The Cheesy Results of WW II

TRACING THE PATH PODCAST

This fascinating historical account reveals the surprising origins of several beloved food items and even a well-known charitable concept, all linked to World War II and the ingenuity spurred by its demands.

The story highlights how Wisconsin’s booming dairy industry and its innovative cheese production laid the groundwork for processed cheese, ultimately leading to James Kraft’s canned cheese that revolutionized military rations.

Furthermore, the immense wartime stockpiles of powdered cheese, a product of research into food preservation, were later sold off as surplus, inspiring Charles Doolin to create Cheetos. The war also led to the creation of the CARE Package, designed by Arthur Ringland to deliver aid to war-torn Europe, often containing these very same cheese products.

Finally, the story culminates with the impromptu invention of nachos by Ignasio Anaya in a border town, using readily available Wisconsin cheese, which then found widespread popularity thanks to Frank Liberto’s development of an efficient concession stand model and a fortuitous mention by Howard Cosell.

Wisconsin Turns to Cheese

Ever see an ancient painting of Cleopatra eating nachos? What about an Aztec temple worshiping the tortilla chip? If nachos aren’t from ancient times, when were they first created? Can you believe World War II? If we didn’t have World War II, there may not have been nachos at all. But that’s just part of the story because maybe they’re Wisconsin’s fault.

We begin our story with the settling of America.

When the United States was first settled, followed by westward expansion, it was around 1634 that the French sent John Nichollet to the area we now call Wisconsin to negotiate with the native tribes there.

Though it wasn’t that long ago, Jean Nichollet’s goal wasn’t to settle Wisconsin. His goal was to negotiate safe passage, as he was tasked with finding a route to Asia.

Oh, how times have changed.

In his wake, it wasn’t only the French who settled the area, but also the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Danish, and the Germans.

For many, the lush greenery and fertile soil were enough to set down roots and call Wisconsin home. Farm life was soon the occupation of the citizenry there, and while most were grain farmers, some were dairy.

Many farmers floated between grain and dairy, but improved transportation in the Great Plains was bringing down the prices of grain and forcing many farmers to become full-time dairy farmers.

The struggle dairy farmers encountered was always over how to increase the shelf life of milk.

Around 1837, many looked at experimenting with cheese to do just that. The first cheeses made in Wisconsin were recipes and methods Europeans had already understood, like Swiss cheese and Emmentaler.

Cows would produce 7 gallons of milk per day, which was more than most families could consume, so milk was often traded with neighbors. But anything that didn’t get consumed would spoil, and spoiled milk would often become yogurt or cream, and after that cheese.

The rise and fall of wheat prices moved even more farmers to the stability of dairy, especially in the 1850s when prices lagged. And by 1864, there were 30 cheese factories in Wisconsin and by 1870 there were 54.

In 1858, John J. Smith was the first to begin exporting cheese out of the state. He made cheese in Sheboygan County and shipped barrels to Chicago. Then in 1882, Ambrose and Susan Steinwald established a cheese factory on a 160 acre farm.

While their son Joseph was handling a batch of cheddar, he washed the curd with cold water, but neglected to drain the excess moisture. That excess moisture resulted in a new cheese, moistister than cheddar. It became the first true Wisconsin cheese, and they named it after the town they lived in, Colby, Wisconsin.

In 1890, the game changed the again for the cheese makers of Wisconsin with the Babcock Butter Fat Test, which gave cheese manufacturers a way to test the quality of the milk it was using.

Without uniform quality milk, you can’t get uniform quality cheese.

Soon after that, the dairy farmers got together and created the Dairyman Association to further market Wisconsin cheese to the world. Without having to say it out loud, it should be noted that the Wisconin cheese industry stood alone amongst the states. Nowhere else were these things happening. It was so pervasive in Wisconsin culture that the governor even created the first Office of Dairy and Food Commissioners.

While many towns had their own callboards for trading cheese amongst local farmers, in 1909, Plymouth, Wisconsin was the first city to open their callboard to all cheesemakers, which resulted in it becoming the most prolific and eventually becoming the Wisconsin Cheese Exchange. 

