Hunger: A Modern History

Abstract

James Vernon offers an exciting new way to think about the history of hunger, and a challenging new way to think about how we study modern history. In a wide-ranging study of the various guises of hunger, and of the personal, social, cultural and governmental responses to it, Vernon shows us that hunger, and the eating habits of all British people, are at the very core of changes in social, scientific and state organisation over the past 150 years or more. While the book is very much a national history of changing perceptions and responses to hunger in Britain, Vernon has also managed to give some insights into the role of colonial hunger in shaping British attitudes, as well as arguing for the influence of Britain on the rest of the world in its attempts to eradicate hunger as part of the wider development of the social democratic state. The book contains eight chapters organised along thematic lines, but which also follow a rough chronology from the Victorian view of hunger as the outcome of moral failings, through the emergence of a humanitarian response to hunger, scientific attempts to eradicate hunger by discovering the exact nutrients and amounts of food needed to sustain life, to governmental responses and finally the rise of the welfare state at the end of the Second World War. Vernon argues that the mid-nineteenth century is the dividing line between a view of nutrition as morality and a view of nutrition as science. With the development of the science of nutrition, hunger was no longer simply viewed as under-nutrition, but instead came to be understood as malnutrition, which could not simply be overcome by sufficient food but by the right nutrients in food. It is clear from Vernon's account that, from the First World War, nutrition became an indispensable element of statecraft, making this a political as much as a social and cultural history.