Beyond bully beef: soldiers, food and transcultural interactions in World War I

ABSTRACT

Important recent scholarship has highlighted the social, cultural, religious and emotional significance of food, drink and hunger in wartime. Much of this work has taken World War I as its focus. However, the particular effects of eating as an intercultural encounter is an area so far underexplored in the history of World War I. This article examines these aspects of daily life in war time through the records of diaries, memoirs, soldier newspapers and propaganda to provide greater insight into the strategic, symbolic and emotional role of food and drink for soldiers in diverse World War I armies. Our article shows that food and drink are frequently objects of intercultural exchange. This exchange is revealing not just of the material conditions of war time, but of the social, cultural and emotional contours of the intercultural encounters forced by this global conflagration.

KEYWORDS:

• Food
• war
• World War I
• intercultural
• multi-ethnic
• history of the emotions

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the research assistance and advice of Claire McCarthy in the preparation of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The situation with rations of course varied widely throughout the fighting forces of the many belligerent nations. Some cultural histories of food have challenged accepted truths about army rations, such as the notion that working-class British soldiers were better fed in the army than they had been previously. Rachel Duffett has successfully established that this was not the case, and her subtle and wide-ranging analysis of British rankers’ eating sets the benchmark for work in this area. The context for army rations for the Central Powers was of course the blockade, the impact of which has been studied mostly in terms of the home front (see, especially: Davis; Healy; Vincent. On the French homefront see: Langlinay). Undoubtedly, the extreme shortages caused by the blockade impacted on the quality and quantity of soldier rations in the Central Powers armies and the adulteration of food with “Ersatz” ingredients was a common cause of soldier complaints (see, especially: Ulrich and Ziemann) The wide variability of rations notwithstanding, soldiers of all armies sought out alternatives to the ration diet for the sake of variety, individual choice or for the experience of eating with others. This article is concerned in the main with the transcultural encounters that such eating enabled.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heather Merle Benbow

Heather Merle Benbow is an Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Melbourne with research interests in literature, screen studies, the history of ideas and, lately, cultural history. She has been an invited researcher at the Free University of Berlin, the University of Cambridge and the University of Tübingen. She is the co-editor, with Heather Perry, of Food, Culture and Identity in Germany’s Century of War (2019 Palgrave Macmillan).

Kate Darian-Smith

Kate Darian-Smith has published on the cultural and social histories of war, childhood, food and heritage in Australia and the British world. She is Professor and Executive Dean of the College of Arts, Law and Education, University of Tasmania. Her recent publications include The First World War, the Universities and the Professions in Australia 1914–1939 (2019) and Remembering Migration: Oral History and Heritage in Australia (2019).

Véronique Duché-Gavet

Véronique Duché-Gavet specialises in Renaissance literature and culture. She also researches the language of Australian Soldiers during the First World War. She is the A.R. Chisholm Professor of French at the University of Melbourne (Australia).