]
Let's do it!
MUSIC [01:42]
LIA [01:55]
Anna and I have known each other a long time. We're both super creative people and we both love food.
ANNA [02:03]
However, we're kind of a food odd couple. Lia is a great cook and creator, I am less skilled in the kitchen. I'm more of a food thinker, like a food philosopher, a food-losopher. Can we make that a word?
LIA [02:18]
Yeah, sure, I mean, it’s our show.
ANNA [02:20]
That's why you make your own show. Lia, let's start with you. Tell us about your food back story.
LIA [03:31]
Well, I’m Filipino, and in our culture food is love. If you visit any Filipino household, you will be fed — whether you’re hungry or not. And as you know, Anna, I was born in the Philippines and moved to the United States when I was really young, so as an immigrant kid, food was one of the ways I learned about America. I have vivid memories of the first time I ever had mashed potatoes and gravy. It was life-changing. But you know, food was also a way for me to share my Filipino culture with others. I remember introducing pancit, which is a Filipino noodle dish to my American classmates in elementary school. I was really shy about it at first, but a bunch of them liked it, and it made me feel so proud. So food has always been a way for me to connect with people and places, whether it's learning about a new community or me getting to share some part of myself with others. So what about you, Anna? What's your food back story?
ANNA [03:34]
Ah, well I am from an equally exotic place, Buffalo, New York. Every night growing up, my mother would dutifully cook us nutrition pyramid-compliant dinners with straightforward wholesome American food. You know, stuff like casseroles and roast beef and green beans. However, despite my mother's best efforts at feeding me healthy things, I was a latchkey kid and I definitely took the period between when I got home from school and when my parents got home from work as a junk food free for all... There were so many Little Debbie snack cakes, The Swiss Cake Rolls were my snack cake of choice, I used to make myself nachos, which was just I would spread tortilla chips on a plate and then I would grate, you know the big blocks of orange cheese...
LIA [04:28]
Oh yeah.
ANNA [04:30]
I would just grate the cheese until I couldn't see the chips anymore.
LIA [04:35]
Okay, so between that and your mother's more wholesome meals, which would you say stuck in terms of your eating habits?
ANNA [04:45]
Oh, absolutely the latchkey kid free-for-all. And I can’t cook. I’m a terrible cook. So if you match that with my palette, which is stuck at middle schooler, then like when I’m left to my own devices I will just have Goldfish crackers and apple slices for dinner. But I love food, and I could talk about it all day long, which is why we are here. And speaking of why we’re here: Lia, this podcast is an extension of your company, YumDay. Can you tell us why you founded YumDay and what it's all about?
LIA [05:19]
Yeah, so I've been obsessed with food holidays ever since I learned about National Doughnut Day.
ANNA [05:26]
How did you find out about National Doughnut Day?
LIA [05:29]
Well years ago, a co-worker arrived at the office with boxes of doughnuts, and I just assumed it was somebody’s birthday. But when I asked her whose birthday it was, she looked at me and said, “It’s National Doughnut Day!” I’d never heard of National Doughnut Day before, so I had to find out more. I grabbed a doughnut — maybe two — ran back to my desk, started Googling, and I discovered that National Doughnut Day was a very real thing with a surprising and inspiring history. But then that led me to looking up if there were other food holidays, and I found out that there’s at least one food to celebrate each day. Plus, many of them also had cool backstories like Doughnut Day. I always thought it’d be fun to celebrate as many food holidays as I could. So last year, I decided to actually do it and launched my foodie passion project, Yumday! Since last October I’ve been cooking and eating the national food of the day almost every day, and along the way, I’ve discovered new recipes and cool histories behind so many holidays.
ANNA [06:40]
I love following along with YumDay, I loved learning about all of these different food holidays and foods honestly, I'd never even heard of. But Lia, you don't just cook the foods, you also style them and take incredible photos of them, which everyone can see on YumDay.co or if you follow @YumDayCo on Instagram. I have to say you make all the foods look pretty... Including the ugly ones.
LIA [07:09]
Oh, thank you so much. It's a fun challenge. I really nerd out when it comes to food photography. Speaking of nerding out, earlier when you said you were a food thinker, a food-losopher.
ANNA [07:20]
Food-losopher, trademark.