And finally, to top it off, in 1915, Wisconsin became the first state to require getting a license to become a cheese manufacturer.

By 1919, 63% of all cheese in the United States came from Wisconsin. Now, don’t get lost in the dry history of Wisconsin cheese.

We’re about to get to three of the most important innovations of your life. All because of cheese.

Kraft and the Government

World War II was a test for modern warfare.

And with many of Europe’s cheese factories under siege, Wisconsin factories provided cheese for the UK soldiers.

While cheese did help fix the milk shelf life problem, cheese manufacturers didn’t care about milk shelf life. They cared about cheese shelf life. If they could improve it, they could ship their wares further away to new buyers.

And for the government, if they could improve the shelf life of cheese, they could store it longer and be ready in more situations.

Well, in 1911, two Swiss scientists found a way by adding sodium citrate to emmentaler cheese. They found it would melt like fondue, but also harden again. This would become one of the first processed cheeses.

At around the same time, all the way back in the United States and only 16 miles from the Wisconsin border, Jimmy K. and his brothers had a cheese manufacturing plant in Stockton, Illinois. 

Jimmy’s family had grown up in Ontario, but when he was 28, he left and went to Chicago to start a cheese delivery business. His plan was to buy cheese wholesale and then deliver it to stores around Chicago.

The summer heat, however, badly affected his ability to transport cheese long distances. He too needed a way to extend the shelf life.

His intuition told him that the bacteria in milk that turned it into cheese was probably the same bacteria that spoiled it. So, he thought if If he could kill the bacteria after it became cheese, then maybe he could stop it from spoiling.

He started his quest by making large quantities of cheddar and melting them down and then repasteurizing them as he stirred constantly. He then added sodium phosphate, which gave him the ability to pour the cheese into cans where it could solidify as it cooled.

There he thought if he could get the cheese into cans, the bacteria and the oxygen wouldn’t mix and maybe the cheese would last longer. This type of canned processed cheese would forever change the world and Jimmy K.’s business. 

After Jimmy patented the process in 1916, the American military came knocking on his door for

For the military, a canned, easy to transport cheese that didn’t go bad in the summer was an answer to a thousand plans and prayers. All the military branches needed cheese for things like cheese on toast, cheese sauce on veggies, cheesy potatoes, and more.

Because their logistic and planning needs were so high, they needed to fit as much as possible in each container they shipped across the ocean. When they found out about Jimmy K.’s canned cheese. They ordered 6 million pounds of tins.

That single act would put Jimmy K.’s business on the map. 

His company is what it is today because of this one government order.

But the order didn’t bear his nickname on the contract. Nope. Jimmy was just a nickname. The order was made out to his full name, James Kraft. And it is what started the Kraft Corporation. And so now you know why they make such a big deal about Kraft Mac and Cheese.

It was probably good that Kraft was 16 miles south of Wisconsin’s border because the country’s cheese makers condemned this processed cheesed.

By 1922, Wisconsin was producing over 406 million pounds of cheese, but that didn’t stop the Great Depression from hurting. 1929 and beyond were lean years for everyone. But the dairy industry was too important to the economy.

So Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on October 17th, 1933, through executive order number 6340, created the Commodity Credit Corp to help stabilize the products in the dairy industry. The CCC was designed to buy and sell products for other government departments and at times would donate the products to relief agencies just to make sure the dairy farmers could continue to be profitable.

When the world looked like it could be at war again in 1940, the military started to think about future food, future storage, future logistics. How would all of that take place again?

They had canned cheese, but they began experimenting with other foods they would need to store for long amounts of time. Since water was available everywhere, they were looking to dehydrate or compress everything.

Some of the research was doled out to various universities which had USDA research facilities.

One of those facilities was actually dedicated to the dehydration of cheese, which was considered an impossibility. The process was run by George Sanders, who actually came up with a successful two-step process that worked and resulted in a dehydrated powdered cheese.

