An Edible History of Humanity

by Tom Standage

  This was vividly illustrated just a few years later during the Second World War, and on the North African front in particular, where the German general Erwin Rommel found himself hemmed in by logistical constraints—primarily that of fuel. The German and Italian troops in North Africa received supplies via the port of Tripoli. Rommel dreamed of defeating the British, based to his east in Egypt, and then choking off the Allies’ supply of oil from the Middle East. But there was no suitable railway line along which he could advance to the east, so his supplies had to be carried across the desert in trucks. As the German troops advanced, convoys of trucks shuttled back and forth between Tripoli and the front, carrying fuel, ammunition, food, and water. Seizing a deep-water port along the coast would reduce the distance that supplies needed to be carried overland, so Rommel captured the Libyan port of Tobruk, near the border with Egypt. But the port’s capacity was limited and approaching ships were sunk by the Allies in large numbers. Rommel’s supply lines were so overextended that 30 to 50 percent of his fuel was being used to ferry fuel and other supplies to the front. The farther east he advanced, the more fuel was wasted in this way. When he retreated or was pushed back westward, his supply problems eased.

  Rommel’s attempt to defeat the Allies in North Africa failed. “The first essential condition for an army to be able to stand the strain of battle is an adequate stock of weapons, petrol, and ammunition,” he eventually concluded. “In fact, the battle is fought and decided by the quartermasters before the shooting begins.” In a previous era he would have mentioned food and fodder. But they were no longer the critical elements of military supply. Food’s central role in military planning had come to an end. But by the middle of the twentieth century food was already taking on a new role: as an ideological weapon.

  10

  FOOD FIGHT

  Food is a weapon.

  —MAXIM LITVINOV, SOVIET MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, 1930–39

  How do you deal with mice in the Kremlin? Put up a sign saying “collective farm.” Then half the mice will starve, and the other half will run away.

  —SOVIET-ERA JOKE, FROM BEN LEWIS, Hammer and Tickle

  FOOD FROM THE SKY

  The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, an ideological struggle between capitalism and communism that overshadowed the second half of the twentieth century, began in earnest with a food fight over the city of Berlin. Germany had been divided at the end of the Second World War into four zones—those controlled by Britain, France, and the United States in the west, and a fourth zone controlled by the Soviet Union in the east. Its capital, Berlin, situated in the heart of the Soviet zone, had also been divided in four in this way. In early 1948, nearly three years after the end of the war, the British, French, and Americans agreed to unite their respective zones of Germany, and of Berlin, under a single administration in order to coordinate the reconstruction of the country. The Soviets were strongly opposed to the Western allies’ plan, because Germany had emerged as a symbolic battleground on which, both sides agreed, the future political direction of Europe would be decided. The Western nations wanted to establish a democratic government in a reunified Germany, whereas Russia hoped to orchestrate the installation of a Communist regime. The disagreement between the two sides became focused on Berlin, an isolated Western toehold in the Soviet zone of eastern Germany. As Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, put it: “What happens to Berlin, happens to Germany; what happens to Germany, happens to Europe.”

  Determined to force the Western allies to abandon West Berlin, the Soviets started interfering with the delivery of food and other supplies to the city, interrupting road, rail, and barge traffic on various spurious pretexts. The Soviets calculated that the Western allies would prefer to give up the city rather than go to war to defend it. In April 1948 Lucius D. Clay, the highest ranking American military officer in Germany, told Omar Bradley, the U.S. Army chief of staff, that “if we mean that we are to hold Europe against communism, we must not budge. We can take humiliation and pressure short of war in Berlin without losing face. If we move, our position in Europe is threatened . . . and communism will run rampant. I believe the future of democracy requires us to stay here until forced out.” In June, Clay underlined his position in a telegram sent to his superiors in Washington, D.C.: “We are convinced that our remaining in Berlin is essential to our prestige in Germany and in Europe,” he declared. “Whether for good or bad, it has become a symbol of the American intent.”