LIA [07:24]
Can you tell us a little bit more about what food-losophy means?
ANNA [07:28]
There are just very few things that are as necessary, ubiquitous, diverse, and also personal as food like every living being needs it. That makes it central to all the other parts of our lives, not just basic survival, so we schedule literally every day around eating, it's how we divide our time. It's the center of our social lives, whether... If you think about like a first date or having drinks after work or a Sunday brunch, which I miss, and it's part of our rituals like a wedding cake is super important, right? And our religions, so like communion, a Passover Seder or fasting, not eating food for Ramadan, and essential to our holidays. I mean, what is Thanksgiving without turkey? Like what, it's just Thursday. Just cancel the day. Plus food is a huge part of our relationships, right? Like, like you said, in your family, food is love...
LIA [08:27]
Yeah.
ANNA [08:28]
We even use food words as terms of endearment for the people we love, like honey or sweetheart, sugar.
LIA [08:35]
Right. And food can also be very political.
ANNA [08:38]
Yeah, absolutely. Access to nutritious food and clean water has always been political, and especially if you think of actual legislation or actual government projects like school lunch programs or food stamps or things like grocery store deserts. And it's a status symbol. Food is a status symbol that has changed over time, right? It used to be that being fat showed that you had high status because you could afford more food than you needed, and now being skinny show status because it means you can afford fancy organic food and personal trainers and fancy gym memberships, which of course, being fat doesn't mean you're unhealthy and skinny mean you're healthy... But that's kind of how we look at it as a society, right?
LIA [09:25]
Right.
ANNA [09:25]
So what I’m getting at here is that food is a human constant. So if we look at a specific ingredient, or meal, or food tradition, deeply, then it will tell us something about the society or the moment in time that it came from, you know, just like looking at a piece of art will.
LIA [09:48]
Yeah. You're so right about that. And while I'm sure there are a lot of folks who think that food holidays might seem silly or are just marketing stunts, when you dig in, there are so many days, like National Doughnut Day, with fascinating origin stories that have real cultural significance.
ANNA [10:07]
Okay, so should we jump into talking about food holidays?
LIA [10:10]
I think we should. Let's do it.
MUSIC [10:12]
ANNA [10:15]
Okay Lia, let's talk about food holidays. So these are days, weeks, or months that celebrate a specific food dish or ingredient, right?
LIA [10:27]
Yep, that's right.
ANNA [10:28]
But where do they come from? Like who decrees that these are food holidays?
LIA [10:32]
Ah, that’s a very good question. Well, there are what I call “official” food holidays that are celebrated as a tribute to certain events in history or that have been established by Food and Trade Organizations, private businesses, individuals, and even the government. For example, Ronald Reagan issued a presidential proclamation in 1987, proclaiming June 25th to be National Catfish Day. Catfish farming in the Mississippi Delta was really booming at the time, so a commemorative bill was proposed and eventually passed by Congress, which led to Reagan's Catfish Day proclamation.
ANNA [11:13]
Wow. Okay, so that's, that's official ones. Are there unofficial ones?
LIA [11:18]
Yes, so the holidays I’m calling “unofficial” have no known origin. Basically, they've been celebrated for so long on the internet that Google has indexed these holidays, and I guess if Google tells you that it's National Crab Stuffed Flounder day, then it must be real, right?
ANNA [11:37]
So let's talk about the food holiday that started your obsession, National Donut Day. You said earlier that it had an amazing story.
LIA [11:47]
Yeah, National Doughnut Day is a great example of an official holiday with a very cool story behind it, but before I dive in, I wanna note that there are two national doughnut days. So the official celebration is on the first Friday of June, but the unofficial one, the one with the questionable origin is on November 5th.
ANNA [12:13]
Well I mean we'll take any excuse to eat doughnuts, right?
LIA [12:17]
Yeah, I'm not complaining.
ANNA [12:19]
Okay, but we'll give the June holiday its due. What makes it official?
LIA [12:27]
So the official National Doughnut Day in June dates back to 1938 when it was created by the Salvation Army as a fundraiser to help people during the Great Depression. It was also established to honor the women who served donuts to soldiers in World War I. These women were called The Salvation Army Doughnut Lassies, and they were led by an incredible woman named Evangeline Booth.
