Archive Showcase: Vita-Min-Go
A Wartime Game to help you better manage your nutrition
For the first Archives Showcase post, I wanted to share with you an amazing game in my collection that I don’t think I’ve shared anywhere else. It’s called Vita-Min-Go, published in 1942. It’s unique and fun and fairly straightforward. The point of the game was to make nutrition “fun” by helping the player track the nutrients they were getting in their everyday diet. In some ways, it’s similar to modern day nutrition or food logging apps, but this is definitely a game with six different sheets one single person needed to keep track of.
The six sheets used to track one person’s diet were: Vitamin A, Vitamin B1 (thiamin), Vitamin B2 (riboflavin), Vitamin C, Iron, and Calcium. The player would use a button or coin on each sheet to mark if they achieved their nutrition goals for the day.
The message of the game is clear on the cover: “We need a Victory Diet to keep the Nation strong.” This early and continuous push for nutrition was an important aspect of American wartime propaganda. And it’s part of the foundation of our current government nutrition programs!
The directions to play involve remembering what you ate throughout the day, but it could easily be adapted to “play as you eat.”
Note how the prize for winning is “better health and more vigor”! And the penalty for losing? A greater chance of sickness. No one likes to lose or be sick, especially when the nation is at war! So, in other words, letting yourself succumb to sickness due to poor diet was unpatriotic and something easily avoided.
There were some caveats to this game. There was no counting of calories. This game was purely to help you monitor your nutrition, making sure you were getting enough vitamins, calcium, and iron. It also didn’t count proteins, but they are assuming you are consuming proteins since much of the nutrition you’re tracking would come from proteins. Finally, they make sure you understand how to preserve those vital vitamins by cooking and storing fruits and vegetables properly. This was a very popular theme in nutrition education in the 1940s.
I think this is my favorite part of the game - the score sheet. The colors correspond with the different game sheets. And this chart tells you how much of each nutrient is contained in these foods. It’s unfortunate if you ate outside of the things on this list, but I think the basic gist of learning to include healthy options in your diet is there. There’s nothing like a visual, color-coded list like this!
The back of the game shows eight food groups, which is interesting. I have seen other sources with eight food groups from early in the war, but in most sources from wartime, eggs were put in with meat to create the seven food groups we’re familiar with. And, yes, butter and margarine had their own group!
I hope you enjoyed this look at a unique piece of history from wartime. What do you think? Is this a game you would play to better manage your nutrition? Tell me your thoughts in the comments!
It sounds kind of fun! But also the shame of being unpatriotic is you didn’t eat healthy--gotta love propaganda haha