A shortage of infant formula is the latest chapter in our recent saga of supply chain disruptions and rising prices.
Early 20th century Baltimore witnessed a number of dire shortages, often referred to as “famines,” for everything from chewing gum to ice. And inflation was often a repeated theme, too; it rose above 17% in 1917, the year the U.S. entered World War I.
The Sun reported on multiple shortages and price hikes that year. In November 1917, Northern cities faced a “salt famine” amid supply shortages related to the war in Europe. The price of produce became so high that Baltimore grocers threatened to boycott the growers of potatoes and onions unless they went down. Eggs and meats were completely out of reach to low-income residents.
“Everyone is familiar with the gradual increase in the prices of foodstuffs,” said one Sun article on the topic.
To help understand the relationship between product shortages and price surges during World War I, The Baltimore Sun this week interviewed historian Jonathan Rees, author of “Refrigeration Nation: A History of Ice, Appliances, and Enterprise in America,” published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Rees, a professor of history at Colorado State University Pueblo, said the shortages and price rises of that earlier period have differing causes.
“Now, you have a shortage of supply and a shortage of workers in production and transportation,” he said. “It’s hard to get things from the point of production to consumers.”
During the first world war, however, the war effort caused massive disruptions to European agriculture that had huge consequences for the rest of the world.
“Nobody in Europe could grow anything,” Rees said. With European armies mobilizing, “there’s nobody to bring the crops in.”
As a result, American food became “absolutely essential” to feeding the rest of the world. At the same time, the U.S. was rationing food supplies as it entered the European conflict.
In Baltimore, food prices were so high in 1917 that the city’s Board of Estimates discussed buying produce from local farmers to sell at public curb markets at cost. According to an article in The Sun, city leaders believed that they could thus alleviate the high prices consumers were paying for food, an issue that the article called “one of the most serious situations that has confronted the city in years.” Improvised markets were set up at two locations in Baltimore.
Poor families were subsisting on rice, hominy and cornmeal, which took the place of bread and potatoes, according to an article in The Sun.