LIA [12:56]
Evangeline Booth was the daughter of the founders of the Salvation Army. She started taking on leadership roles with the Salvation Army when she was just a teenager, and in her 20s, she led the organization’s expansion efforts from Great Britain to Canada and the United States. By the early 1900s, when she was just in her 30s, she was creating new forms of social service, like building hospitals for unwed mothers, special residences for working women, housing for the elderly, soup kitchens, and more. She even supervised major disaster relief efforts. Of course, her service during World War I, which included the Doughnuts for Doughboys Program, earned Evangeline a Distinguished Service medal from the United States Army in 1919.
ANNA [13:45]
So Evangeline Booth was a global business and humanitarian leader and war hero who started when she was a teenager and I've never heard her name before, which makes me a little angry, honestly. So what was the Doughnuts for Doughboys program?
LIA [13:59]
In 1917, Evangeline sent a handful of Salvation Army officers, including four women, to support the soldiers on the front lines in France. They built restrooms, service centers, basically anything and everything to support American troops. Two of the women who were there, Helen Purviance and Margaret Sheldon, wanted to provide home cooked food to the soldiers. But their supplies were pretty limited. However, when they looked at what ingredients were available, they had just enough to make doughnuts. So Helen and Margaret fried up donuts in a little frying pan in their tent, and the story goes that the smell was so good, soldiers began lining up outside.
ANNA [14:43]
I totally believe it. Doughnut smell is awesome, it's one of the best smells.
LIA [14:48]
For real. And that’s how the Doughnuts for Doughboys program got started!
ANNA [14:53]
So how did they manage to make so many doughnuts if they did not have, I'm assuming an abundance of ingredients or tools?
LIA [15:01]
Well, yeah, they were in short supply, but Helen and Margaret, really resourceful, started to collect excess rations, and because they didn't have all the proper kitchen tools, they used whatever was available to roll out the dough, like wine bottles and shell casings as rolling pins.
ANNA [15:18]
That is badass.
LIA [15:19]
Well, as you can imagine, this doughnut operation grew over time, and more women volunteered as Doughnut Lassies to serve the troops. They were serving upwards of 9000 doughnuts daily, even delivering them to soldiers in the trenches.
ANNA [15:37]
That's amazing.
LIA [14:51]
Isn’t it? It's crazy. There's even a story about a young woman named Stella Young, who's actually featured on a lot of the Salvation Army Doughnut Lassie posters, and she was making doughnuts in her tent, while there was crazy intense firing outside. And the story goes that a piece of shrapnel ripped through the tent and through the frying pan that she was using, but didn't stop her from continuing to make and serve doughnuts.
ANNA [16:08]
What I love about this story, is it ties right back to what we were saying earlier, that food can be about so much more than just basic survival. The donuts weren’t important because of their nutritional value, they were important because of their emotional significance. The soldiers were young men, thousands of miles from home, in a situation that was unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and terrifying. These donuts brought them a little bit of joy. And the Donut Lassies themselves, being there and handing out the donuts to the soldiers, gave them a moment of kindness and connection. That’s what’s so moving to me about this. I mean, imagine you’re an 18-year-old boy, you’re in some field in France, you’re freezing, you’re getting shot at, you’ve got Trench Food - and a nice lady hands you a donut?
LIA [17:03]
Right? Well we can tell how much they meant to the soldiers because in 1919 a song was written about them called “Don’t forget the Salvation Army, always remember my donut girl”
MUSIC [17:25-18:23]
“Don’t Forget the Salvation Army (Doughnut Girl)”
LIA [18:00]
That’s a really old track so if you couldn’t hear the lyrics, he’s saying: Don’t forget the Salvation Army, always remember my doughnut girl / She brought them doughnuts and coffee just like an angel, she was their best pal / As brave as a lion but meek as a lamb she carried on beside the sons of Uncle Sam / So don’t forget the Salvation Army, remember my doughnut girl
ANNA [18:29]
This is just such a good example of what we mean when we say food stories are people stories.
