Recommended musical accompaniment for this week’s episode of “Edibles & Potables” can be found at Atomic Platters, a classic audio compilation from 2005.
‘Atomic Platters’ is the result of a years-in-the-making musical ‘Manhattan Project’ that collects over 100 vintage Cold War songs and more than two dozen frighteningly naive civil defense Public Service Announcements (many of these PSAs are voiced by celebrities such as Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, Pat Boone and Johnny Cash, to name just a few!) from the paranoid period that brought us fallout shelters, survival biscuits and uranium fever.
Fortunately “platter” also describes today’s topic: food in a time of fallout, when “nuclear war readiness meant stocking the pantry and recipes for canned ham salad.”
What Would You Eat in a Cold War Fallout Shelter? by Andrew Coletti (Atlas Obscura)
Books like Family Food Stockpile for Survival, issued by the US Department of Agriculture in 1961, provided guidance on which foods keep longest and how to purify water for drinking. However, the book makes it clear that the “responsibility” of preparation “is placed directly on the individual citizen and family.” A government ad campaign called “Grandma’s Pantry” encouraged home food stockpiling with taglines like “Unexpected company? Grandma always had plenty for everyone.”
The author Coletti takes this culinary expedition a step further with a recipe: Make This Fallout Shelter–Friendly 1960s Ham Spread, source of our cover photo, which was taken by Rachel Rummel for Gastro Obscura.
