Jenny Turner writes:

Eating for Victory is a companion volume to Make Do and Mend, and is less useful since pretty well all the recipes in it are completely disgusting. And yet, as documentary evidence, it illustrates unpalatable truths not really confronted in any of the other books. As the food writer Jill Norman explains in her excellent introduction, people could not have been fed as nutritiously and relatively equitably had ‘food preparation, preservation, storage and transport’ not been industrialised: flesh compressed and tinned in the forms of Spam and snoek, protein isolated and packaged as powdered eggs and milk; gum-soothing white bread replaced with the B-complexified National Loaf (‘many people did not find its greyish colour appetising’), and lovely natural butter with nasty chemical-ridden margarine, fortified with the vital amines studied by Jack Drummond, Lord Woolton’s scientific adviser, in his prewar research. ‘Drummond’s organisational flair, together with Woolton’s determination . . . led to a national food policy that promoted adequate nourishment and the economical use of foodstuffs,’ Norman adds – a policy enforced by undercover inspectors and ministry snoopers, nearly 900 of whom, according to Angus Calder, were working by 1944 in the Ministry of Food.

(LRB 14 May 2009)

Michael O'Mara | hardback 160 pp. |ISBN: 9781843172642