LIA [18:34]
This was just one of the many ways women contributed to the war, and it didn't end with World War I. In World War II, the American Red Cross had Doughnut Dollies. So like the Doughnut Lassies, they also made and served doughnuts to troops in addition to all of their other wartime service duties, but unlike the Lassies, the Dollies did have a bit of help with doughnut production because they were loaned doughnut machines by the Doughnut Corporation of America.
ANNA [18:58]
Oh, that's kinda cheating.
LIA [19:00]
Yeah, kinda. According to a report from December 1944, 205 Red Cross Doughnut Dollies, with the help of those doughnut machines, made and served nearly 4.7 million doughnuts to soldiers stationed in Great Britain. Even today the work Evangeline started over a hundred years ago still goes on: this year for National Doughnut Day, the Salvation Army continued its tradition of supporting people on the front lines. They actually served donuts to first responders and healthcare workers on the front lines of the pandemic.
ANNA [19:41]
That's fantastic. Evangeline would be proud.
LIA [19:45]
She would be. So, Anna, this is why I love National Doughnut Day, not just because I'm addicted to carbs and sugar, or that you can get free donuts from places like Krispy Kreme and Dunkin Donuts, but because this food holiday has such an awesome origin story that celebrates power women in history.
ANNA [20:06]
Lia, I'm so glad you said that and that we’re telling this story because, okay, you've heard this rant, listeners, you're gonna hear this rant a lot, it's a common rant of mine, but women have contributed to every part of society since the beginning of time, even if you haven't heard of them. Okay, there's always been women inventors, artists, scientists, warriors, always, always, always. Women have participated in and been integral parts of every major event in history, right? Their contributions just aren't always seen as worthy of textbooks or HBO mini-series as the dude counterparts, but it doesn't mean we weren't there, and it doesn't mean we weren't important. And this is the perfect example.
LIA [20:47]
It really is!
ANNA [20:49]
And it’s just one of so many food stories we can’t wait to share with you. Speaking of which, coming up in our Deep Dish segment, we’re going to explore how Americans deal with food in a lockdown, from Doomsday Preppers to the Cold War’s government-engineered survival food.
MUSIC [21:13]
ANNA [21:22]
Okay, Lia. As we talked about at the top of the show, every living being needs food, it’s a constant. So when we anticipate a crisis that might threaten our access to food, we freak out. I definitely did at the beginning of the pandemic. I started hearing rumors that there was going to be a stay-at-home order, my first thought was “I gotta get some food.” But of course, that was everyone else’s first thought too. So I roll up to Ralphs, and the parking is packed like it was the day before Thanksgiving. Then I go inside and see the empty shelves. Not only are the shelves empty, entire AISLES are empty -- which is what you see at the beginning of every apocalypse movie like that is some Walking Dead s**t. And I was scared, I was legitimately scared. So I did the only thing I could think of: I loaded my cart with whatever nonsense food was left in that store and I spent hundreds of dollars on random gross food I would then force myself to eat over the following months.
ANNA [22:37]
So I started wondering: ok if someone wanted to prepare for a scenario where access to food is really threatened, how would they do that? How have people done that in the past? Is there a perfect Doomsday food out there? That’s what we’re going deep on in our Deep Dish today.
MUSIC [22:50]
ANNA [23:11]
If you’re looking for Doomsday food, you go to the first logical place: Doomsday Preppers. If you’ve never heard of them, they’re people who are preparing for a world-altering event, like a natural disaster, nuclear warfare, or a global pandemic. They stockpile supplies, grow their own food, create water purification systems, and build survival bunkers (actually they call them bug-out locations, but they’re bunkers). Which sounds kind of practical, especially given everything we’ve been through in the past year. But when I dug a little deeper I realized that their seeming practicality gets out of control pretty fast. So they start out in a place that sounds reasonable...
CLIP 1 [23:58]
"Doomsday Preppers": People call me a suburban prepper, but I really prefer to think of myself as just your typical suburban mom who has an eye on the future.
ANNA [24:05]
...then they take it to just the craziest conclusion possible.
CLIP 2 [24:10]
"Doomsday Preppers": If you don't have food, you're gonna die, if you don't have firearms, someone can take all your food, so to me, you have to balance that between firearms and food...
CLIP 3 [24:22]
I have four AR-15's, one for each family member.
