Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (86 page)

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

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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 different 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.
¹⁰¹The 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.’
¹⁰²In 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’.
¹⁰³Even 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.
¹⁰⁴In 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.
¹⁰⁵Most 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.

1931

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’.

August: Ottawa Trade Agreement.

1932–33

Ukrainian famine.

1933

30 January: Hitler appointed Reich Chancellor.

March: National Socialists win a parliamentary majority. Japan leaves League of Nations.

June: Walther Darré appointed Minister of Food and Agriculture in Germany. The Reich Food Corporation is created and Germany launches Battle for Production.