20 Everyday Products Created By War, Disaster And Shortages

Fanta was the brainchild of Max Keith, who headed Coca-Cola’s German operations in World War II. When Allied blockades prevented Germany from receiving Coke’s syrup, he got chemists to develop a substitute using whey, a byproduct of cheese-making, apple pulp, and beet sugar, and then named it Fanta. In 1943, more than 3 million cases of the concoction were sold in Germany. But it was not the orange-tinted soda people know today, which Coca-Cola’s parent company invented independently in Naples about a dozen years later.

In 1919, the U.S. prohibited the sale of alcohol, but a quirk in the law still let households legally preserve fruit juice at home. Grape growers in California took advantage of this by packaging dried grapes in brick form, calling them wine bricks, or Vine-Glo, and the packaging included comical warnings about how to avoid turning the bricks into actual wine. These wine bricks were the most popular from 1929 to 1931, in effect, home-fermentation instructions sold off the shelf.

Pietro Ferrero was a pastry baker in the small Italian city of Alba, and when World War II devastated trade routes and caused cocoa prices to skyrocket, he could not afford enough of the ingredient. In 1946, he mixed his cocoa with cheap, abundant hazelnuts and sugar from the area and pressed it into a firm loaf named Giandujot that customers sliced onto bread. He wouldn’t make it soft enough to spread until 1951, and his son Michele wouldn’t name the product Nutella until 1964.

In 1937, the drug firm S.E. Massengill offered a new antibiotic syrup named Elixir Sulfanilamide. To make it liquid, its lead chemist added it to a newly developed solvent not yet proven safe for humans that was also used in antifreeze. At that time, no law mandated safety testing. The syrup killed 107 people, mostly children, from kidney failure. As a result, the company received a fine for labeling the poison an elixir, a misbranding violation. The public fury led Congress to pass a law in 1938 requiring safety tests on all drugs before they go on the market.

The Monopoly game pieces normally used were made of zinc or pewter. However, in 1942, the federal board controlling wartime materials banned the use of metals like zinc, tin, and steel in non-essential products. As a result, Parker Brothers switched to flat, painted wooden tokens and cardboard pieces until the restrictions were lifted in late 1945.

Nylon had entered the shops only in 1939 as a substitute for silk, but the outbreak of war quickly saw both fabrics disappear: silk imports were halted in 1941, and nylon was requisitioned by the government in 1942 for use in parachutes and tire cord. With nothing left to wear, cosmetics companies such as Max Factor and Elizabeth Arden instead sold tinted leg makeup, with a drawn seam on them. Nylon stockings did not reappear in shops until late 1945.

The Depression meant many American families had no money for fresh meat or milk, so in 1937, Kraft Foods, the company founded by James L. Kraft, launched a budget solution: dry macaroni with a packet of shelf-stable powdered cheese. The 19-cent meal could feed a family of four in nine minutes. The concept is said to have begun when a salesman rubber-banded packets of cheese onto boxes of pasta. And it was a hit! Kraft sold 8 million boxes in its first year.

Upton Sinclair was a journalist who wrote The Jungle in 1905, revealing that Chicago’s meatpacking plants were filthy and diseased. Along with the public concern about hidden narcotics in patent medicines, his work pressured President Theodore Roosevelt to enact legislation in 1906 that outlawed contaminated food and mandated labeling of ingredients. Sinclair’s goal had been to expose poor working conditions, not unsanitary food production. “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach,” he said.

Until World War II, wet meat from cans was the standard for American pets. When Japan took control of Southeast Asia’s tin mines, the U.S. government forbade the use of metal containers for dog and cat food in 1942, so the metal could be used for military purposes. Brands such as Gaines and Ken-L Ration switched to dry food packaged in paper sacks. Although dry food existed at the time, it quickly became the primary food source for pets, and canned pet food never regained its previous popularity.

In the late 1860s, an aphid mistakenly brought over from America began destroying the roots of French vines. This destroyed over two-thirds of French vineyards within about two decades, causing wine prices to skyrocket. Unable to afford wine anymore, the French began consuming more absinthe, a distilled wormwood liquor which had been around for some time, but had not yet achieved widespread popularity. In the ensuing few decades, consumption of absinthe grew rapidly. France finally outlawed the drink in 1915.