Step one of his process was grating the cheese down to very, very small pieces and drying it out at very, very low heat. By drying it out, each small piece would form a protective layer around the fats.

Then the cheese would be grated again into a powder and dried at low heat again.

Kraft bid on this process and got the contract to produce $25 million worth of powdered cheese for the government for World War II.

Mountains of Cheese

Beyond the logistics of cheese, World War II created new problems for America.

With all the young men sent to war and the women in supporting roles, the US economy was short on labor.

That’s when Mexico and the US created the 1942 Bracero program. Bracero being a person who works with their hands. 

The relationship started as a series of diplomatic accords allowing millions of Mexican laborers entry to the US to work in the fields and on the railroads.

But for Mexico, that meant they too had a net shortage for labor. Though that need slowed down when it became difficult to export products like tequila during wartime. And when Germany sunk Mexico’s oil tankers in 1942 and didn’t apologize or offer to reimburse Mexico’s loss, Mexico’s back was against the wall.

As such, on May 22nd, 1942, Mexico declared war on Germany and the Axis powers, and immediately sent its Aztec Eagles Elite Air Squadron to the Philippines to help the US military.

Their 33 pilots in P47 Thunderbolts flew 795 sorties in liberation of the Philippines. They also agreed to send more labor to the US as their contribution to the war effort.

Mexico’s declaration of war had another effect as well. For the legal and illegal Mexicans living in the United States, a sense of pride in Mexico arose and they started going to local recruiter and joining the US military, including 15,000 illegal immigrants.

The war’s battles on the seas severely reduced many of America’s needs, like oils from Asia and coffee from South America, and Japan’s military cut off trade with places like the Philippines. Because of that, and the amount of product being sent to the troops, the US was forced to implement rationing, sending ration cards to all Americans and a little known fact to Mexicans living along the US border.

The scale of the war was so massive and length uncertain, the US government had to prepare for both external and internal possibilities.

So, it bought and stored or distributed 100 million pounds of cheese from Kraft, dried eggs, and anything else they could purchase that was dehydrated, compressed, or canned. The stockpiling, however, didn’t foresee the 1945 wars end.

So when 1945 came quickly, it left the US with caves of dried eggs, football fields of potato cakes, and mountains of powdered cheese.

In fearing the effect of a sudden withdrawal, the government kept buying the excess product, often selling it back to the vendors at reduced prices, which forced the government to create a Federal Surplus Property Administration to sell the excess inventory at bargain basement prices.

Which brings us to the second hero of our story after James Kraft. 

The First CARE Package

Arthur Ringland was born in Brooklyn in 1882 and grew up to get a Master’s Degree in Forestry. In 1905 when the Department of Agriculture created the Forest Service, Ringland was part. He was assigned to the southwest region in charge of Lincoln National Forest.

When World War I started, he joined the military and was assigned to the Forestry Regiment to run sawmills in France. And after World War I, he was part of the American Relief Administration in charge of bringing and organizing supplies to help war affected citizens in Turkey and Czechoslovakia. 

Well, jumping forward to the end of World War II, his skills and experience were then requested when war torn Europe needed someone with his level of empathy to help organize relief and assistance.

Ringland and a friend of his, Dr. Lincoln Clark, got started right away.

They started approaching charities with the idea of joining forces and becoming a new large post-war charity.

They found 22 charities willing to work together to bring supplies to Europe. He called them the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe. Along with the help and supplies from their charity workforce, they also acquired 2.8 million military rations the US had built up with the intentions of delivering to soldiers in Berlin, Korea, the Philippines, Israel, and Yugoslavia.

And another stockpile in case Japan had invaded the mainland.

The rations contained tinned meats, raisins, powdered eggs, margarine, lard, sugar, powdered milk, apricot preserves, coffee, honey, and bags of macaroni noodles with powdered Wisconsin cheese.

With the rations and other supplies, they created packages of relief intended for the worst hit areas of Europe. The first package arrived in late 1945 in La Havra, France, and their most famous delivery was to Berlin, which at the time was surrounded by a Russian blockade.

