Biscuit production and consumption as war re-enactment

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that eating biscuits produces a small-scale war re-enactment with each bite. I focus on Anzac biscuits, which are sold at cafes, baked at home, nibbled at morning tea, and are a crucial fundraiser for veterans’ organizations across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. The biscuit’s commemorative function starts with the Australia New Zealand Army Corps’ participation in the Gallipoli campaign during World War I. Anzac biscuits connect contemporary eaters with food observed on the battlefield. Thinking Anzac biscuits together with war re-enactment complicates the biscuit’s relations with national belonging, which rely on communitarian Christian frameworks that emphasize liturgy and communion. War re-enactment offers opportunities for slippage, transformation, and the possibility of changing history to change the present. Biscuits, including but not limited to Anzac biscuits, become political actors that counter conventional frameworks and invite new associations.

KEYWORDS:

• Biscuits
• war re-enactment
• everyday militarisms
• ANZAC
• Australia
• aotearoa new zealand

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Acknowledgments

I am a non-Indigenous person working on the unceded lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation as well as the unceded land of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. My thanks to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their generous and helpful comments, to my colleague Scott East for reading an early draft of the paper and helping to shape and focus it, and to Jennifer Biddle for her ongoing mentorship of Tasting History: Biscuits, Culture and National Identity. This research was funded by the Australian Research Council (DE190100080).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Australian War Memorial provides a recipe for hard tack in its ‘Classroom resources’ section. ‘Make hard tack.’ https://www.awm.gov.au/learn/schools/resources/hard-tack

2. In Hawaii, hardtack remains a popular staple inherited from missionary and whaling maritime histories (Neimanis et al. 2019). In Newfoundland, hardtack anchors the popular dish Fish and Brewis (Margaret 1980). In Japan, kanpan is a popular snack food derived from hardtack (Cwiertka 2002). Turkey’s peksimet are ‘twice-baked bread slices that could be carried like biscuits, and kept long to be consumed later’ (Öney Tan 2016, 3).

3. ‘Baking strange’ derives from ‘making strange’ and Viktor Shklovsky’s ostranenie (Kelley 2022).

4. Everyday Militarisms additionally refers to an international research collective dedicated to ‘generat[ing] new perspectives and dialogue on the ways in which militarisms are inseparable from everyday life’ by focusing on decolonial, intersectional approaches that acknowledge ‘the transpacific entanglements that suture US and Australian histories.’ I am part of this international research network, founded by Astrida Neimanis, Caren Kaplan, Jennifer Terry, and Tess Lea. The work of this network has influenced this project. ‘Everyday Militarisms,’ accessed 5 May 2020. https://everydaymilitarisms.squarespace.com/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE190100080).

Notes on contributors

Lindsay Kelley

Lindsay Kelley’s working in the kitchen, art practice and scholarship explore how the experience of eating changes when technologies are being eaten. Her first book, Bioart Kitchen: Art, Feminism and Technoscience (London: IB Tauris, 2016, reissued 2022), considers the kitchen as a site of knowledge production for art and science. Her second book, After Eating: Metabolizing the Arts, forthcoming from MIT Press in 2023. The recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (2019-2022), she has exhibited and performed internationally, and her published work can be found in journals including parallax, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Angelaki, and Environmental Humanities.