What do you think?
Rate this book
Bullets and Bread: The Story of Sacrifice in American Homes to Feed the Troops in World War II
The U.S. a collection of cities serviced by outlying farms and producers is amazingly transformed into a nation serviced, by a national food production industry to meet the needs of fighting a world war. The armed services, 350,000 strong at the war's start, quickly grew to 11,000,000 men and women who had to be fed along with the millions more on the home front. This is the story of the transformation to meet those needs and the interesting stories about the people, prominent and not-so prominent, of the era and the food they liked to eat and more frequently, what they had to eat. Many stories from the troops on the front are included and so too, many recipes suitable for today's dining
- GenresHistoryNonfictionWar
320 pages, Hardcover
First published October 15, 2012
1 person is currently reading
274 people want to read
About the author
Kent Whitaker
25 books7 followersKent Whitaker, often called the "Deck Chef" is a father, husband, culinary writer and cookbook author. He also covers sports such as racing for a variety of media outlets.
He is the winner of the Food Network - Emeril Live Barbecue Contest and co-recipient of the American Authors Association Gold medal for the Texas Hometown Cookbook.
Kent has been a spokesperson for Pabst Blue Ribbon, TimberTech, ALPO/Purina etc. His short radio show is heard on over 60 affiliates.
"I also love barbecue, tailgating, Jimmy Buffet, Frank Sinatra, Turner Classic movies and Monday Night football. Oh yea, Die-hard Braves fan."
He is the winner of the Food Network - Emeril Live Barbecue Contest and co-recipient of the American Authors Association Gold medal for the Texas Hometown Cookbook.
Kent has been a spokesperson for Pabst Blue Ribbon, TimberTech, ALPO/Purina etc. His short radio show is heard on over 60 affiliates.
"I also love barbecue, tailgating, Jimmy Buffet, Frank Sinatra, Turner Classic movies and Monday Night football. Oh yea, Die-hard Braves fan."
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 20, 2013
This book is a great piece of writing and research, and hit 3 areas that I particularly enjoy reading and learning about. As I read this book it brought to mind another covering WWII recipes published by the Imperial War Museum in England, but ‘Bread and Bullets’ has a wider scope than the IWM book.
The book itself is divided into 3 sections; history, memoirs and recipes that I tried, some of which with excellent results. The first section of the book covers all things related to the history of war-time food including famous people and food companies of that era. The reader is educated in the ways of the military cooks and bakers that fed the armed forces in a time of combat. Despite their often being ridiculed by those that had to eat their offerings, we learn that they did the best they could with the ingredients on hand and, often under some very stressful situations; trying to make sure that the fighting forces never went without a meal was no mean task, and the work that went into this adds new meaning to the phrase ‘an Army fights on its stomach’. The numbers that had to be catered for were absolutely mind-boggling and, until reading this I did not realise how much of defining factor food actually played in the war effort. Especially interesting from a historical point of view is the comparison between Allied and Axis food.
Memoirs from both military personnel and their families back home, add a human aspect to this book some of which make the reader chuckle and others which are quite poignant. Through their words, and the skill of the Author, the reader learns about victory gardening and the impact of rationing on the daily lives of real people. Reading these experiences makes one wonder why, in our times of plentiful food are we not more conscious of what we use, and aim to cut down our food wastage and even grow more of our own vegetables. The recipes, and yes the Author admits some of the ingredients are spelled wrong, are included for historical purposes only, but using modern hygiene standards and ingredients they are easily adaptable for any reader, like myself, who wants to try them out. After all how many readers of this book would have access to a WWII helmet to cook in? Also, as the reader who tries them out is not likely to be cooking for 100+ people, any scaling down of ingredients needs to be double checked before trying out to avoid disastrous results.
As much as I enjoyed reading this book, and putting my cooking skills and recipe adaptations to the test, there were a lot of proofreading errors that should have been picked by the Editor before this book went to print. The result of this was it really pulled from my overall enjoyment of the book, and I felt that the Author had maybe used a generic spell-check program when going through their work as some words just did not make any sense in context.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoy WWII history, be it from a military or home front perspective; also readers who enjoy books that include recipes that they would like to challenge themselves with would be well advised to give this book a look.
