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ten years, under the nondescriptive title Agricul- “Food will win the war and write the peace,” During the
tural Land Requirements and Resources: Part proclaimed Secretary of Agriculture Claude R.
III of the Report on Land Planning. Few people Wickard when the United States entered the nineteenth
actually read it or understood its methodology. war. For the first time in American history, food century,
But someone, somewhere, remembered that it became a weapon. American farmers were called Americans
had concluded that it took approximately two upon to pull out all the stops and produce more
and a half acres of land to feed each American. food than they ever had before. had never
Divorced from its context, and with the original In 1943, the Office of Price Administration seriously
study never cited, this “2.5 acres per person for took over the American food supply. It con- subscribed
an adequate diet” soon became an axiom in trolled both the price and the supply of critical
discussions about how many people the world agricultural commodities. Items like meat, butter to Malthus’s
could feed. and sugar were rationed. No one in the United gloomy
States was in any danger of starving, but it was a belief that
WAR AND WORRIES shock to go to the grocery store and find orindary
During the nineteenth century, Americans foods temporarily unavailable. population
had never seriously subscribed to Malthus’s At first, most people understood that the would
gloomy belief that population would always “food crisis” was temporary, caused by the always
outstrip food supply and cause poverty. “Malthu- war. They knew that the United States would
sianism,” as this philosophy was called, didn’t fit need to continue sending food to Europe for a outstrip
with the American experience. Nor were Ameri- couple years after the war until they could get food supply
cans much in favor of “neo-Malthusianism,” the their agriculture restarted, but that was only for and cause
belief that birth control and contraceptives were the short term.
the only way to keep populations from exceeding But what if the war hadn’t caused the food poverty.
their food supply. crisis at all? What if it was the other way around?
All of this changed during World War II. What if Germany and Japan had become ag-
As the European nations destroyed each other’s gressive because they couldn’t feed themselves,
transportation and production infrastructure and because they were overpopulated? What if
farmers were drafted into the military, the pre- Malthus was right, population had outstripped
dictable result was severe food shortages. Even food supply, and the war was just a “positive
before the United States joined the war, it began check” trying to restore a lost balance? What if
shipping food aid to England. the future held only more and worse wars until

FIGURE 4. Raymond Pearl noted that
the production of many items was
actually increasing much faster than
population growth, thus raising the
standard of living.

Source: Raymond Pearl, “The Popula-
tion Problem,” Geographical Review.
1922;12(4):636-645.

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