Many Mouths
The Politics of Food in Britain from the Workhouse to the Welfare State

A compelling study of two centuries of British government food programs and the cultural, political and economic factors that shaped them.

Nadja Durbach (Author)

9781108483834, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 March 2020

440 pages, 15 b/w illus.
23.5 x 16 x 2.2 cm, 0.7 kg

'… Durbach's study provides compelling evidence that there are certain irreducible realities about food itself that resist even well meaning attempts at ameliorating undernutrition no matter what form it may take.' Travis A. Weisse, Bulletin of the History of Medicine

This compelling study explores food programs initiated by the British government across two centuries, from the workhouses of the 1830s to the post-war Welfare State. Challenging the assumption that state ideologies and practices were progressive and based primarily on scientific advances in nutrition, Nadja Durbach examines the political, economic, social and cultural circumstances that led the state to feed some of its subjects, but not others. Durbach follows food policies from their conception to their implementation through case studies involving paupers, prisoners, famine victims, POWs, schoolchildren, wartime civilians and pregnant women. She explores what government food meant to those who devised, executed, used, and sometimes refused, these social services. Many Mouths seeks to understand the social, economic, and political theories that influenced these feeding schemes, within their changing historical contexts. It thus offers fresh insights into how both the administrators and the intended recipients of government food programs realized, interpreted, and made meaning out of these exchanges, and the complex relationship between the body, the state and the citizen.

Introduction. The politics of pickles
1. Old English fare: festive meals, the new Poor Law, and the boundaries of the nation
2. Gendered portions and racialized rations: the classification of difference in British and colonial prisons
3. Famine, cooked food, and the starving child: rethinking political economy in colonial India
4. Tommy's tummy: provisioning POWs during the first world war
5. The science of selection: malnutrition and school meals in the interwar years
6. Every sort and condition of citizen: British restaurants and the communal feeding experiment during the second world war
7. Nations out of nurseries, empires into bottles: the colonial politics of welfare orange juice
Conclusion. How the sausage gets made.

Subject Areas: Food & society [JFCV], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], British & Irish history [HBJD1]