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By Root 1258 0

recorded a scene at his family’s table: ‘One morning a jar was put on the breakfast table with supreme nonchalance … My father, an undemonstrative man, spread the nectar on his bread and bit into it. He frowned and said: “What was that?” “Carrot marmalade,” said my mother. With unusual deliberation, he picked up the jar, took it into the garden and poured it onto the compost heap.’

Yet any Russian or Asian peasant, or Axis captive, would have deemed carrot marmalade a luxury. Kenneth Stevens was a prisoner in Singapore’s Changi jail. He wrote: ‘In this place one’s mind returns continually and dwells longingly on Food … I think of Duck and Cherry Casserole, Scrambled Eggs, Fish Scallops, Chicken Stanley, Kedgeree, Trifle, Summer Pudding, Fruit Fool, Bread & Butter Pudding – all those lovely things were made just perfectly “right” in my own home.’ Stevens died in August 1943 without ever again tasting such delicacies. Only in 1945 did his wife receive his diary from the hands of a fellow prisoner, and share his anguished fantasising from the brink of the grave. Meanwhile, the average height of French girl children shrank by eleven centimetres and of boys by seven centimetres between 1935 and 1944. Tuberculosis stimulated by malnutrition increased dramatically in occupied Europe, and by 1943 four-fifths of Belgian children were displaying symptoms of rickets. In most countries city-dwellers suffered more from hunger than country people, because they had fewer opportunities for supplementing their diet by growing their own produce. The poor lacked cash to use the black market which, in all countries, continued to feed those with means to pay.

In the matter of diet Canada, Australia and New Zealand escaped lightly, and Americans scarcely suffered at all. Rationing was introduced to Roosevelt’s people only in 1943, and then on a generous scale. Gourmet magazine gushed tastelessly: ‘Imports of European delicacies may dwindle, but America has battalions of good food to rush to appetite’s defence.’ Meat was almost the only commodity in short supply, though Americans complained bitterly about that. A housewife named Catherine Renee Young wrote to her husband in May 1943: ‘I’m sick of the same thing … We hardly ever see good steak any more. And steak is the main meat that gives us strength. My Dad just came back from the store and all he could get was blood pudding and how I hate that.’ But whatever the shortcomings of wartime quality, in quantity American domestic meat consumption fell very little, even when huge shipments were exported to Britain and Russia.

Every nation with power to do so put its own people first, heedless of the consequences for others at their mercy. The Axis behaved most brutally, and with the direst consequences: Nazi policy in the east was explicitly directed towards starving subject races in order to feed Germans. Such was the regime’s administrative incompetence that food imports to the Reich, and consequent Soviet deaths, fell far short of the hopes of agriculture minister Herbert Backe and his ‘Hunger Plan’. People in occupied regions displayed extraordinary ingenuity in hiding crops from the occupiers, and clung tenaciously to life in defiance of the predictions of Nazi nutritionists, who anticipated thirty to forty million fatalities. But many people indeed perished. Pre-war Soviet agriculture was grossly inefficient, and much farmland had been overrun by the Wehrmacht. Even when it was reclaimed, machinery had been seized or destroyed, the countryside laid waste. In pursuit of the Wehrmacht’s policy of seeking to live off the land, German soldiers in the east consumed an estimated seven million tons of Russian grain, seventeen million cattle, twenty million pigs, twenty-seven million sheep and goats and over 100 million domestic fowls.

The Japanese throughout their empire adopted draconian policies to provide food for their own people, which caused millions to starve in South-East Asia. China also suffered appallingly, its peasants despoiled by both the Japanese and Nationalist armies. In Henan