The Stomach for Fighting: Food and the Soldiers of the Great War

Food is central to morale and physical performance, but also fundamental to emotional and social identities. The Stomach for Fighting: Food and the Soldiers of the Great War explores its significance to the British men on the Western Front, both as a narrative of military provisioning and an examination of the wider role of food in their lives. The limitations of nutritional science, transportation problems, conflicting priorities and unskilled cooks produced a diet that left much to be desired. The soldiers’ accounts are replete with references to food, and this book analyses their response, an aspect ignored by the official records. While the army provided more food than many ate as civilians, calories do not address the central complexity of eating, which is rarely about nutrition alone and comes freighted with emotions that have little to do with physiological need. Even though the calorific targets were frequently met, the men remained unhappy: army food did not taste like home. It carried with it an unpalatable flavour of their new, institutionalised lives. Rations were a daily reminder of an alien military existence and a medium through which more general concerns could be articulated. Conversely, in their correspondence home, food provided a vocabulary for the expression of familial love and concern founded upon past meals and sustained by the flow of food parcels. The study of soldiers and their food offers a new path through which the social history of the war and the emotional experience of its soldiers can be interrogated.