The Axis Powers Are Still Trying to Kill My Mother

I remember the first time I heard about the plot to kill my mother. I was young, maybe ten or eleven and sitting at the kitchen table. I was too young to understand the import of what she was saying then, but slowly, over the years, the evidence was amassed and the conspiracy was uncovered.

Here is what I was able to deduce:

• The Axis cabal started initiated World War II at a time of diminished industrial capacity and when food was labor intensive to produce.


• They sucked up all the labor of the allied countries into vast pools that were designated as "Armies" and "Navies" depriving the agricultural economies of a key resource.


• Furthermore, through overt aggression, the Axis powers contributed to an political evaluation and prioritization of these "Armies" and "Navies" and diverted critical food products to them.


• Finally, the axis powers employed tactics that encouraged food scarcity; capturing food producing regions in Europe, employing blockades that restricted commerce, the conversion of critical farm land to war production, and the diversion of petro-chemicals from farm use (tractors, pesticides) to war uses.

Alone this appears to be normal by products of warfare. But, this came at a curious time in industrial agriculture. More directly, this was shortly after the invention of a butter substitute called "Margarine". Margarine was an effective substitute but lacked the flavor, texture or color of butter. If you are to hear Mom talk about it, the 1940s version of margarine was particularly repulsive.

Thus, an impressionable girl at a formative age was deprived of a critical comfort food at a momentous time. Later, having achieved an economical stability Mom replaced her margarine (but not her children's) with artery clogging butter. We were all treated to long winded explanations about how the Nazis deprived her of this staff of life as a child, the very horrors of early margarine, and how now, as an adult, she was entitled and even required as a 1944 scrap drive activist to eat butter rather than margarine.

How very diabolical those evil Axis mad men were to trade four years of gustatory deprivation for forty years of slowly built up cholesterol. A lasting attack on the "not quite old enough to be the greatest generation".