Jessie Chen’s HW#2: Food and Coffee during the Civil War

The most fascinating thing about Civil war soldiers’ diet is how clueless they are when it comes to cooking. They are so dependent on having women cook for them that they themselves didn’t know how to prepare their own food. Because of that, they ate unsanitary raw meat, hardtack, and hard bread, which are not healthy nor appetizing. They had to dip their hardtack and hard bread in their coffees to soften it enough to eat. Union soldiers relied on the U.S. Sanitary Commissions to provide them food, along with teaching them how to cook. Even though the soldiers learned some techniques for cooking, many still got sick and died from unsanitary practices.

Another fascinating thing about the Civil war soldiers is how far they are willing to go to drink coffee. They are willing to use water from “canteens and puddles, brackish bays and Mississippi mud, liquid their horses would not drink” (Grinspan, 2014). They would even cook their coffee “over fires of plundered fence rails, or heated mugs in scalding steam-vents on naval gunboats” (Grinspan, 2014). Drinking coffee allowed the soldiers to stay awake during the war and was the only thing delicious to them.

The one food that I cannot live without is french fries.

Taken from: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/317941.php

Reference:
Grinspan, J. (2014, July 9). How Coffee Fueled the Civil War. New York Times. Retrieved from https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/how-coffee-fueled-the-civil-war/