THE BATTLE FOR FOOD DURING THE WORLD WAR II

"The Taste of War" 
Calories were made to be counted, but they have generally been counted for two very different reasons. We associate calories with excess, but for most of its history this little unit of energy was linked to shortage. The years since World War II have been a time of cheap and plentiful food, and of obese and sick citizens. Since our own daily struggle is fought against fat, we fail to see that many of the conflicts of the past were wars against hunger. Just as obesity leads to diabetes and human blindness, so plentiful food leads to decadent forms of history and social blindness. We are fortunate to have a bracing book like “The Taste of War,” which does much to correct understanding of the causes of armed conflict and mass murder.

If World War II were only about bad ideas, as we like to think, then we are all safe. Who among us admires Hitler, Himmler or Hirohito? But if the war and its atrocities had to do with material want, we cannot so easily separate ourselves from evil. Lizzie Collingham soberly argues that the expansionist designs of both Nazi Germany and imperial Japan must be understood within a world political economy in which the single crucial commodity was food. The British Empire had dominated a global system of free trade that was disrupted by the Great Depression. States like Germany and Japan, unable to supply themselves with sufficient food for their own citizens from domestic sources, had two choices. They could play the game by the British rules, which could seem humiliating and pointless in the 1930s, or they could try to control more territory.
Collingham, the author of “Imperial Bodies” and “Curry,” sketches the hunger motive on the body of the Japanese soldier in Asia, who not only starved others but was starved himself. The energetic Japanese attacks remembered with chagrin by British and American soldiers were driven by the need to capture food from the enemy. In the end, more Japanese soldiers died from starvation and associated diseases than in combat. Nazi Germany planned to control a vast Eastern European empire whose inhabitants would be starved in the tens of millions. It was a rare case of planning more murder in war than actually happened. When the Nazis had to choose whom to starve in an uncertain and long war, they thought racially and picked the Jews. Most of the world’s Jews, seen by the Nazis as the cause starvation, invasions tend to do so. Some two million people starved to death in French Indochina. At least 10 million starved in China, whose army was living from the land on its own territory.
About three million starved in Bengal in British India. Collingham argues that many of them might have been saved if Churchill had not been annoyed with Gandhi and the Free India movement and inclined to see Indians as racial inferiors. Collingham’s case, in one respect, is even stronger than it seems. Rather than seeing the Soviet Union as an aggressor in the war, which it certainly was in 1939 and 1940, she discusses its fate after it was betrayed by its Nazi ally and invaded in 1941. But larger history confirms her argument. Like Germany and Japan, the Soviet Union too was reacting to an international political economy dominated by Britain. It too wished to create economic self-sufficiency on a continental scale. The solution Stalin advanced was not to seize territory from abroad, but to colonize itself from within. Agriculture was “collectivized,” brought under state control. As Collingham notes, millions of people died of malnutrition as a result.

They died in what their own leaders called a “war” against prosperous farmers, and in a process that Stalin saw as necessary preparation for a general war to come. The result was control without productivity, which left the Soviet Union vulnerable when it was invaded by Nazi Germany. Communist agriculture survived through a kind of parasitism upon capitalism: Stalin allowed collective farmers to work private plots and middlemen to profit on sales of food. In the end, though, it was American food that ensured the Soviet soldier did not go hungry. As Collingham rightly notes (if not without some self-indulgent swipes at American culture), the war was a very special moment for American agriculture, offering a perfect conjuncture: demand abroad, stability at home and a technological revolution. Prosperity depended in considerable measure upon a world calamity, but in the United States it was ascribed only to domestic freedom.

Thus, Collingham argues, the war did not boost policies of planning and redistribution in America as it did in Europe, and it permitted the false lesson that laissez-faire is always enough. The improvements in technology (pesticides, fertilizers, hybrids) were very real, and spread from the United States to the rest of the world after the war. They were and remain enough to oversupply America and Europe with food. Had this green revolution come 20 years earlier, World War II might have been unthinkable. But will such abundance last forever? The combination of population growth and prosperity in this century means that we have ever more urban people eating ever more meat, which requires ever more grain, ever more land, ever more efficiency. Climate change and water shortages make soil fertility uncertain. The early 21st century is coming to resemble the early 20th century, with expectations of shortfall influencing ideology and strategy.
The American understanding of World War II arises from the special circumstances that made it, for us, the source of postwar plenty. But how would we behave if we anticipated that we will no longer be able to feed ourselves as we are accustomed? How will Asia look in 30 years, after China’s topsoil is eroded and its glaciers have melted? Collingham’s book masterfully corrects our understanding of the great conflict that made America what it is, and thus prepares us for the conflicts that are all too likely to come. Its usefulness is hard to overstate.


By Timothy Snyder (Housum Pofessor of History at Yale University), about the book " "The Taste of War" (Lizzie Collingham) 634 pp. The Penguin Press. $36. Published in the "Sunday Book Review" of "The New York Times" May, 6th, 2012. Adapted to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.