Food in the era of the First World War was much more than a military necessity. The shortages of foodstuffs profoundly shaped states and societies during the conflict and beyond. Hunger in war was not a new phenomenon, but its experience during the First World War led to three main changes. First, it changed the social contract between citizens and the state. People who had suffered serial nutritional deprivation came to believe more forcefully than before that a primary responsibility of the state was to provide a bare minimum of supplies for their survival. States, too, understood that being able to provide foodstuffs for their citizens was essential for their legitimacy. Second, hunger in the era of the First World War brought a new emphasis on “nutritional sovereignty”: the idea that states must be able to produce their food supplies themselves, rather than import them. Finally, hunger in the era of the First World War was a turning point in the development of international aid. While international charitable aid had existed long before the War, the amount of aid given the number of different groups and institutions grew exponentially.

This chapter explores the ways in which hunger in World War I altered existing political structures. Civilian populations engaged in a complex politics of provisioning by contesting state and local authorities and governments’ management of food. In the face of hunger and starvation, civilians across Europe and the Middle East gradually and to various degrees called their governments’ legitimacy into question. Civilians gave voice to their demands through petitions, food riots, and, in some instances, rebellion and revolution. Women, in particular, appealed collectively to officials, evoking the urgent need to feed and care for their children. Food became central to politics as political parties competed in demonstrating their ability to bring food to hungry populations. Recognizing the crucial role of hunger to salvaging any popular support for continuing the war, governments responded by regulating food and suppressing, even violently, public protests demanding provisioning. The ability to supply food became an avenue to political success. The chapter introduces the Ottoman experience and provides a comparative discussion of the politicization of hunger. We explore how that process varied across and within the warscapes of Ottoman and European societies, and how hunger, as a catalyst, altered existing political structures and gave rise to new forms of political organization in response to demands by both elite and non-elite groups. Finally, we ask how political parties and organizations used food procurement and provisioning of civilians amidst hunger as an avenue to achieve, expand, or preserve political significance.

By focusing on the British blockade of Germany, the prevailing narrative over-privileges one aspect of the use of food for belligerent purposes during the First World War. Blockade was not just Britain’s concern. France played a key role in its implementation, especially in respect to land routes and in the Mediterranean. Also, it was not just imposed in the Atlantic approaches. The other seas lapping both Europe and western Asia were vehicles for the application of sea power. In addition, starvation was not just an instrument of maritime warfare: it was also used by armies. Nor was Germany the only target; so too were its allies: Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria. How the blocking of maritime trade affected their fighting power varied, depending on the management of their domestic food production, their distribution networks and their agricultural workforces. The blockade may have looked like a blunt instrument but its effectiveness depended on its interactions with other conditions, not all of them under governmental or even human control.

The Second World War is widely regarded as a pivotal moment in the understanding of malnutrition and starvation, whereas the significance of the First World War has been largely overlooked. This chapter examines some of the major lines of research into hunger and malnutrition during the war of 1914–18, as well as the state of scientific knowledge on the eve of that conflict. It argues that the war brought major shifts in the understanding of a number of deficiency diseases – scurvy, pellagra and beriberi – as well as in the physiology and pathology of hunger. Privation of military and civilian populations and the opportunity to study malnutrition in controlled environments created opportunities for scientific research, while wartime imperatives, both political and military, provided the impetus and resources necessary for systematic investigation. Cumulatively, these advances were transformational but not all of them resulted in lasting achievements. In this respect, nutritional science provides some useful insights into the complex relationship between war and scientific and medical change.

Maps were part of the zeitgeist in the era of the First World War. They were used as practical tools to understand the world, as props to support new borders, and as a means to project power. Within this context, hunger maps played a vital role in re-drawing the world. Hunger Draws the Map was widely published in the US national and local press in late 1918 and early 1919. More than just a reflection of hunger in that present moment, it was also a projection of how its creators believed the world should be. Hunger Draws the Map, and other hunger maps, influenced public policy and had huge impacts for the people and geographies they covered. Hunger maps not only suggested where hungry people were, but which people’s hunger was deserving of note, and where food aid should be sent. As objects, they created sympathy, and, like other maps of the era, were projections of power. Hunger maps were both tools that helped bring about changes in the wake of the First World War, as well as by-products of the very processes they aimed to change.

