What If the FDA Encouraged Meatless Mondays and Wheatless Wednesdays? At One Time, It Did.
What the 1918 Spanish flu can teach us about what to eat now
When the pandemic started, we were all chefs, shouting about sourdough yeasts and where to score grass-fed beef. That was never going to last. Now we’re all just trying to survive on pizza, mac and cheese, and bean wraps. Simplicity is the new Eden, with the U.S. food supply chain showing its fragility as workers at meat processors, grocers, and warehouses have been vulnerable to waves of Covid-19.
For a lesson in the elemental food life, let’s take a trip to the last time Americans found themselves stuck at home en masse because of a disease, the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, which killed as many as 100 million people in a world with only 1.8 billion. Compare that to this moment, shared by 7.7 billion souls.
In America’s thousands of newspapers (archived, wondrously, at newspapers.com), you’ll find stadiums and theaters closed, cures promised, reports of deaths sweeping a nation, arguments over masks, and a concern with what to eat. In Europe, World War I forced food shortages, although restaurants were generally allowed to remain open as places of social convening.