But that didn’t stop the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe from delivering relief.

They famously airlifted 250,000 packages into the heart of Berlin with their name prominently displayed on the side of every box. However, when I say their name was prominently displayed, the words Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe was too long.

So each box had the abbreviation on the side: C A R E.

You probably didn’t know it, but Arthur Ringland and Dr. Lincoln Clark are the ones responsible for the term Care Package.

Which brings us to the third hero of our story, Charles Elmer Doolin. 

Fried Government Cheese Cheetos

Charles Doolin was born in 1910 in Kansas City, but largely grew up in San Antonio. Doolin’s father was an engineer who invented a few automobile advancements. He taught his kids about engineering and writing patent applications for their inventions. 

As a teen, Charles worked in his family’s auto repair garage and in their candy shop. In the candy shop, they sold ice cream and confections at the shop. But Doolin wanted a new product that would electrify his customers.

When on July 10th, 1932, he saw an ad in the San Antonio Express for an original recipe for fried corn chips along with a potato ricer and 19 retail accounts. Someone was selling their business.

He jumped at the opportunity.

Doolin went and sampled the chips, which he liked. So he bought the small business for $100, which is about $2,300 today. He began to make the chips and served the accounts from his mother’s kitchen.

He made a couple of changes, however.

He started by making the chips a bit thinner and cutting them to look like pieces of ribbon. He called them Fritos and named his company the Frito Company.

By 1947, he had grown it to five manufacturing plants, including one on the West Coast.  Plus, he began offering more snack foods like roasted peanuts, peanut butter crackers, potato chips, and fried pork rinds.

And he was always scouting new ideas.

In 1948, Doolin got wind of the government’s Surplus Property Administration, which was offloading all the extras it had stockpiled for the war. That’s when he found out about the mountains of powdered Wisconsin cheese.

So, he bought them.

And in their Dallas Test Kitchen he began to experiment with ways to use the cheese. What seemed to have the best plan was combining the powdered cheese with cornmeal and frying it. It didn’t take long before a new snack was born, and Doolin thought it was perfect. He called it a Cheeto, and soon everyone loved his Cheetos snacks.

With eyes on growing his company even bigger, Doolin could see that he’d need a partner to achieve achieve true scale. So he reached out to another snack manufacturer Herman W. Lay, in 1961, as he brought additional manufacturing and distribution reach.

Thus later in 1961 the government’s excess cheese helped create Frito Lay Incorporated, the biggest chip and snack company in the world.

But Fritos and C.A.R.E. packages aren’t the only cheesy success story of World War II. too.

There’s one more and it’s even bigger.

A Kid Named Nacho

But that takes us back briefly to Mexico in 1850 where Andre Zapata and his men sent word back to Colonel Juan Manuel Maldonado of the Mexican Army that they had established a pass across the Rio Grand River.

The settlement there became known as Piedras Negras because of all the black rocks in the river. Eagle Pass, Texas would develop on the other side of this river crossing. 

In 1881, coal was found in Piedras Negras and thus a railroad was connected to which Piedras Negras became a real town in 1883.

The US side of Piedras Negras wasn’t much until 1942 when the US Army Air Force built an aircraft training command there called Fort Duncan. The flight training there was the final place pilots would train before becoming full-fledged pilots. That was the point of the base.

Because it was a border town with many Mexicans working on the American side of the river is one of the places that created the need for cross border rationing cards. The Mexicans were given red rationing cards, which meant their purchases of meats, fats, fish, and cheese were restricted.

One of those was the owner of Club Victoria, a small restaurant in Piedras Negras. It was the kind of place military wives would come for a drink while waiting for their husbands during the war. In 1943, Ignacio Anaya was working as the waiter when some Air Force wives stopped in. 

It was late and the cook had already left, but the ladies inquired about some drink and some food. Ignacio, eager to please, went to the kitchen to see what he could put together.

He looked around and saw some tortillas. He quickly broke the tortillas into pieces on a plate and found some Wisconsin Colby cheese, a relief cheese the owner could buy with his ration card, and on top of that, a slice of jalapeño pepper on each chip.

