World War I and the Origins of the Modern Food System

ABSTRACT

This forum explores how the demands of World War I shaped industrial food production, state control over distribution, and cultures of food consumption. As the belligerent nations strained to mobilize their full resources, the production of food was arguably as important as munitions, and indeed the two were linked, since the Haber-Bosch process for synthesizing ammonia, invented shortly before the outbreak of the war, was used to make both gunpowder and fertilizers. Governments intervened to maximize food production, giving unprecedented boosts to industrial agricultural production and increasing food imports from colonies. Blockades were also used by both sides to attack civilian foods supplies, giving increased moral weight to food conservation and food aid programs. Paradoxically, although cheap food remained a precondition of political stability, hunger came to be used as a political tool.

KEYWORDS:

• Food production
• food aid
• blockades
• industrial agriculture
• colonialism

Notes

1. Bloch, The Future of War, lx-lxi.

2. Offner, The First World War; and Hull, A Scrap of Paper.

3. Cullather, The Hungry World; and Perkins, Geopolitics and the Green Revolution.

4. Schrad, The Political Power of Bad Ideas.

5. Cohen, Making a New Deal.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lauren Janes

Lauren Janes is an associate professor of history at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, where she is a Towsley Research Scholar and was awarded the Janet L. Andersen Excellence in Teaching Award. Her first book, Colonial Food in Interwar Paris: The Taste of Empire (2016) examines the promotion and consumption of colonial foods in France during and after WWI, revealing the embodied limits of French acceptance of colonial influence on the metropole. She is currently writing “Nourishing the World: A Global History in Three Foods and One Dish” for Hackett’s Critical Themes in World History book series.

April Merleaux

April Merleaux teaches at the Center for Environmental Studies at Williams College. She is the author of Sugar and Civilization: American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness (2015), which won the 2016 Myrna Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Her current research looks at the agrarian history of anti-narcotics policies in the twentieth century, focusing particularly on the western hemisphere. The project considers drugs as internationally traded agricultural commodities, and traces how changes in the global food system have altered rural livelihoods and shifted more productive resources to drug crops.

Helen Zoe Veit

Helen Zoe Veit is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University. She is now writing a book called Picky, which traces the emergence of picky eating among children in the United States. Her first book, Modern Food, Moral Food, explored food and nutrition in the Progressive Era. She directs the What America Ate project, a website and online archive about American food in the Great Depression. She is a member of the editorial collective of Gastronomica, and she has edited three books with the American Food in History book series, most recently Food in the American Gilded Age.

Alice Weinreb

Alice Weinreb is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. Her book, Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth Century Germany (Oxford University Press, 2017) received the Ernst Fraenkel Book Prize and the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize. A specialist in postwar Germany, gender and the body, and the history of food and hunger, she has published articles in the Zeitschrift für Körpergeschichte, Central European History, and German Studies Review, as well as in several anthologies. She is currently working on a transnational cultural and medical history of Anorexia Nervosa.

Samuel Yamashita

Samuel Yamashita is the Henry E. Sheffield Professor at Pomona College and has been doing research on food since 2009. Several chapters in his Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 (Kansas, 2015) deal with the food situation in World War II Japan, and “The Food Problem of Evacuated Children in Wartime Japan, 1942–1945” was included in Kataryzna Cwiertka, ed., Food in Zones of Conflict (Ashgate, 2013). He also recently published Hawai’i Regional Cuisine: The Food Movement That Changed the Way Hawai’i Eats (Hawai’i, 2019) and is currently revising “The ‘Japanese Turn’ in Fine Dining in the United States, 1980–2018” for publication.