The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food

by Lizzie Collingham

  If anything, palates appear to have been coarsened and tastes homo-genized by the monotony of wartime diets. This was particularly noticeable where governments controlled what people ate. Endless bland meals in army messes, factory canteens and British Restaurants habituated people to insipid dishes designed to neither offend nor excite the taste buds. This tendency was particularly noticeable among young American and Japanese men, whose army diets deliberately avoided regional dishes and sought to create a uniform cuisine.

  It has been argued that war is one of the most powerful forces of globalization, and millions of young men, who would never otherwise have ventured far from home, travelled the globe in the armed forces during the Second World War.87 The adventurous discovered new foods and new ways of eating. Anthony Lamb recalled that during his training in the use of artillery at Deolali near Bombay the lunches were ‘appetizing curries with all the trimmings, iced limeade, delightful Indian sweets’.88 In his prison camp in Egypt Richard Eickelmann, a captive German, learned how to make ‘desert char’: extremely strong tea, flavoured with condensed milk and lots of sugar. Even in the 1990s he still prepared tea for English guests in this fashion.89 Fred Watt, a black GI in a service corps, also enjoyed the British teatime tradition of ‘little flavoured cakes and a pot of tea’ every day at three in the afternoon. He concluded that the opportunity the war gave him to live abroad ‘was one of the greatest experiences that I have ever had … By me not being able to go to college, I still consider myself as knowledgeable as anyone else because of all my knowledge from travelling.’90 But in most of the countries occupied or visited by soldiers, rationing and the scarcity of food meant that few were able to sample the best dishes in the local cuisine’s repertoire. Rather, it was the soldiers who had access to superior foods. The Allied armies’ reliance on canned goods from America ensured that virtually every part of the globe acquired a taste for Coca-Cola and Spam. American military food probably had the most profound impact on the diet of Pacific islanders but the taste for American foodstuffs spread throughout the globe. The Australians acquired the habit of eating packaged breakfast cereals and a fondness for sweetcorn, which had been introduced to satisfy the tastes of American servicemen.91 The actress and cook Madhur Jaffrey recalled that after the war Delhi was swamped by US army ‘leftovers in the form of mysterious boxes known as K-Rations … my cousins and I tore them open as if they were Christmas presents, pulling out each carefully fitted tin or package with the greatest glee. Thus I was introduced to my first olive, my first fruit cocktail and my first taste of Spam. I rolled mouthfuls slowly around my tongue and pronounced each of them to be exotic and wonderful. I had never eaten tinned fruit or meat before.’92 Thus, the war acted as a powerful vehicle for spreading the American way of eating across the globe.

  Nevertheless, even though the war forced a large proportion of the world’s population to give up rice, it did not instigate a widespread conversion to bread. The occupation of most of the world’s rice-exporting countries by the Japanese meant that rice-eating peoples throughout the British empire were confronted with wheat as a substitute. This was a deeply unpopular development, as rice-eaters claim that a switch to wheat causes stomach problems. The inability of rice-eaters to digest other, coarser grains when weakened by malnutrition was tragically demonstrated by the victims of the Bengal famine. But wheat poses all sorts of other problems even for those who have not been weakened by hunger. Rice-eating countries often lacked mills to make wheat flour, or commercial bakeries or domestic ovens in which to bake it into bread. Ceylon had to build flour mills and bakeries to process the Australian wheat which went some way to replacing Burmese rice imports. Schools, health officers and government officials had to campaign hard, using a mix of lectures, demonstrations and posters, to persuade the Ceylonese to eat bread.93 After the war the Ceylonese immediately reverted to rice. This was the case in virtually every rice-eating country which had been forced to eat wheat during wartime, including Bengal and Mauritius. Only in Somalia did the younger generation develop a taste for wheat bread, which they continued to eat after the war, while the older generation reverted to their preferred millet and rice.94

  In the post-war years it was the Japanese who were forced to eat bread. The initial American policy towards defeated Japan was that they were only prepared to give sufficient aid to the country to prevent disease and social unrest. The United States had no intention of paying for the reconstruction of the Japanese economy. But the miserable state of the Japanese food system and the disastrous harvest of 1945 meant that over the period of American occupation (August 1945 to April 1952) the United States ended up spending about $2 billion, mainly on food aid.95 However, the food which the United States provided gave no quarter to Japanese eating habits. The influx of wheat flour from America forced the Japanese to acquire the habit of eating bread and in 1946 it was announced that ‘the era of flour has arrived’.96 An electric company in Osaka even began producing bread-making machines which baked a corn- or wheatmeal batter into loaves.97 In 1947 the occupation authorities introduced school lunches in an attempt to improve the nutrition of the children. These included small white bread rolls served alongside whatever was available from army stores, perhaps a stew or soup, some vegetables and often a drink of milk. Oki Chiyo’s son recalled the introduction of American food to his school. Before this he and his sister brought a lunch from home of rice, pickled plum and a few fish flakes. He and his classmates suffered from runny noses due to the lack of protein in their diet. Over time the American lunches cured them, while at the same time they appear to have encouraged among this generation of Japanese an eclectic attitude towards unusual combinations of western foods which is still common today.98

