Many Mouths: The Politics of Food in Britain from the Workhouse to the Welfare State, by Nadja Durbach

Abstract

Reviewed by: Many Mouths: The Politics of Food in Britain from the Workhouse to the Welfare State by Nadja Durbach Rebecca Earle (bio) Many Mouths: The Politics of Food in Britain from the Workhouse to the Welfare State, by Nadja Durbach; pp. xii + 363. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020, £36.99, £30.00 ebook, $46.99, $38.00 ebook. Many Mouths: The Politics of Food in Britain from the Workhouse to the Welfare State explores a series of occasions when the modern British state undertook to feed “some members of its population (but not others) and what government food meant to those who devised, those who executed, those who used, and those who refused the state’s alimentary interventions” (17). These programs of state feeding were motivated by a range of concerns; discontent over the mounting cost of poor relief, desire to ensure the robustness of the labor supply, anxieties that hungry children would be unable to benefit from state education, and humanitarian responses to famine (among other factors) all shaped the diverse occasions on which the modern British state sought to provide food for sections of the population. Precisely because these programs responded to diverse situations, the responses were themselves inconsistent and incoherent, Durbach argues. History, she writes, reveals “no arc of progressive change” (245); she does not trace “a growing state interest in feeding its citizens” (5). Rather, her themes are the agency exercised by the recipients of state feeding, the important role of local authorities in implementing, and modifying, national initiatives, and the limited impact of nutritional science in shaping any of these policies. A particular strength is Durbach’s sustained attention to Britain’s status as an empire. State feeding initiatives demonstrate clearly the unequal levels of responsibility the government felt toward ensuring that different imperial subjects were not hungry. Many Mouths explores these themes through a series of case studies ranging from debates over the provision of Christmas meals in Victorian workhouses to the efforts of the Welfare Foods Service to supply orange juice to small children during and after the Second World War. Other chapters study, inter alia, the attempts to design standard dietaries for nineteenth-century prisons, the principles governing eligibility for free school meals in the interwar years, and the unexpected popularity of British restaurants. Weaving together these case studies are helpful historical synopses that provide a framework for understanding the specificities of each example. The book is based on extensive research in the United Kingdom’s National Archives and other repositories, a mass of printed primary sources, and much engagement with the [End Page 729] considerable scholarship on the evolution of the British diet, biopolitics, and other relevant topics. The result is a readable, compelling, and authoritative book that adds greatly to our understanding of the complexities shaping the alimentary interventions that Durbach studies. Her use of case studies is intended to underscore the contingency and variability of these interventions. Officials rarely learned from past experiences of state feeding, were inconsistent in their use of nutritional science, and responded more to the specifics of each situation than to broader comparisons with other state feeding programs. Consistency, indeed, was rarely the goal. To be sure, as Durbach concedes, there were some overarching trends; over the twentieth century the state began to accept some responsibility for supporting the wellbeing of all members of the nation, but Durbach’s focus is on the “messiness” of these processes (4). As much as she identifies change, she stresses unexpected continuities linking (for instance) Charles Trevelyan and the 1943 London Council of Social Service: both decried the provision of subsidized food to unde-serving eaters. What did it mean to receive food from the state? On occasion, it meant a recognition of the recipient’s membership in the body politic. When inhabitants of the work-house demanded the Christmas meal of roast beef, plum pudding, and beer abolished by the New Poor Law, they were affirming their rights as British citizens to participate in the cultural life of the nation. For this very reason, the guardians of some workhouses refused to comply with the prohibition, allowing inmates this customary “old English fare” on holidays...