  As Soviet interference with delivery of supplies to West Berlin continued, Clay proposed sending an infantry division to accompany a convoy of trucks through Soviet-controlled East Germany to the city as a show of strength. But his plan was regarded as too risky, since it might have sparked a firefight between American and Soviet troops that could have escalated into a broader conflict. When the introduction of a new currency in West Germany was announced on June 18, in effect formalizing the economic separation of East and West Germany, the Soviets expressed their displeasure by blocking freight access to West Berlin by road, rail, and barge. By the evening of June 24 all land and water access to West Berlin had been completely sealed off. Colonel Frank Howley, the U.S. commandant in Berlin, went on the radio to reassure the inhabitants of the city. “We are not getting out of Berlin, we are going to stay,” he said. “I don’t know the answer to the present problem—not yet—but this much I do know: The American people will not stand by and allow the German people to starve.”

  He was speaking unofficially, because the allies had not yet decided how to respond. But they had to do something: The city had only enough food for thirty-six days, and enough coal for forty-five days. Clay once again proposed his plan for an armed road convoy, and was again overruled. General Brian Robertson, the British commander in Germany, said that his government would not approve such a move either. But he suggested an alternative way to break the blockade: supplying West Berlin by air.

  On the face of it, this was a preposterous idea. Supplying the two million people in West Berlin, it was calculated, would mean delivering some fifteen hundred tons of food and a further two thousand tons of coal and fuel every day, at a bare minimum. (Ideally, some 13,500 tons a day would be needed, but this was a minimum figure for the summer months.) The only aircraft available were Douglas C-47s, capable of carrying about three tons each. Even with the help of smaller British transports, it was hard to see how it would be possible to deliver the necessary volume of supplies. The airlift idea was, however, the only alternative to making a politically unacceptable climbdown and abandoning the city. It also had the advantage that, unlike the land-based access routes through East Germany to West Berlin, the status of which was legally unclear, the right to use air corridors to and from Berlin had been agreed in writing with the Soviet Union in November 1945. A small amount of supplies had in fact already been delivered by aircraft in April 1948, after the Soviets had begun interfering with rail freight.

  So Clay ordered the airlift to begin. He assumed that he would be able to get hold of more planes fairly quickly, and that the airlift would only have to operate for a few weeks while a diplomatic solution to the crisis was agreed. The first aircraft, carrying supplies from airfields in West Germany, arrived in West Berlin on June 26. With the backing of President Harry Truman, who gave his formal support to the airlift despite objections from some of his advisers, the operation slowly scaled up, reaching twenty-five hundred tons a day by mid-July.

  But diplomacy with the Soviet Union was getting nowhere. Tensions rose when America stationed B-29 bombers—the type of aircraft that had dropped atomic bombs on Japan in 1945—at airfields in Britain, within range of Moscow. The aircraft were not equipped with nuclear weapons, but the Soviets did not know this. After the airlift had been running for a month, however, the immediate threat of war seemed to have receded, and it had become clear that the airlift would have to operate for more than just a few weeks. The C-47s were replaced with larger C-54s, cap
able of carrying ten tons of cargo, and flights were soon operating every three minutes, twenty-four hours a day. General William H. Tunner, who was put in charge of the airlift in late July 1948, introduced new takeoff and landing rules to maximize capacity and minimize the risk of accidents. Teams of volunteers unloaded the aircraft in Berlin and competed to do so in the shortest possible time. The Americans called the mission “Operation Vittles”; to the British it was known as “Operation Plainfare.” By October deliveries had reached five thousand tons per day.

