Bookslinger’s comment so completely predicts a post I have on the agenda that I’m going to link back to it when I get that far. That post will focus on a Relief Society lesson about getting adequate nutrition in wartime — in the U.S. at least — and includes a chart reminiscent of the Food Pyramid, but radically different from what we know today where our main problem is avoiding a superabundance rather than getting enough.

It is, of course, the difference between “then” and “now” in how we view sugar (and, generally, all the other commodities plugged in the ads we’ve posted) that gives all these ads their humor.

I used to decry and mock the church’s recommendation to have 60 pounds of sugar per person in one’s year’s supply. For a person to consume 60 pounds of “added” (not naturally occuring in fruits/vegetables) sugar annually is unreasonable in a normal modern-day diet.

However,the operative phrase is “normal modern-day diet”. We forget that today we have a literal over-abundance of food that did not exist as recently as WW-II.

If times were to get real tough, and millions of saints literally _had_ to eat off their year’s supply for a year, (and if millions of saints _shared_ their year’s supply, effectively cutting it in half) and not be able to get all their necessary daily calories, then that 60 pounds of sugar makes a bit more sense. It may not make you healthy, but its compactness and high calorie-density (with ease of storage and transportation) will at least provide some calories to keep you alive.

Our sedentary life-style of work and TV-as-recreation only require 1800 (female) to 2000 (male) calories per day. But for heavy manual labor, a caloric intake of up to 5000 calories per day may be needed.

The stress and necessity of physical labor during times when using food storage is necessary would also require a higher than normal daily caloric intake.

Meat-heavy diets were also not widely available back in the 1940′s and earlier. And the _abundance_ of enough food to over-fill one’s stomach was not all that common back then either.

So that left many people literally unable to get enough calories to sustain their body mass. A lot of people got skinny during the Great Depression and during World War II.

To get another take on the picture I’m trying to paint, think of dog mushers and arctic explorers using chocolate as a compact high calorie-density food to fuel them in their extreme condition.

The generation of the Great Depression just lived under different situations of economic and food availability than we do.

So yeah, our laziness and poor eating habits and over-abundance of better foods (along with an over-abundance of bad foods) have turned sugar into an “evil.” But if laziness, poor eating habits, and the overabundances are removed, sugar turns out to be not so bad.

Besides, eating boiled cracked wheat cereal three times a day without any sugar gets boring pretty fast.

Were any sugar substitutes already around at that time, such as aspartame or xylitol?

Thus, it didn’t take any stretching to tie domestic sugar production to the war effort. It was as integral to that effort as the manufacture of weapons or ammunition. Take the sugar (and substitutes) out of your diet and you’ll find out why in a hurry.

home industry and patriotism, and the pulling-together-we-can-do-it cooperative spirit that marked both the pioneer and World War II

now is the time, this is the place, and we are the people.

As I understand it, bakers did not like to use beet sugar, since it did not give the same results as cane sugar. I do not know if that is true or if it is propaganda by the cane sugar lobby.

(I’ve heard stories about similar print ads for Utah’s Silk Industry. I’d love to find some of those.)