Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (2 page)

Note on Sources

Throughout the book I refer to Mass Observation and the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System. Mass Observation was set up in Britain in 1937 by the anthropologist Tom Harrisson, the sociologist Charles Madge and film-maker Humphrey Jennings, to record the views of ordinary people. During the war around 3,000 people responded to questionnaires sent out to them by Mass Observation and others kept diaries which they would send in to Mass Observation in instalments. These are now held by the Mass Observation archive at the University of Sussex and many have since been published in various collections. The names given to Mass Observation observers are pseudonyms. The Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System consists of transcripts of interviews conducted in West Germany in 1950–51 with refugees and defectors from the Soviet Union, most of whom were living in camps for displaced persons at the time. The interviews were conducted on behalf of the United States government in order to gain an understanding of communism.

1

Introduction – War and Food

‘Death by famine lacks drama. Bloody death, the deaths of many by slaughter as in riots or bombings is in itself blood-bestirring; it excites you, prints indelible images on the mind. But death by famine, a vast slow dispirited noiseless apathy, offers none of that. Horrid though it may be to say, multitudinous death from this cause … regarded without emotion as a spectacle, is until the crows get at it, the rats and kites and dogs and vultures very dull.’
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This was the view of newspaper editor Ian Stephens commenting on the Bengal famine of 1943, which killed 3 million Indians. It is perhaps the quiet and unobtrusive nature of death by starvation which explains why many of those who died of hunger during the Second World War are largely forgotten today. While the Vietnam war is firmly embedded in the western collective memory, most westerners have never heard of the famine in the Vietnamese region of Tonkin in 1943–44 which probably killed more peasants than all the years of war which followed.
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And yet ‘one dies a very terrible death from starvation’.
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As one of the survivors of the Leningrad siege was disturbed to discover, ‘It’s not so horrifying when a person … has been hit by a shell or a bomb. But what happened as a result of hunger, that was particularly awful, the way a person’s face changed … a man became an animated corpse and … a corpse is a grim spectacle.’
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During the Second World War at least 20 million people died just such a terrible death from starvation, malnutrition and its associated diseases: a number to equal the 19.5 military deaths.
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The impact of the war on food supplies was thus as deadly in its effect on the world population as military action. This book seeks to understand the role of food at the heart of the conflict. The focus on food is not intended
to exclude other interpretations but rather to add an often overlooked dimension to our understanding of the Second World War.

The book begins by uncovering the important role food played in driving both Germany and Japan into conflict. During the nineteenth century Europe’s urban industrial workforce substantially increased their consumption of meat, while the demand for rice rose significantly among Japan’s urban population. Both countries feared that their agricultural sectors could not produce enough food to feed the cities. Britain had responded to the problem of feeding its urban population by embracing free trade and it imported large quantities of food and animal fodder. But Germany and Japan felt disadvantaged by the international economy dominated by Britain and America. Right-wing elements within both countries pushed for an alternative, more radical solution to the problem of food and trade. Rather than accepting subordination to the United States, Hitler preferred to engage in a struggle for world supremacy and looked to an eastern empire as a source of food and other resources which would make Germany self-sufficient and independent of world trade. This made war in eastern Europe inevitable. The Japanese army sought to reduce its country’s dependence on the United States by consolidating its hold over mainland China which many officers saw as an area of settlement and resources, not the least of which was food. But Japanese belligerence in China set the country on a collision course with the United States in the Pacific.