Originally reviewed on: http://catesbooknuthut.com/2013/09/20...
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
The book itself is divided into 3 sections; history, memoirs and recipes that I tried, some of which with excellent results. The first section of the book covers all things related to the history of war-time food including famous people and food companies of that era. The reader is educated in the ways of the military cooks and bakers that fed the armed forces in a time of combat. Despite their often being ridiculed by those that had to eat their offerings, we learn that they did the best they could with the ingredients on hand and, often under some very stressful situations; trying to make sure that the fighting forces never went without a meal was no mean task, and the work that went into this adds new meaning to the phrase ‘an Army fights on its stomach’. The numbers that had to be catered for were absolutely mind-boggling and, until reading this I did not realise how much of defining factor food actually played in the war effort. Especially interesting from a historical point of view is the comparison between Allied and Axis food.
Memoirs from both military personnel and their families back home, add a human aspect to this book some of which make the reader chuckle and others which are quite poignant. Through their words, and the skill of the Author, the reader learns about victory gardening and the impact of rationing on the daily lives of real people. Reading these experiences makes one wonder why, in our times of plentiful food are we not more conscious of what we use, and aim to cut down our food wastage and even grow more of our own vegetables. The recipes, and yes the Author admits some of the ingredients are spelled wrong, are included for historical purposes only, but using modern hygiene standards and ingredients they are easily adaptable for any reader, like myself, who wants to try them out. After all how many readers of this book would have access to a WWII helmet to cook in? Also, as the reader who tries them out is not likely to be cooking for 100+ people, any scaling down of ingredients needs to be double checked before trying out to avoid disastrous results.
As much as I enjoyed reading this book, and putting my cooking skills and recipe adaptations to the test, there were a lot of proofreading errors that should have been picked by the Editor before this book went to print. The result of this was it really pulled from my overall enjoyment of the book, and I felt that the Author had maybe used a generic spell-check program when going through their work as some words just did not make any sense in context.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoy WWII history, be it from a military or home front perspective; also readers who enjoy books that include recipes that they would like to challenge themselves with would be well advised to give this book a look.
Originally reviewed on: http://catesbooknuthut.com/2013/09/20...
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
January 30, 2019
A history of military rations development up to and through World War II. One chapter gives recipes for military staples such as S.O.S. and hash from various conflicts. The first chapter does not really relate to rationing but tells brief stories about civilian and military celebraties. Little space is devoted to rationing on the civilian front.
May 28, 2018
The stories collected from veterans are the best part so I would read those first and then browse the rest as you have interest. There are so many typos the rest of the book was honestly a little hard to read.
December 2, 2021
A valuable sidebar on the history of world wars.
A wonderful, quirky little book. The museum and organization list is invaluable. The recipes cannot be found elsewhere. Very interesting for warriors children.
A wonderful, quirky little book. The museum and organization list is invaluable. The recipes cannot be found elsewhere. Very interesting for warriors children.
September 2, 2015
Another book that leaves me wondering why. Why was it written? Why did I buy it? Why do I have this bizarre gene that makes me judge a book by it's cover?
In all fairness, the book should have been titled "A collection of stories and general reminiscence about military food by WW2 veterans". In that case I would have known what to expect, immediately bought it and had been happy.
This is NOT the "...Story of Feeding Americans at Home and on the Battlefield".
It is at best, a book report by Kent Whitaker in which he strings together a small sampling of random veterans remembrances, some generic information from Wikipedia and other internet sources in regard to military rations history and development and a few off hand references to the United States build up of war production items - no in-depth study here - and peppers it with poor pictures from the same random veterans personal collections and the internet.
The original stories from the vets are fun to read, as are the original recipes and smattering of old food related ads, but there is really nothing new here.
