Food Rationing and Morale

Abstract

A RATIONING system manifests the typical characteristics of a social invention. While food rationing did not originate in the last war, the most definite development in modern times occurred then in European nations. In the United States we are now putting together a rationing system out of elements indigenous to our own culture and on the basis of European models. The inventive process is tentative, and we are not wholly conscious of what the ramifications may be. When rationing spreads throughout a society, a new stateway is emerging. Fundamental cultural attitudes regarding the appropriate methods of distributing goods are being revised. New modes of cooperation, voluntary or enforced, and new techniques of social control are being tested. The foundations of group morale during crises are laid bare. Rationing is urgent in its motivation and widely ramifying in its effects; it deserves to be called a major social invention. In both structure and functioning a rationing system has its sociological no less than its economic elements. The operation of a rationing system provides crucial ex-