Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 2 (2021), p. 305

(ebook). Innumerable books, articles, and television programmes, together with the (possibly fallible) memories of those involved, have familiarized a British audience with the history of food in the Second World War. It is conventionally a story of rationing, plain but healthy eating, agricultural expansion and digging for victory, pig clubs, Lord Woolton, the Minister of Food from 1940 to 1943, and how well the Americans ate. The official accounts of food and agriculture written in the immediate post-war years told stories of struggles, ultimately successful, to solve the problems posed by the war. Subsequent historians have either reinforced and amplified, or questioned and cast doubt upon the initial accounts, or made revealing comparisons between the British experience and that of people living in continental Europe.

Natacha Chevalier’s testimonies from the Kitchen Front in Britain join those that argue for a more complex and nuanced history of food in the war years. They are essentially based on eight diaries in the Mass Observation archive held at the University of Sussex. These she selected by first applying a list of keywords (which she does not specify) relating to food ‘through the search engine’ of the digitized Mass Observation material, and making a first selection of diaries based on ‘the number of keyword matches and a random reading of samples’, then after ‘a more extensive reading, eight diaries were eventually chosen according to the degree of information they provided about food purchase, preparation and consumption’ (p. 4). These were then analysed using a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods. For example, the number of complaints about food expressed each month was compared to the number of mentions of food ‘in order to measure the degree of inconvenience related to food felt by the diarists’ (p. 5) and the way in which it changed over the course of the war. Mass Observation also issued a questionnaire on food matters to all of its volunteers in April 1943, and the replies to this questionnaire were also analysed using the same methodology. This revealed that although, as expected, many respondents mentioned eating less fruit, meat, butter, eggs, and sugar than before the war, it was fruit, especially oranges and bananas, and sweets that they missed more than the other commodities (p. 41). At least part of the explanation for this, she argues, is that the people who responded to Mass Observation questionnaires were skewed towards the middle class, and that before the war fruit was purchased more by the middle and upper classes than the working class.

Given this bias in her sources, she makes a virtue of necessity by arguing that ‘more attention has been paid to the working classes and their diet than to the food practices of the middle classes’ in historical studies of the Home Front. This is a pity, she maintains, because not only did this neglect the experiences of nearly a quarter of the population, but it was the quarter whose food buying and consumption habits, with their greater emphasis on proteins, fruit and vegetables, were most likely to be affected by wartime shortages. Her eight diarists were therefore all members of the middle class, although they illustrate the wide range of incomes, employments, and backgrounds that were found in that category, from Robert (the only man among the eight), an electricity sub-station worker living in a rented house in Hampshire, and Clara, married to a Bradford fireman and the mother of two young children, to Irene, a young widow with a bevy of servants and a house in Maida Vale, and Naomi, running a farm on her own estate in Scotland. She was the writer Naomi Mitchison, married to Dick Mitchison, MP and barrister, and the only one of the diarists identified by her real name. An edition of her diary (Among you taking notes) was published in 1985.

After the introduction explaining this methodology, Chevalier’s first chapter is a brief account of changes in British eating habits since the sixteenth century, followed by a second summarizing class differences in food consumption based on pre-war surveys. The third chapter is mostly a summary of the literature, as it existed up to about 2012, on food production, administration, propaganda and nutrition education, but ending with a survey of the evidence on consumer responses to wartime changes revealed in the various Mass Observation sources. The final two chapters account for two-thirds of the book. The first part of chapter 4 contains brief biographies of the diarists and a flavour of their writing about food, and the second an account of the overall contents of their diaries and their views on wartime conscription, work, and health. The final part of the chapter provides some quantitative analyses which demonstrate that concerns over food issues varied in frequency, reaching a peak in 1941 when the overall progress of the war was at its worst from an Allied viewpoint. Chapter 5 covers the same material thematically, exploring a range of topics such as shortages, shopping, changes in values and attitudes, hospitality, feelings about unfair distribution, the black market (which is not distinguished from the grey market of arguable legality), eating out, the problems of feeding children, and so on. Given all this detail it is perhaps disappointing that the short concluding chapter contains few surprises, but it is nevertheless worth being reminded that wartime food, while sufficient, was often dull and monotonous, that there were big inter-personal differences in wartime food experiences, that social class affected attitudes to food, and that wartime solidarity applied especially to close family and friends.