Feeding the People in Wartime Britain [Paperback]

While the history of food on the home front in wartime Britain has mostly focused on rationing, this book reveals the importance and scale of nation-wide communal dining schemes during this era. Welcomed by some as a symbol of a progressive future in which 'wasteful' home dining would disappear, and derided by others for threatening the social order, these sites of food and eating attracted great political and cultural debate.

Using extensive primary source material,Feeding the People in Wartime Britainexamines the cuisine served in these communal restaurants and the people who used them. It challenges the notion that communal eating played a marginal role in wartime food policy and reveals the impact they had in advancing nutritional understanding and new food technologies. Comparing them to similar ventures in mainland Europe and understanding the role of propaganda from the Ministry of Food in their success, Evans unearths this neglected history of emergency public feeding and relates it to contemporary debates around food policy in times of crisis.

This book studies the history of communal dining schemes in Britain during WWI, WWII and the interwar period to explore food policy in times of crisis and the ways in which it is politically and culturally construed.Bryce Evansis Professor of History at Liverpool Hope University, UK. An expert on food history he is the author of five books includingFood and Aviation in Twentieth Century Britain(Bloomsbury, 2020) and has written numerous journal articles.

Feeding the People in Wartime Britain is an impressive piece of scholarship and deserves
a wide readership among historians of the modern era. It is written in an accessible style
that will also appeal to general readers. Journal of British Studies

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Emergency public feeding in 20th and 21st century Britain
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