ANNA [24:27]
It turned out that “Prepping” is a lot more about making your kids cosplay as a tiny militia / than it is about making sure you have food to survive Doomsday. Basically, they all had vegetable gardens and piles of MREs in their garages. That’s it. The Preppers were honestly a little disappointing, but I was intrigued by the idea of bunkers because: if you were going to have a Doomsday bunker, I would assume you’d want to put food in it. And bunker food, it turns out, is a whole THING. I found a shocking number of articles, listicles, and recommendations for bunker food.
LIA [25:25]
Did they all just say “banana bread and sourdough starter?”
ANNA [25:29]
No!
LIA [25:30]
What?
ANNA [25:31]
No!
LIA [25:32]
That’s in my bunker.
ANNA [25:36]
No! None of these authors anticipated our deep, desperate need for emotional fulfillment through food. So none of them mentioned either banana bread or sourdough, so take this with a grain of salt.
ANNA [25:54]
Here’s a list of recommended bunker foods according to the experts, and by experts, I mean the internet.
LIA [27:01]
Wait, what is rancidification?
ANNA [27:06]
First of all: it’s my new favorite word. Second of all: it’s exactly what it sounds like - the oxidation or hydrolysis of fats and oils when exposed to air, light or moisture, or by bacterial action, resulting in an unpleasant taste or odor. So basically, the nastyfication of food.
LIA [27:29]
Nastyfication
ANNA [27:30]
Nastyfication sounds like a Janet Jackson /B side.
LIA [27:34]
/It does! That’s what I was thinking! “I’m Miss Nastyfication.”
ANNA [27:47]
Miss Nastification…Ok, so that’s what the experts say now, but I also wanted to find out if or how we have tried to prepare for a Doomsday scenario in the past. [28:03] There was a period in US history when things like “building survival bunkers” and “finding the perfect Doomsday food” weren’t fringe activities. [28:11] We actually had entire military departments dedicated to them, and the idea of survival was baked into Americans’ everyday lives. So I’m talking about the early years of the Cold War.
ANNA [28:30]
A little refresher: After World War II, the world was completely traumatized from seeing the new and horrific ways human beings could hurt each other, not the least of which was the atom bomb. As other countries, especially Soviet Russia, began building their nuclear arsenals, Americans became increasingly afraid of a nuclear attack on US soil. In the mid-50’s President Dwight Eisenhower enlisted the Office of Civilian Defense, which had been established by FDR in 1941, to come up with new ways for the government to protect civilians, and ways for civilians to protect themselves if the Doomsday scenario came true.
CLIP 4 [29:10]
“The Free World knows out of the bitter wisdom of experience, that vigilance and sacrifice are the price of liberty…” [Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace”; Speech; 14:26-33]
ANNA [29:19]
These were called Readiness Programs. One of the most famous was “Duck and Cover,” a method of personal protection for anyone within the radius of a nuclear explosion (who wasn’t vaporized immediately, I guess?). It was famously taught through a 1952 children’s film, which was shown countless times in American grade schools. It featured an adorable turtle named Burt and this song, which, no, you will never get out of your head.
CLIP 5 [29:49]
"Duck and Cover": He did what we all must learn to do, you and you and you and you. Duck and cover.
ANNA [30:00]
The film taught the kids how to, well, duck and cover.
CLIP 6 [30:04]
“Duck and Cover” instructions (3:03-3:16)
ANNA [30:17]
So just to recap: if a bomb goes off that destroys literally everything around it on a molecular level...just duck and cover! you'll be fine. Radiation can’t find you under a desk. There were several readiness programs related to food and the home in general. For example, in 1955, the government created an initiative called “Grandma's Pantry”, encouraging families to always have at least seven days worth of food for the whole family on hand. The inspiration came from the idea that whenever you stopped by Grandma’s house she always had enough food for everyone. They put displays in 500 Sears-Roebuck stores across America, which consisted of a cardboard cut-out of "Grandma"- surrounded by shelter-friendly foods, like Corn Flakes and Tang.
LIA [31:35]
Okay so if the world ends just drink some Tang. Easy. Got it.
ANNA [31:41]
Yeah, but drink the Tang under your desk so that you're safe.
LIA [31:37]
I forgot that first step…
ANNA [31:38]
Go under your desk. Drink the tang. Duck. Cover. Tang.