  Economic recovery really began in Japan after 1950, when the Korean war brought in an injection of American cash. As incomes rose the Japanese continued to eat bread at breakfast time but quickly reverted to rice for lunch and dinner. The massive recruitment of peasants into the army from the 1930s onwards had changed the rural view of rice. In the military the recruits grew accustomed to eating rice as the basic staple around which every meal was structured. When they returned to civilian life they were no longer content to revert to the peasant habit of eating millet or barley, or to mix their rice with other grains. The wartime rationing system had a similar impact on the urban poor. The fact that the basic ration was rice gave the grain the status of the staple food to which every Japanese was entitled. The fact that the rice in the ration was gradually replaced by substitute foods re-inforced rather than undermined the sense that rice was the central element of the Japanese diet.99 Once they could afford it, all Japanese, rural and urban dwellers, chose to eat rice with their meals. It was the Second World War which transformed white rice into the staple of the entire Japanese population.

  Alongside food abundance and food processing, a further factor which helped to shape the new consumer was the influence which the new science of nutrition gained during the Second World War. The science of nutrition which developed out of the wartime study of the most beneficial diets for different types of physical activity tended to redefine food as the sum of different nutrients which influence bodily health. This approach to food has led to a restless search to identify those foodstuffs which are unhealthy, and those which are the key to good health. Hence the demonization of saturated fats and the recent celebration of omega-3 fatty oils. Perversely, this view of food as solely the sum of nutrients also allows us, or rather food scientists, to declare highly processed foods healthy. Thus a conglomeration of hydrogenated oils, guar gum and corn starch masquerading as yoghurt, can be defined as healthy as it is low in fat and high in calcium. This has diverted the modern consumer’s attention away from natural foods and from food as a source of pleasure, while at the same time it has accorded nutritional science an authority which it does not deserve. The scientific understanding of nutrition is extremely imprecise and scientists still have only the haziest notion of how the d
ifferent foods which make up a varied diet work together within the body to impact upon health.100

  One thing is clear, however. The western diet which emerged out of the post-war agricultural and food-processing revolution is not particularly healthy. Soil repeatedly made artificially fertile, yields less nutritious food, and intensive, industrial agriculture produces foodstuffs which contain traces of harmful chemicals. The modern western diet is also over-reliant on processed foods, particularly refined carbohydrates, and provides far too many cheap and empty sugary calories. It is this diet, created out of the processes set in motion by the Second World War, which tends to make the western world overweight, at times obese, and most certainly less healthy. While the disadvantages of the western diet are now widely recognized this has done nothing to prevent the newly developing world from adopting it.

  As soon as the Iron Curtain was lifted in 1989 eastern Europeans displayed a desire for abundance and plenty to equal that enjoyed by western Europeans in the 1950s. Communism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe had never fulfilled its promise of making a life for its people better than that experienced in the capitalist west. During the aftermath of the German post-unification elections of 1990, Otto Schily, then a candidate for the Green Party and later Interior Minister for the Social Democrats, was asked on television to explain the overwhelming success of the Conservative Christian Democrats in the East. He presented the interviewer with a banana. His stunt offended many East Germans but its wordless message was clear to everyone. A banana, a rare and prized luxury because of the communist regime’s lack of foreign exchange, had come to symbolize the material abundance of the capitalist west. In their first free election since 1933, East Germans had voted, not for a reformed version of socialism, as was offered by some of the other parties, but for mass consumerism: for affordable cars, holidays and plenty of good food.

  Mass consumerism and good food have proved equally alluring in an economically flourishing China. The promise of Mao’s agricultural minister, that communism would provide plenty of good food, is finally being realized as the urban middle classes feast on meat, fish and eggs.101 The Second World War provides a powerful illustration of the way in which rising incomes substantially increase the demand for food. John Beddington, the British government’s chief scientific adviser, speaking to a conference on sustainable development, described how a rise in wages from £1 to £5 a day leads to an exponential increase in the demand for meat and dairy products. Once wages rise above £5 a day, a market for processed and packaged foods emerges. Other developing countries such as India, Indonesia and Brazil are following China’s lead and increasing their consumption of energy-intensive foods. The food affluence, which the developed world achieved in the 1950s and 1960s, is spreading across the globe.