This perspective on the causes of the Second World War is relevant to the contemporary global food situation. The problem which confronted Germany and Japan in the 1930s, of how to feed a growing urban population with the more nutritious but also more costly food which it demands, has returned to confront the developing world with even greater force and with the potential for an equally global impact at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Rising living standards among the growing urban middle classes in developing countries such as China, India, Indonesia and Brazil have led to marked changes in eating habits. Zhang Xiuwen grew up a member of a poor farming family in the rural province of Yunnan. He often went hungry and he only ever ate meat on special holidays once or twice a year. He never drank milk. Now he is a tennis coach in Beijing and he and his family can afford to eat meat and drink milk
every day. This shift from a grain-based vegetarian diet to one rich in meat and milk has been replicated across China and the rest of the developing world, where hundreds of millions of consumers’ food preferences have changed as their nutritional status has improved. Chinese per capita consumption of meat has risen in the last twenty-eight years from 20 kilograms in 1980 to 54 kilograms in 2008. The wider impact of such changing tastes has been to divert ever more of the world’s grain harvest into the stomachs of animals rather than humans. In 2007 China imported 45 per cent of the soya beans traded on the world market to feed pigs, poultry and farmed fish. Approximately 30 per cent of the world’s grain crop is now fed to livestock.
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Diverting grain from humans to animals is an extremely inefficient use of food. The 3–4.5 kilograms of grain that have to be fed to a steer to obtain half a kilogram of beef contain as many as ten times more calories and four times as much protein as half a kilogram of beef.
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At the same time increased demand for grain for feed has pushed up prices and made food more expensive for the poorer sections of the world’s population who rely on grains for their staple diet. Even poorer countries have become increasingly dependent on food imports. In West Africa urbanization has produced a large body of townspeople who have switched from eating traditional staples such as millet and cassava to eating rice, which has to be imported. In Indonesia and India small improvements in income have led to a growing demand for imported vegetable oils.
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Thus, development through industrialization and its inevitable corollary, urbanization, pushes countries into the difficult position of decreasing food self-sufficiency and increasing dependence on a volatile world food market in which the politically less influential countries, with less access to foreign exchange, are at a disadvantage. Sub-Saharan Africa’s food import bill increased fourfold in the last decade even though the amount of food imported declined.
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As the world population and the world’s middle class continues to grow and food prices rise, this is likely to become an ever more pressing problem.

It is unlikely that food price rises will eventually be held in check by increased production, as many agricultural experts argue that the technological innovations of the green revolution have run their course, and there is little prospect of increasing yields as a result of new farming techniques. Meanwhile, the rising cost of fuel, fertilizer and
increasingly scarce supplies of water is setting a limit on the improvement of agricultural methods in developing countries.
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Climate change is only likely to make matters worse. While it is estimated that the world’s population will increase by a further 3.3 billion in the next fifty years, scientists have warned that half of the world’s arable land may become unproductive.
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The dismal prospect is that as the worldwide demand for meat and livestock products, vegetable oil and grain grows, the share of food available for the world’s poor will decline.

In 2007–2008 a food crisis was sparked by a variety of factors working together. An increase in the production of biofuels pushed up the price of sugar, maize, cassava, oilseeds and palm oil.
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Drought pushed up the price of wheat. The surge in petrol prices increased the cost of fertilizers and doubled the cost of food transport. India responded to the threat that it would not be able to afford to import wheat by imposing an export ban on rice, and was followed by Thailand. The Philippines, anxious it would not be able to import enough food to feed its towns, panic-bought rice and pushed the price up to over $1,000 a ton. This, combined with speculation and the hoarding of foodstuffs, contributed to further food price spirals. In Egypt, where the government spends more on subsidized food for the poor than it does on health or education, more and more of the population resorted to buying cheap government-subsidized bread, with the result that the government was unable to meet the rise in demand. Bread queues lengthened and the poor found it increasingly difficult to sustain themselves. As grain prices continue to rise, the number of hungry people in the world grows exponentially and food is once more becoming a catalyst for political conflict. A ripple effect was felt around the world in 2007–2008 when food riots erupted not only in Egypt but in Senegal, Cameroon, Niger, Haiti and Mexico.
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One of the most powerful aspects of making food the central focus of an investigation into the Second World War is that the agrarian policy of the Nazi regime is revealed as one of the driving forces behind some of the worst atrocities committed during the conflict. The experience of the First World War had taught the National Socialist leadership that an adequate food supply was crucial to the maintenance of military and civilian morale. Food shortages among the soldiers on
the front and the civilians at home had pushed a deeply demoralized Germany towards capitulation in 1918. It was both fear of a repeat of the disastrous decline in civilian morale and a powerful sense of the German people’s superior entitlement to food which made the National Socialists determined that the German population would not go hungry during this war. Instead, others would have to go without food.