Eat More

Eat More

This cartoon appeared in the September 13, 1924 issue of the Canadian Countryman. It was intended to be a humorous take on the Canadian government’s nutritional policy, which often took the form of public information campaigns urging citizens to “Eat More” foods with high nutritional value. These public health campaigns took place in the context of vitamins research during the interwar years which increasingly linked vitamin deficiencies with various diseases such as rickets. The federal Department of Health, which was responsible for many of these campaigns, was itself established only five years previously as a result of the horrors of the Spanish Flu epidemic which killed an estimated 30,000-50,000 Canadians at the end of the First World War. The Department of Agriculture also became directly involved in promoting nutritional education, especially towards children. The “Eat More” campaigns satirized in this cartoon were only the beginning of the Canadian government becoming actively involved in promoting certain dietary choices, a practice which persists to this day.

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Celebrating 150 Years of Canadian Agriculture

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