  However, the uneven distribution of purchasing power means that as sections of the world’s population improve their diet, the number of hungry people in the world is also increasing. ‘If all the cereals grown in 2007 had magically been spread equally among earth’s 6.6 billion persons and used directly as food … [they] could have supplied everyone with the required amounts of calories and proteins, with about 30 per cent left over.’102 In fact, an estimated 923 million people (many of them concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and south-east Asia) were chronically hungry and undernourished while millions more suffered from ‘the hidden hungers of iron deficiency, vitamin A and iodine deficiency disorders’.103 Even if the problem of unequal distribution were solved, the combined impact of a world population which is continuing to grow and the increasing demand for energy-intensive foods such as meat and milk products means that pressure on the world’s food resources is increasing. If demand continues to rise with growing affluence, there will simply not be enough food and certainly not enough energy-intensive food to go around. The world’s agriculture cannot sustain a global population where everyone eats as many calories and as much meat and dairy produce as the average American.

  There is pressure on the world’s food supply from other directions too. In developing economies more and more agricultural land is disappearing, as cities, industries and transport networks spread out into the countryside. The rising demand for biofuels is also beginning to impact upon the amount of grain available for food. In 2009 enough US grain to feed 330 million people was channelled into the petrol tanks of American cars. The World Bank concluded that American and European production of grain for biofuels had dramatically pushed up world food prices.104 In addition, the environmental consequences of the industrialization of agriculture are becoming apparent. Many areas, such as the Punjab, which experienced a green revolution in the 1960s, are now facing a fall in productivity due to pesticide and fertilizer pollution, nutritionally depleted, fertilizer-dependent soils, and increased soil salinity in combination with a dangerous lowering of water tables.105 Most worryingly of all, climate change threatens to significantly reduce the availability of agricultural land. Rising sea levels and desertification threaten rich agricultural areas such as Bengal, the Mediterranean and California. Agricultural scientists warn that research is not about to produce a new technological revolution to boost agricultural production. The optimistic post-war period when food was abundant and cheap appears to be drawing to a close and it seems likely that in the future food will become increasingly scarce and expensive.

  The First World War taught governments that a free market could not be relied upon both to mobilize a nation’s resources and to protect the population’s access to the necessities of life. High food prices in Britain in 1916 led to industrial unrest, in Russia severe food shortages lit the spark of revolution in 1917. When they entered the Second World War most countries applied the lessons of 1914–19 and almost immediately introduced regulatory economic controls and rationing in order to ensure equitable distribution of foodstuffs. A world with less food will once again increase the pressure on governments to act to safeguard social cohesion and the sustainability of their food supplies. It is unlikely that something like Second World War ration coupons will return. Instead, it is more likely that governments will adopt the kind of mechanisms which are currently evolving to tackle the effects of global warming, such as carbon-trading schemes and international treaties like the Kyoto Protocol. Pressure will mount to create an international body such as Boyd Orr’s World Food Board to co-ordinate and regulate global food production and trade. The drive to implement energy-saving measures and preserve fossil fuels will eventually extend to farming and food-trading practices and the world’s population may once again be pushed towards a greater reliance on less energy-intensive and more efficient foods, the staples of wartime: bread and potatoes.

  *President since April 1945 after Roosevelt’s death.

  *This was how the Allies referred to themselves after the Atlantic Charter of 1942.

  *To cause these substances to be deposited in solid form out of liquid.

  A Selective Chronology of the

  Second World War

  1920–21

  November–February: Washington Naval Conference.

  1921

  Lenin introduces New Economic Policy in Soviet Union, rationing discontinued.

  Japanese army sets up a Military Diet Research Committee.

  1922

  28 October: Mussolini becomes Italian Prime Minister.

  1925

  July: Mussolini launches the Battle for Wheat in Italy.

  July: In Japan the Army Provisions Depot sets up the Provisions Friends’ Association to spread the principles of military mass-catering to the public.

  1926

  Rationing re-introduced in Soviet Union.

  1927

  April: Chiang Kaishek orders purges of his former communist allies.

  1928

  Chiang Kaishek establishes Nationalist government of China with a capital in Nanjing.

  1929–33

  The Great Depression.

  Collectivization in the Soviet Union.

  1
931

  18 September: Japan occupies Manchuria.

  1932

  15 May: Japanese Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi assassinated. Parliamentary government in Japan replaced by a cabinet of ‘national unity’.