Last summer I began looking at US women’s magazines from the early 20th century and came across calls to assist in food relief in Belgium in 1914. This brought up memories from my first weeks at the National Archives in Seattle. We had just received a temporary exhibit of embroidered flour sacks from the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and I helped arrange them for display in our research room.
Hoover served as the head of the Commission for Relief in Belgium that distributed wheat from the US to the people of Belgium and occupied France. Once emptied of grain, the recipients decorated the sacks and they were auctioned to raise money for food relief. Hoover received hundreds of these sack as gifts.
In the past couple of years supply chain issues have been in the news. I wondered what other parallels I might uncover. As I work my way through American Cookery, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies’ Home Journal I keep finding exhortations to eat locally grown food, to eat less meat, and to stop food waste. More than one hundred years later, all of these issues are once again making news.
In 2022 I’ll be devoting most of my time to this research and sharing that with my readers.
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