A cattle plague began in 1865 with an outbreak of a contagious cattle disease in Britain that, between then and 1867, killed or required the culling of some 300,000-400,000 head of cattle, destroying London’s source of fresh milk. Canned condensed milk, first patented by the American Gail Borden in 1856, became a popular substitute for fresh milk. Demand for condensed milk was high, and within a few years, a man named Charles Page established a condensed milk company that became Nestlé.

In response to Britain’s decision to grant the East India Company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies, which led to the Boston Tea Party, future U.S. President John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail: “Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better.” Patriotic colonists began boycotting British tea as unpatriotic, prompting households to turn to herbal “Liberty Teas” and to coffee. While coffee had been around long before this, it was the boycott that cemented coffee as America’s daily brew.

In April 1942, the War Production Board issued a regulation prohibiting the sale of trouser cuffs, pocket flaps, pleats, double-breasted suits, and long skirts and coats nationwide to free up wool, cotton, and synthetic fibers for war efforts. The zoot suit, a flamboyant style that used large quantities of material, was essentially banned. Retail executive Stanley Marcus advised the government on how to implement the regulation with the goal of reducing civilian consumption of cloth by 15%. As a result, American menswear became simpler and less voluminous.

Once Japan took over Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies in early 1942, more than 90 percent of the U.S.’s natural rubber supply vanished in one fell swoop. Rubber was rationed, speed limits were reduced to minimize tire wear, and shoes were made with wood soles and fabric uppers since leather was also being used for military purposes under a different wartime mandate. The rubber crisis prompted the creation of a synthetic rubber industry in the United States that survived long after the end of World War II.

Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, wartime shipping disruptions cut off supplies from sugar-growing regions such as the Philippines and Cuba, and in May of 1942, sugar became the first U.S. consumer good placed under formal rationing. Bottlers like Coca-Cola and Pepsi were restricted to only 70 percent of their pre-war sugar usage, which led them to create new syrups with higher percentages of saccharin and corn syrup. Sugar was rationed for the longest time during the war, going on until 1947, and the sugar shortage created long-term interest in the commercial potential of artificial sweeteners.

By 1869, planters in what was then the British colony of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) were reporting a fungal disease decimating their coffee trees. Within about two decades, exports were down, and estates were going bankrupt left and right. A Scottish planter by the name of James Taylor, along with a handful of other planters, began to replant the island with tea bushes. The subsequent tidal wave of cheap Ceylon tea was the nail in the coffin for coffee as the daily beverage in Great Britain.

The boll weevil, a beetle that destroys cotton, entered Texas in 1892 and by 1922 had made its way to every corner of the U.S. Cotton Belt. It reduced cotton production by as much as 50 percent in some of the most hard-hit counties. Desperate textile producers searched for a replacement and found one in rayon. Sold as “artificial silk,” rayon was the first synthetic fabric to achieve widespread popularity. Meanwhile, scientist George Washington Carver suggested to southern farmers that they plant peanuts rather than cotton. His work contributed to the commercialization of peanut butter and peanut oil.

With the outbreak of war in 1914, Britain blockaded Germany, cutting off imports of wheat and fertilizers. The German government legislated that bakeries blend their flour with 10 to 30% potato meal and rye by January 1915. The result was the heavy, brown Kriegsbrot, known as “war bread.” At the height of the blockade in the last year of the war, even ground straw was added in some areas. Bread was distributed with ration coupons, along with ersatz coffee made from roasted chicory root and acorns.

In 1845, a fungus-like organism decimated Ireland’s potato crop, a food staple for over one third of its people. Then Britain’s Prime Minister Robert Peel approved a huge import of corn from the U.S. as a relief effort, but Ireland had no machinery to grind the corn fine enough, and no one knew how to cook it. The coarse flour was dubbed “Peel’s Brimstone.” But once introduced, cornmeal remained on the shelves in Ireland and England.

The eruption of Mount Tambora, a volcano on the island of Sumbawa, in what is now Indonesia, occurred in 1815 and dumped enough ash into the stratosphere to chill the planet’s temperature. In the following year, known as the “Year Without a Summer,” European crops failed from unseasonable frosts and the cost of animal fodder rocketed. Poor farmers in Baden, Germany, killed or starved their horses because they could not feed them any longer. The horsefeed crisis is widely seen as a key catalyst behind Karl von Drais’s invention: a steerable two-wheeled “running machine” that he unveiled in 1817. This was the mechanical precursor to the bicycle.

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