Finally, the book suffers from horrible editing that makes it difficult to read at times. It's like reading a hand written letter in which you substitute words that you cannot make out. I thought that I may have had a proof copy, but no. Here you will find; odd sentence structure, out of sync syntax, bad punctuation, bad use of spell Czech, and an incredible amount of repetition.
I know I read the story of "six meals a day, three up, three down" at least a half a dozen times. It was cute the first two times...
Get it for the vet's stories - and some painless summer reading.
In all fairness, the book should have been titled "A collection of stories and general reminiscence about military food by WW2 veterans". In that case I would have known what to expect, immediately bought it and had been happy.
This is NOT the "...Story of Feeding Americans at Home and on the Battlefield".
It is at best, a book report by Kent Whitaker in which he strings together a small sampling of random veterans remembrances, some generic information from Wikipedia and other internet sources in regard to military rations history and development and a few off hand references to the United States build up of war production items - no in-depth study here - and peppers it with poor pictures from the same random veterans personal collections and the internet.
The original stories from the vets are fun to read, as are the original recipes and smattering of old food related ads, but there is really nothing new here.
Finally, the book suffers from horrible editing that makes it difficult to read at times. It's like reading a hand written letter in which you substitute words that you cannot make out. I thought that I may have had a proof copy, but no. Here you will find; odd sentence structure, out of sync syntax, bad punctuation, bad use of spell Czech, and an incredible amount of repetition.
I know I read the story of "six meals a day, three up, three down" at least a half a dozen times. It was cute the first two times...
Get it for the vet's stories - and some painless summer reading.
October 27, 2013
I received this book to read and review from netgalley. Being a big history buff - WWII is one of my interests - and getting more and more into gardening and eating better, I was thrilled with the idea of a book like this.
That being said, the book really falls short.
First, there's a lot of typos and grammatical errors, things that really should have been caught.
Second, there's so much repetition. I understand in any book like this, there is going to be some summaries and back info, but it just seemed like alot of the same information was repeated more often then was necessary.
The history section was a bit slow going, I already knew most of the history and was disappointed not to learn anything new. The recipes were interesting to read and to think about, but nothing I would try on my own. The memoirs section was by far the most interesting part of the book and by far my favorite as well, and the section I would recommend. I honestly thought more of the book was going to be like this section, so perhaps my own bias and preconceived notions colored my impressions of the book.
I'm rating the book 3 stars because the book was good, I just was left wishing there was more to the book (and not in a good way, like at the end of a particularly good novel).
That being said, the book really falls short.
First, there's a lot of typos and grammatical errors, things that really should have been caught.
Second, there's so much repetition. I understand in any book like this, there is going to be some summaries and back info, but it just seemed like alot of the same information was repeated more often then was necessary.
The history section was a bit slow going, I already knew most of the history and was disappointed not to learn anything new. The recipes were interesting to read and to think about, but nothing I would try on my own. The memoirs section was by far the most interesting part of the book and by far my favorite as well, and the section I would recommend. I honestly thought more of the book was going to be like this section, so perhaps my own bias and preconceived notions colored my impressions of the book.
I'm rating the book 3 stars because the book was good, I just was left wishing there was more to the book (and not in a good way, like at the end of a particularly good novel).
August 14, 2014
A detailed compilation of the history of all things related to war-time chow. The first part of the book is historical information and includes some interesting tidbits about some famous people and food companies. The middle section is short stories and memories from military personnel and families. The latter part of the book lists some historical recipes. There's also quite a few photos and advertisements throughout. A very intriguing read! Suggested for military and/or history buffs as well as anyone who enjoys cooking.
Net Galley Feedback
Net Galley Feedback
August 19, 2013
I won this book through a Goodreads First Reads giveaway but never received my copy of the book. Per the advice Goodreads I am rating the book so that it doesn't count "against" me if I register for other giveaways (apparently part of their algorithm is based on whether you read/review books received in giveaways).
I am bummed that I didn't get this book. I've read a number of books about WWII and the rationing that occurred and I had thought that this book looked very interesting.
I am bummed that I didn't get this book. I've read a number of books about WWII and the rationing that occurred and I had thought that this book looked very interesting.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews