Food and War in Twentieth-Century Europe, Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Rachel Duffett, and Alain Drouard, eds

摘要

Historians are proving increasingly receptive to the significance, if not centrality, of concerns about food, diet, and nutrition in 20th-century periods of international conflict. The question of how to feed soldiers and civilians captured the attention of policy makers, medical communities, business groups, and consumers during both the First and Second World Wars. Both of these defining periods of conflict severed long-established trading patterns, disrupted domestic purchasing habits, witnessed extensive food shortages, and provoked pertinent fears of mass starvation. In response, state bodies devised innovative methods of feeding the expansive military machine to bolster their likelihood of success and also intervened in the consumption habits of civilians located on the domestic front. Increased state intervention in that arena, it was hoped, would strengthen civilian capacity to contribute productively to the war efforts, as well as maintain communal health. To achieve these goals, state bodies across Europe called upon the expertise of an array of groups including nutritional scientists, food manufacturers, and medical communities due to having recognized that large-scale war could not be fought or sustained without being attentive to food