  The Soviets made various attempts to disrupt the airlift, harrassing the freight planes by buzzing them with their own aircraft, releasing barrage balloons that got in their way, causing radio interference, shining searchlights at incoming aircraft, and sometimes even firing into the air in their vicinity. But they never went so far as to shoot any of the planes down. The soldiers and airmen in Berlin, meanwhile, who had arrived in the city a few years earlier as an occupying enemy force, forged a close bond with the city’s inhabitants, whose liberty they were now defending. Flying boats landing on a lake in central Berlin to deliver salt, which was too corrosive to be carried in other aircraft, were met by Berliners who paddled out to present their pi lots with bunches of flowers. And an American pi lot, Gail Halvorsen, became a hero to the children of Berlin after he began dropping chocolate bars, sweets, and chewing gum, attached to parachutes made from handkerchiefs, out of the window of his aircraft whenever he passed over the city. Soon other pi lots were following his example, and Halvorsen’s unofficial venture won official approval. Over three tons of sweets, both supplied by American manufacturers and donated by American children, were dropped on Berlin. Highlighting the link between American children and those in Berlin, as their respective countries took a stand together against communism, gave the operation enormous propaganda value.

  That the food being supplied to West Berlin was being used, in effect, as a weapon against the Communists was explicitly acknowledged on a poster produced in 1949 by Douglas, the maker of the C-54 planes that were the mainstays of the airlift. It shows a girl holding up a glass of milk, and hundreds more glasses floating down from passing aircraft in the sky. Under the headline MILK . . . NEW WEAPON OF DEMOCRACY, the poster explains: “In today’s diplomatic Battle for Berlin, hope for democracy is being kept alive for millions in Western Europe by the U.S. Air Force. Flying Douglas aircraft almost exclusively, Yankee crews have poured over half a million tons of supplies into Berlin since last June.”

  In the spring of 1949 General Tunner decided to stage a spectacular “Easter Parade” to demonstrate how committed the Allies were to continuing the airlift for as long as necessary. Deliveries were exceeding six thousand tons a day by March 1949, but Tunner set the ambitious target of delivering ten thousand tons on a single day: April 17, which was Easter Sunday. Maintenance schedules were arranged so that the maximum number of aircraft would be available that day, and crews at different airfields prepared to break their previous records. The ground crews and pi lots were determined to beat the ten-thousand-ton target, and in the event a total of 12,940 tons were delivered. This vividly demonstrated the potential capacity of the airlift operation and the commitment of the people operating it. The publicity surrounding the Easter Parade sent a clear signal to the Soviets and helped to bring about a new round of negotiations, at which the Soviets finally agreed to lift the blockade of West Berlin from May 12, 1949. Delivery flights did not end immediately, but they gradually wound down over several months, to ensure that the operation could be stepped up again if necessary. The last flight took place on September 30. The airlift had operated for fifteen months, during which some 2.3 million tons of supplies were delivered in more than 275,000 flights.

  “Milk . . . new weapon of Democracy” poster produced by Douglas during the Berlin airlift.

  Subsequent negotiations failed to reach agreement on the future of Germany or Berlin. The crisis spurred the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance of Western powers, on April 4, 1949, thus setting the stage for the standoff between America and its allies on the one hand, and the Soviet Union and its allies on the other, in the following decades. The first battle of this Cold War had been fought not with bullets or bombs, but with milk, sweets, salt, and other foodstuffs and supplies. In the four decades that followed there was never a direct conflict between NATO and Soviet forces. Instead the conflict was waged indirectly: through wars between the two sides’ client states, through propaganda, and with ideological weapons—including food.

  STALIN’S FAMINE

  The Soviet leader, Josef Stalin, was no stranger to the use of food as an ideological tool. After assuming power in 1924 he had launched a crash industrialization program with the aim of catching up with, and then surpassing, the Western industrialized nations. Food was central to his plan. At the time, the Soviet Union was a major exporter of grain, and the purchase of industrial machinery from foreign countries was to be funded by an increase in such exports. Small farms run by individual farmers and their families would be crunched together to form “collective” farms owned by the state. Bringing farming under state control in this way would, Stalin hoped, boost production. “In some three years’ time, our country will have become one of the richest granaries, if not the richest, in the whole world,” Stalin declared in 1929, as he unveiled his plans. This would provide extra grain to sell abroad, yielding more hard currency to fund the industrialization program. Stalin set a goal of doubling steel output and tripling iron production within five years. The success of his program would demonstrate the superiority of socialism, as farmers working together produced more food and as the Soviet Union rapidly industrialized.

