Share the Meat, a sponsors' sheet that calls rationing an honor system

Share the meat is an advertisement sheet catalogued at 1941, with a blank panel for sponsoring firms. A smiling helmeted soldier receives meat in his mess tin beside globes marked United States, England, Russia and China, and the text sets weekly fair shares by age and calls the program "America's Honor System" (NAID 513757).

The sheet

A soldier in a helmet, smiling, holds out a mess tin and a hand drops a piece of meat into it. Two globes beside him are labelled with four countries. The rest is text: a reason, a sum, a table, and seven tips. The bottom panel, where the sponsoring firms' names would go, is blank on this copy.

After the fighters you come first

SHARE THE MEAT

UNITED STATES ENGLAND RUSSIA CHINA

[...] It takes 6½ billion pounds of meat to feed these men and their fighting allies.

Even though we have the biggest bumper "meat crop" in history (24 billion pounds), simple subtraction and division tell plainly why the rest of us must Share the Meat.

There's a lot of meat left—there's enough meat left, if we share. Here's your fair share:

Men, women and children (over 12 years of age).....2½ lbs. per week / Children 6 to 12............1½ lbs. per week / Children under 6..............¾ lb. per week

[...] "Share the Meat" is America's Honor System to help combat the enemy's Terror System. [...]

These firms pledge cooperation in the "Share the Meat" program and sponsor this advertisement

The arithmetic

The sheet shows its arithmetic. Twenty-four billion pounds, minus six and a half for the forces and their allies, leaves the rest to be divided. The archive tags card stacking, because these are the figures the sponsors chose to print and the sheet gives no source for them, and bandwagon, for the shared-sacrifice appeal. The tips are practical: spread meat across the week, learn other cuts, serve smaller portions, store it cold.

"Honor System"

The phrase deserves a straight reading. The sheet presents sharing as voluntary, set against the enemy's "Terror System." It also refers to "restricted cuts" and lists meats that "are not restricted," which implies that some limits already applied. An honor system and a restriction are different things. The sheet uses both words and does not say which rules were binding and which were only requests.

A free people can agree to share, and a published fair-share table is a reasonable way to ask. Compulsion is a different act and should be named as such. The archive does not say which firms paid for the sheet, where it ran, or how the 1941 catalog date fits the program it describes.

The Office of Price Administration's own posters made the case for rationing: Rationing Safeguards Your Share and Rationing Means a Fair Share for All of Us.