ANNA [31:47]
Since women in the 1950s were often the keepers of the home, they were seen as first responders and had a key role in civil defense. Please see my earlier rant about women being integral to every part of history because this is yet another example. They learned to recognize different air sirens,/ read radiation output meters,/ administer first aid,/ and act as lookouts, you know, for any funny business in the sky (Although if there is funny business in the sky, it's too late ladies, it's too late, it's over. Go inside, drink your Tang). Some women were assigned to be Block Wardens, meaning they were in charge of organizing and executing emergency plans for their entire neighborhood. Lia, you know I would’ve been the first to sign up to be a Block Warden.
LIA [32:36]
You’d be the greatest block warden.
ANNA [32:38]
I would be running drills at 3:00 AM. My clipboard and stopwatch would show no mercy. In order to prepare for possible food shortages, women were also encouraged to cook large quantities of food they could freeze or preserve. I actually found a story by a woman named Barbara Curtis about baking huge batches of what her mother called Doomsday Cookies in the 1950s.
LIA [33:06]
Doomsday Cookies?
ANNA [33:07]
Yes, that is what her mother called them. Yep, it's from "Chicken Soup for the Soul Cookbook, 101 Stories with Recipes From the Heart." Here's an excerpt:
MUSIC [33:25]
ANNA [33:26]
"I grew up in the 1950s, during the height of the Cold War, a time defined by the threat of another world war and the bomb. We all practiced hiding under our desks during simulated bombing raids and heeded very seriously the practice of stockpiling food against wartime shortage - so my sister and I would help mom make dozens of Doomsday Cookies. I didn't know what that meant (being too little to go to school yet) and asked her when Doomsday was. I thought it was some kind of holiday you could plan for, like Christmas! Mom said that Doomsday was the time when our enemies would drop a bomb on us. Scary! but mom never believed in lying to children. I remember feeling so confused: how can something as good as these cookies be related to a terrible scenario like Doomsday."
ANNA [34:22]
Lia, I think I’ve figured out what happened to Boomers. I think they were deeply traumatized as children by all of this, by Duck and Cover and bombing drills and Doomsday Cookies. Which is why when they grew up and got some power, they decided that every police officer should have his own tank, and if someone offers you an Altoid, they’re a dirty socialist.
LIA [34:51]
I think you’re onto something.
ANNA [34:53]
Now, the government knew that if there was a nuclear attack/ people were going to need more than a desk and some Tang to stay safe, they would need to create secure places for civilians to go and possibly stay for long periods of time. Which brings us finally, to the bunkers. AKA fallout shelters.
CLIP 7 [35:15]
"Walt Builds a Shelter": The main object of shelter living is to survive, however, community supplies and equipment which supplement those items provided by the federal government will make shelter living more enjoyable, comfortable, organized, and pleasant."
ANNA [35:33]
These shelters are pretty incredible: They weren't just fortified basements. The government built whole underground cities, carved out mountains in the Rockies and the Poconos, connected lava tunnels in Hawaii, and tricked out a lot of caves across the country. Some of the shelters still exist, and (my first thought was that those sound like they would make amazing AirBnBs), but it turns out that while they are still safety bunkers, they’re just reserved for high-ranking government officials and corporate executives. The government also wanted civilians to build their own shelters.
CLIP 8 [36:18]
"Walt Builds a Shelter": Well, here's a way anybody can do just what I have done. To begin with, the best way to build anything is the right way. So I got this bulletin. It's the official bulletin put out by the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization called the Family Fallout Shelter.
LIA [36:38]
It's like HGTV for the Cold War.
ANNA [36:40]
Totally, and since it was the early 60s, I'm imagining that they were all done in like mid-century modern. Style, like their shelters, it's all like clean lines. Lotta Orange shag carpets. Okay, so once they got the people in the shelters, they were gonna have to feed them, obviously, which brings me to my favorite part of the story, the absolute masterpiece that is the Civil Defense All-Purpose Survival Cracker. Is your mouth watering?
LIA [37:15]
Mm, it is.
