Political conflicts trigger renaming of everyday foods to signal ethnic hostility.

Evidence

In a historical example of culinary verbal realism, the First World War inspired many in the US to rename sauerkraut as “victory cabbage,” hamburgers as “victory steaks,” and frankfurters as “hot dogs.” More recently, the refusal on the part of France to support the US war on Iraq led Representative Bob Ney (a Republican from Ohio) to propose that US government restaurants rename french fries as “freedom fries” and french toast as “freedom toast.” Despite these salient examples, there have been no empirical investigations of the prevalence, the antecedents, or the consequences of this tendency for verbal realism. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1274

Categorization

• CANDY: Sauerkraut became ‘victory cabbage’ in WWI and hamburgers became ‘victory steaks’ — perfectly tweetable war trivia.
• SHARE: Worth sending to the food historian who appreciates how wartime propaganda rewrites menus.