  In some respects this was an attempt to reproduce what had happened in western Europe, starting in Britain, where industrialization had been preceded by a surge in agricultural productivity. This had liberated laborers from the land and made them available as industrial workers, which is why Adam Smith had called industrial activity “the offspring of agriculture.” But the Soviet approach was very different, because the state had played a very limited role in orchestrating Britain’s industrialization; it had not been a deliberately planned outcome. Stalin’s industrialization program, by contrast, was a state-organized effort that would be funded by squeezing as much as possible out of peasant farmers. “Collectivizing” the farms would mean that their produce belonged to the state and therefore could be more readily appropriated for export.

  Unsurprisingly the farmers themselves were less than enthusiastic about this new policy. Collectivization, in practice, meant herding the farmers into communal accommodation and, in some cases, forcing them to renounce private property and destroy their possessions. The more productive (and hence wealthier) farmers were particularly reluctant to go along with this. In some cases they chose to burn their crops or slaughter their cattle rather than surrender them to the new collective farms. Stalin decreed that since all crops, cattle, and agricultural produce now belonged to the state, anyone who refused to hand it over or destroyed it was an enemy of the people or a saboteur, and deserved to be deported to the Soviet network of penal labor camps, which later came to be known as the Gulag.

  Since the most productive farmers were most likely to object to collectivization, the impact on agricultural productivity was predictable. With their produce now belonging to the state, there was no incentive for farmers to maximize production. Drought, bad weather, and a lack of horses to work in the fields also meant that the harvests of 1931 and 1932 were poorer than usual. The result was that just as Stalin was demanding more agricultural goods to fund his industrialization program, the level of food production actually fell. But admitting that collectivization had made farms less productive was unthinkable to the Soviet leadership. Stalin insisted instead that there had been record harvests, but that some farmers were hiding their produce to avoid having to hand it over. This explanation justified the state’s continuing procuremen
ts of large amounts of grain. But it meant that many farmers were left without enough to eat. And those who failed to meet their grain quotas or were suspected of hiding grain were punished by having other crops removed as “fines,” so that they had even less food. Meanwhile the industrial workers in the cities had plenty to eat, and exports of grain doubled, giving the outside world the impression that Stalin’s scheme was proceeding as planned.

  On average, farmers ended up with one third less grain for their own consumption than they had had before collectivization. But in some areas the situation was much worse. In particular, in Ukraine, a rich agricultural region that traditionally produced large grain surpluses, the state set ambitious procurement quotas. When the expected bumper harvests failed to materialize, local officials were ordered to step up their searches for hidden stores of food. Stalin decreed that retaining so much as one ear of wheat from the state was punishable by death or ten years’ imprisonment. One participant recalled: “I took part in this myself, scouring the countryside, searching for hidden grain, testing the earth with an iron rod for loose spots that might lead to hidden grain. With the others I emptied out the old folks’ storage chests, stopping my ears to the children’s crying and the women’s wails. For I was convinced that I was accomplishing the transformation of the countryside.” As people began to starve, soldiers were posted to guard the large stores of grain that had been amassed by the state. Vasily Grossman, a Soviet writer, recorded the plight of those starving in rural villages: “People had swollen faces and legs and stomachs . . . and now they ate anything at all. They caught mice, rats, sparrows, ants, earthworms. They ground up bones into flour, and did the same thing with leather and shoe soles; they cut up old skins and furs to make noodles of a kind and they cooked glue. And when the grass came up, they began to dig up the roots and ate the leaves and buds.”