ANNA [37:15]
President Eisenhower wanted to develop the perfect doomsday food. He commissioned an exploration into what would be the simplest, cheapest, most nutritious, and longest-lasting food. It needed to be one food that could sustain people for two weeks. After two weeks, they figured it would be safe enough that people could go out and forage for food, and that enough people would have died in the initial attack, that there be enough for everyone left. Doomsday science is bleak, ok. It’s bleak. Also, everything I read counted time in man-days, like two weeks is 14 man-days.
LIA [38:01]
Weird, like as opposed to lady days?
ANNA [38:04]
Squirrel days?
LIA [38:06]
Maybe 'cause Lady Days would be much shorter. We could get much shorter 'cause we could get it done in get half the time.
ANNA [38:12]
'Cause we can f***in’ multitask. After extensive research and testing, they settled Bulgur Wheat. Which is a starch made from parboiled whole grains known as groats. They knew it had a long shelf life because it had been found in a 3000-year-old Egyptian pyramid, and the anthropologists who found it ate it. Anthropologists are nasty. You’re not supposed to eat the artifacts, guys. But people weren't gonna just eat straight up groats as delicious as that sounds. So the next question was, what form should the bulgur wheat take? They went with what would be the most easily packaged and take up the least room: crackers. The people who taste-tested them said that whether surviving on the crackers was better than straight-up starving was quote, debatable, but they went with them anyway. So the plan was that each survivor in a bunker would eat one bulger cracker six times per man-day for a total of 700 calories, which would be enough to just keep them from starving.
LIA [39:36]
One cracker 6 times a day in an underground bunker sounds like the latest GOOP diet.
ANNA [39:44]
My God, it does. Yeah like the Kardashians may have already done this.
LIA [39:48]
That I think I saw a blog post on this like last week.
ANNA [39:51]
Down there with their orgasm candle spinning in their silk cocoons, popping those yoni eggs. 6 crackers. I might try it though, as my Post Quarantine Diet 'cause I am getting desperate. So now they had to figure out how to mass produce the crackers. They wanted to make 150 million pounds of crackers, okay, which would mean processing 3 million bushels of bulgur, Um, but at that time, there was only one mill in the entire US that processed bulgur wheat. So in December 1961, the Pentagon called in the heads of all the US cereal companies, you got Nabisco, Kroger, General Mills, Keebler, and convinced them to shift production to making these survival crackers in mass quantities. So, from 1962 to 1964, these companies produced 20 billion crackers.
LIA [40:59]
That is a LOT of crackers/oh my god.
ANNA [41:03]
Yeah, that’s a lot of crackers. And, you may have noticed that we did not get nuked. By the beginning of the 1970’s it was looking less and less likely that the fallout shelters would be needed. And if we didn’t need the bunkers, we were definitely not going to need all 20 billion of those crackers. But they did want to just toss those beautiful groat crackers. So, because they were for survival, they ended up using them in disaster relief packages, like after an earthquake in Guatemala and a monsoon in India, and also to fight famine in other parts of the world. However, by the late 70s, the crackers were discontinued as disaster relief because wait for it, RANCIDIFICATION had set in!!
LIA [41:57]
Rancidification!
ANNA [41:59]
I love a callback, Lia. I love a callback. Um, relief workers reported that the crackers were so gross, they couldn’t even get starving people to eat them, and the ones who did experience severe gastrological distress. So it was a nice thought, America. But no. But Lia, that's not the end of the survival cracker story.
LIA [42:26]
It's not?
ANNA [42:28]
These crackers are still around and people are still eating them. They were made to be preserved and last a long time, right, so there are still some around and history buffs or survivalists, buy them on eBay or at conventions, and I found a bunch of YouTube videos of these guys who are buying the tins, opening them, and eating the 60-year-old crackers on camera. It's like the most masochistic unboxing videos you've ever seen.
CLIP 9 [43:02]
"Cracker Tasting": Woooo! There is a definite permeating odor coming out of these, uh - wow - oh *coughs*. Alright, here it goes. Oddly enough, the cracker itself doesn't taste that bad, but the smell is unbelievable."
MUSIC [43:30]
LIA [43:35]
I love this story, but you could not pay me to eat one of those crackers.
ANNA [43:41]
No, no. All due respect to the groat crackers, I'm good. So that is the story of the all-purpose survival cracker.
CREDITS
OUTRO