Perceptions and bias help explain animosity over food supplies between urban and rural civilians. While differences in rural and urban hunger existed in some places, caution should be exercised when attributing the destitution of urban dwellers to greed or acts of self-preservation by rural farmers. Greater proximity to major food sources did not always equate to greater access to food. Furthermore, proximity to food in both urban and rural areas was not fixed, but changed over the course of the war and its aftermath. People fled or were forced from their homes in both urban and rural areas. This movement of people blurred rural and urban distinctions as people from the countryside flocked into cities and people in the cities took shorter trips to the countryside to search for food. Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of predominantly urban children travelled temporarily to rural landscapes in the early 1920s. Analyses of anthropometric measurements of school children in Germany and Austria suggest that rural and urban differences were small. During the War, children in Vienna may have suffered more nutritional deprivation overall then in other parts of Austria, but after the War, Viennese children had the fastest rate of recovery.

While much of Europe experienced hunger and hunger-related deaths during the era of the First World War, famine, as defined by an excess mortality rate of 40 per thousand, occurred mainly in the Russian Empire and later Soviet Russia. Furthermore, famine continued in Russia through 1922. In Russia there were two stages of the food problem. 1914–19 was characterized by mutual international blockades that upset regular international trade and caused general hunger with some elevated mortality. Patterns of supply were strained, especially in areas where mortality rose to famine levels. Leaders were slow to recognize the crisis, believing that excess grain production in other parts of the Empire would compensate for regions with reduced food supplies, which they did not. From 1919 to 1922, while trade had opened back up in much of Europe, it did not in Russia, which remained subject to blockade and to civil and international war. Hunger and famine in this period was much more severe, and US aid relief did not enter Soviet Russia until 1921, the final and most terrible year of the famine.

Representations of food in the public sphere in Europe evolved over the course of the First World War. Advertisements served as proxies for the economic situation in a given region, a rough gauge of what was available to consumers, and what at least a portion of them could hope to afford. In certain ways, what was left unsaid or unwritten spoke louder than any representations of the desperate food situation could have. In Austria-Hungary, for example, press censorship included removing entire articles relating to the food situation, shortly before a newspaper was published. The infamous “white spaces” remaining were left to be filled by the reader’s imagination and speculation, which may have had an even more damaging effect than had the situation been discussed openly. Despite the privations of war, however, humor was expressed in various ways as both a direct confrontation with reality and an escape from it. Using examples of posters, cartoons, advertisements, films, and other media, this chapter surveys how hunger – and its most extreme form, starvation – were envisioned and utilized by humanitarian groups, governments, and ordinary people struggling to survive during the First World War era.

This chapter focuses on measuring hunger and is outlined in two sections. In a first section, scientific discourses about nutritional conceptions and anthropometric measurements will be systematically collected and compared among the analysed countries. What were the predominant driving factors and the context behind these discourses (e.g., quantification of eligibility for feeding programs, malnutrition monitoring, etc.)? How diverse were the nutritional conceptions (e.g., Voit) underlying these discourses? Did the discourses change during the war, and was one nutritional conception put through over various countries? What was the role of building up and adapting rationing systems? Which were the anthropometric systems in use in the different countries (e.g., Pirquet, etc.), and who (children/adults, rural/urban populations, etc.) was measured? Were there scientific attempts to compare the situation among different countries already during war time? Also, the short- and medium-term impact of these discourses and authority measures shall be considered (e.g., intensifying mass feeding programs for needy children or maintaining large anthropometric malnutrition monitoring programs in the 1920s, etc.). In a second section, an attempt shall be made to collect and oppose existing contemporary anthropometric information on the analysed countries through an analysis of birth weights, reviewing the existing evidence to reach an internationally comparative perspective.