He melted the cheese and brought it to the ladies delivering it as Nacho’s special.

Why Nacho?

In America, when a young boy is named William, people call him Bob.
And when a child’s official name is Robert, many call him Rob.
Well, in Mexico, when a child named Ignacio is baptized, he often gets the nickname Nacho.

So, he delivered the chip as Nacho’s Special.

The women loved it, and Nacho Special became a requested plate.

Furthermore, locally, other restaurants began selling Nachos Special as well. And a few years later, in 1954, in a local cookbook called St. Ana’s Cookbook, Church of the Redeemer in Eagle Pass, Texas, included the first written recipe of a nacho.

Nachos made their way around Texas, and they got introduced to California.

But it wouldn’t be until 1976 that nachos would begin to take over America.

That brings us to the final hero of our story, Frank Liberto.

Frank was born in 1933 in the family food business, Liberto Specialty Company. Frank’s dad was taking full advantage of the American dream. His company had been providing concessions to stadiums and movie theaters, vending foods like roasted peanuts, popcorn, and snow cones.

Frank’s dad wasn’t the first entrepreneur in the family, however. His grandfather had immigrated from Sicily in 1909 and opened a store that sold Italian coffee, olives, and peanuts.

When Frank was introduced to nachos, he thought they would be a perfect concession item if they didn’t take so long to make.

Putting chips on a plate, topping it with cheese, putting in the oven, melting the cheese, and adding jalapeño would take too long.

What he really needed was a cheese that could be dispensed in high volume. Processed cheese was a much better option, but Kraft’s processed cheese wasn’t a suitable nacho flavor.

So, he drove around Mexico trying different cheeses until he came upon the perfect one. It too had Wisconsin Colby in it, but it was a bit different and came came in cans.

However, to be able to properly dispense it onto chips, he needed it to be not so thick. He found out that adding 32 oz of water and the juice from a jar of jalapeños to a 107 oz can of cheese, he’d end up with 159 ounces of perfect nacho sauce.

But he needed to test the market.

One of the stadiums his company served was Arlington, Texas, home of the Texas Rangers.

He couldn’t convince management to add nachos to the concession booth, but they did agree to let him set up a cart.

At his first game, his cart grew huge lines between innings that didn’t slow down even when the next inning began. People were willing to miss the action in order to get the nachos.

Each of his containers contained a bed of chips, the new creamy, pourable cheese, and jalapeños. And the presence of jalapeños itself increased the number of drinks that were sold.

Arlington management felt it was so successful they added nachos to the concessions official booths. And in the first year, nachos accounted for $800,000 in sales.

One nacho per two and a half patrons. Not only that, but sales of hot dogs and drinks also went up. Then in 1978, nachos became available at Cowboys Stadium.

And then on one fateful night, Howard Cosell, the sports TV broadcaster, would change the popularity of nachos forever. Howard Cosell was in the booth along with Frank Gifford and Don Meredith when nachos were delivered to the press box.

Howard Cosell had never had them, and he loved them.

So after the next inning started, he shared the love of this new food with the TV watching audience, and for the balance of the game would randomly use the word nacho.

“That was a nacho home run.”
“That was the third nacho out” he might say.

After that night, United Artist Theaters called.

They wanted to test nachos in 10 theaters and then quickly rolled them out to the entire nation.

Under the name Ricos, nachos were soon in theaters and stadiums everywhere. And to support sales, Frank even had the Disney Corporation create a commercial for television. You can even see the same logo from the commercial in Ricos Nacho cheese dispensers everywhere, even in my theater in Mount Juliet, Tennessee at the Regal Providence.

Today, Rico’s is the largest family-owned tortilla chip manufacturer in the world. And if you don’t get their nachos at the stadium, you can get their chips at the grocery store under the name On the Border, a partnership with the restaurant chain.

Who knew that World War II would spawn Kraft, the CARE package, Fritos, Cheetos, and Nachos.
 Now you know the cheesy results of World War II.