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.

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.

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.

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.

This chapter highlights how low-level tussles for food replaced large-scale engagements as the main mode of conflict among the Nationalists, CCP, and Japanese. In regions of military contestation, namely guerrilla war zones, civilians participated extensively in two endeavors common to all sides: procurement (acquiring grain) and protection (ensuring that grain did not fall into enemy hands). All three main belligerents attempted to control the flow of grain across ambiguous boundaries through blockades and the rush-transportation and rush-purchase of food. These practices dominated everyday civilian life and were invariably laced with violence. The daily threat of food-related bloodshed forced most ordinary Chinese to go to drastic lengths to survive the protracted three-way struggle. Such grim prospects reveal the limitations of nationalism and collaborationism as explanations for wartime behavior, even though Nationalist and CCP propaganda weaponized the “hanjian” label against each other. The moralization of collaboration and resistance in both scholarly work and popular memory has overshadowed the mundaneness of survival.

Jewish experiences, from life in cramped Judenhäuser always subject to Gestapo violence, to the suffering of individuals and families in a variety of ghettos in eastern Europe, are discussed. This includes the geographies of the Holocaust, house committees and activities within and outside ghetto walls, and also communal organizations, economic activities, self-help, and familial strategies.

This chapter examines the published work and careers of American conservationist William Vogt and Brazilian physician-geographer Josué de Castro during the early Cold War. It emphasizes the different affective strategies that the two men employed to persuade readers of their competing positions regarding the relationship between human population, arable land, food supply, and global security. As a briefly prominent intellectual from the global South, De Castro challenged the emerging, US-led consensus that population control was essential for economic development. Based on his own experiences among marginalized Brazilians, De Castro viewed Vogt’s concern with “carrying capacity” limits as an imperialist imposition on the autonomy of less empowered people. He feared that prioritizing population reduction as the solution to resource scarcity would undermine movements for social and economic transformation, such as agrarian reform in rural Latin America. With little personal experience of the world’s poor, Vogt projected a pessimistic vision of the future on continents overrun by desperate, starving hordes. De Castro’s contrasting vision, on the other hand, stemmed from frequent encounters with the chronically hungry and a more sympathetic understanding of their plight.

• How much you need to eat depends on a variety of factors including how active you are, how tall you are, your body build, and whether or not you are male or female.

• Intuitive eating offers a framework and strategies for getting in touch with your body’s sense of hunger and fullness and really enjoying what you eat.

• It’s essentially that you respect and care for your body and your mind by attending to what and how much you eat without viewing food as a source of stress.

“As food increasingly disappeared from shops, market stalls, and restaurants, wartime shortages badly affected city life. By 1917, most Prague residents struggled to obtain basic food items; the city and its inhabitants were cold, due to coal shortages, and dirty, through lack of soap. The state’s rationing system proved insufficient to cover the needs of the population, leading to the blossoming of a black market. Discrepancies in access to food shaped new divisions. Prague was ‘ruralized’ as people grew vegetables in allotments and on balconies. Hungry city-dwellers went on trips to the countryside to purchase food. This new reliance on farmers subverted social hierarchies. An antagonism grew between Prague and the countryside, undermining the unity of the Czech nation. The association ‘The Czech Heart’ attempted to heal the rift by sending hungry Prague children to better-fed villages. Food provision shifted legitimacy away from the Austrian state to national organizations.”

Our step-by-step clinician guide continues with Session 2 – the Eats! a fun exploration of the sensations that constitute hunger, fullness, thirst, and utter deliciousness! Every session from this one forward begins with a Henry Heartbeat investigation, which helps children (a) expend their energy so that they can focus on the remainder of the session, and (b) become comfortable and proficient with raising and lowering arousal, a foundation of self-awareness and emotion regulation. The ritual of homework review is introduced: new things learned about the body between sessions are added to the Body Map. Children meet new characters including Georgia the Gut Growler, Solomon Satisfied, and Umm-ma Una. Children and parents conduct investigations such as learning to sense their changing energy from food as they eat, whether food tastes more delicious if you eat it slowly – and more. A body wisdom might be: “your body tells you how much energy you need if you learn to listen.” Following Body Brainstorms, families begin the first two steps of the Body Clues Worksheet to practice monitoring what they are feeling and what their bodies might be communicating. With worksheets, workbooks, and coloring pages, the investigators are off to explore the week ahead!

Tens of thousands of European ‘intellectuals’ faced starvation by 1920 and Vienna was the epicentre for international humanitarian aid. This chapter focuses on how the feeding of intellectuals was organized by a range of humanitarian organizations in this period. The most striking example of this was the phenomenon of the ‘intellectual kitchen’, a site where intellectuals were fed away from the wider populations of their towns and cities. The chapter explores the mechanics of food and clothes aid, and argues that issues of class, gender, and race shaped the status of the ‘intellectual’ for humanitarian organizations as well as aid workers.