Food was the most important resource during the First World War. Without it, the massive armies on the Eastern and the Western Fronts, in Africa and in Asia could not have been assembled, let alone made to fight. And at the 'home front', which during the First World War came to be seen as integral to the war effort, food was crucial in maintaining production and morale. Any analysis of why and how the First World War was fought and won is incomplete without a consideration of how states, armies, communities, and individuals fought over the globe's supplies of grains, livestock, fertilizers, feeding stocks, and agricultural labour. This chapter will provide an analysis of the impact of this first global war on the worldwide food distribution system that had evolved since the Industrial Revolution. Its aim is to provide both an introduction to the reader on the impact of the First World War on food, and vice versa, and to provide essential contexts for both the chapters that follow and the data on changes in food supply and consumption, and its manifold effects on state, social structures, and health.

Food insecurity during the First World War made hungry civilians around the continent search for alternative modes and means to fight hunger in war and post-war Europe. A transnational comparison of survival strategies, employed by individuals throughout Europe, demonstrates how ordinary civilians responded to the shortcomings of official food provisioning. The chapter explores how civilians turned to home-based agricultural production, made trips to the countryside or participated in black market. As regular circuits for obtaining food were very restricted, individuals circumvented official distribution means by relying on the alternative economies of grey and black markets. Bartering, especially, became an important means to cope with the economy of shortages. Relying on informal channels, as this chapter demonstrates, the hungry population traded jewellery for potatoes or furniture for meat. Civilians sometimes even resorted to illegal and criminal activities such as fraud and theft to meet their basic needs. In Eastern and Western Europe, individuals of course took actions in different forms, depending on the severity of the food scarcity, but, as this chapter argues, the strategies they used also shared many similar features and delineated new modes of social interactions, and new relationships to the licit and the illicit in wartime.

Across belligerent and even in neutral Europe, wartime brought changes in people’s experience of food. To begin with, the war changed most contemporaries’ diets because of shortages that in some regions lingered long after the Armistice: a drop in consumption of meat, cheese, eggs, cereal, and other foodstuffs; and the widespread use of substitute ingredients and adulteration of food, with cereal-poor “war bread” as a prime example. Other changes in the diet would become permanent, such as the increased consumption of sugar. Wartime populations did not just eat different things; they also ate in different ways. The recipients of relief – an ever-larger segment of the population – had to queue at soup kitchens, although the hard-up middle classes benefited from more restaurant-like surroundings. This points to a larger pattern touched upon in this chapter, viz., the efforts made by authorities and by civil societies not just to provide food in wartime, but also to frame the destabilizing phenomenon that was war food in normalizing, reassuring terms.

The First World War deteriorated the economic situation of the entire world, leading to a terrible humanitarian situation in many European countries. Furthermore, in many European countries, including Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, Hungary, Russia and others, the War did not end in 1918. Many of these countries experienced intense hunger and deprivation. The aim of this chapter is to analyze how international organizations, primarily the American Relief Administration, which directed the largest food foreign aid groups operating on the continent, coped with the deteriorating humanitarian situation created by the hunger crisis. This chapter traces how information about the health situation of the population influenced the opinions of governments, societies, charity organizations, and discussions concerning the question of food provision for the population during the trying economic conditions. It also details the activities of the main humanitarian organizations and the challenges they encountered.

While many European countries had used rationing and price ceilings to respond to emergency hunger situations before the First World War, these measures had been limited in their scope to cities and smaller areas, and were of short duration, generally lasting weeks or months. The long-term experience of hunger in the First World War era shattered civilian expectations of state responsibility and pushed governments to act in new and different ways. This chapter examines how a variety of states chose to respond to the changing experiences of insufficient food supplies and hunger faced by their citizens as they realized that their previous plans, or lack of planning, were insufficient. This chapter is the first comparative analysis of the technical and political aspects of food distribution systems in the First World War for a wide range of different states. The timing and practices implemented by different governments differed for both practical reasons – food did not disappear at equal rates everywhere – and for political reasons.