Hunger: A Modern History

  • James Vernon
Harvard University Press: 2007. 384 pp. $29.95, £19.95 0674026780 9780674026780 | ISBN: 0-674-02678-0

For any nation, eliminating the risk of serious malnutrition or starvation is a mark of developmental maturity. Getting there requires a combination of factors: acute scientific and political awareness, appropriate institutions and a benign economic situation. James Vernon charts progress towards this goal in Britain, between the 'hungry forties' (1840s) and the emergence of its welfare state a century later.

The Food Queue (1918) by C. R. W. Nevinson depicts food rationing in First World War Britain. Credit: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM/THE ART ARCHIVE

Britain was the first country to industrialize, moving towards dependence on imported food, truly representative government and proficient public services. Other European countries had similar trajectories but took longer as they were gripped by more rural poverty and industrialized less aggressively. The land-rich United States and Australia had low population densities and swallowed up their 'huddled masses' efficiently. Yet even the United States could not entirely avoid malnutrition; in the 1900s, niacin deficiency (pellagra) was extremely common in the South.

Vernon's story begins in an era of unprecedented economic development and extraordinary pressure on society's poorest strata. The oracle of the age, Thomas Malthus, saw hunger as God-given discipline for the profligate and the reproductively overenthusiastic. His thinking underpinned the New Poor Law of 1834, a measure designed to make poverty feel like a crime, that involved incarcerating paupers in the workhouses immortalized in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. Deeply critical, The Times newspaper tried to stir polite society's conscience with lurid reports of the fate of victims of the 'Starvation Act', malthusianism and the Corn Laws (that banned cheap imports of grain in years of scarcity to protect the interests of wealthy landowners).

Devastating famine in Ireland brought by the potato blight in 1845–47 provoked neither sympathy nor much governmental assistance for these British subjects. To Charles Trevelyan (a former pupil of Malthus), with some responsibility for dealing with the crisis, it was “an act of providence”; “a sharp and effectual remedy” for the over-population considered an obstacle to land reform. Later in the century, the intense distress conveyed by photographs and reports of Indian famines made the moralizing face of malthusianism seem shameful and the Imperial management look incompetent.

After the turn of the century, research on the scientific basis of nutrition gained momentum and started to shape governmental thinking. Seebohm Rowntree's dietary survey of 1904 showed that the daily calorie intake of 30% of the population of York was less than the minimum required for a healthy life. In the British army, two-thirds of volunteers for service in the Boer War failed to meet physical-fitness requirements because they were undernourished. During the First World War, scientists were recruited to devise diets for soldiers and civilians and to implement food rationing.

Knowledge of the health benefits of vitamins and minerals, gained in the 1920s, raised the question of who should guide the public towards better dietary habits. The problem was severe: surveys in the 1930s revealed some malnutrition in half of the British population, not only the poor. With evidence accumulating that infant mortality, stunting of growth, susceptibility to chronic disease and work-time lost through sickness or lassitude could all have nutritional causes, public policy had to take new directions. One of the most important schemes introduced nutritionally sound meals in school. More problematic was the attitude of the public, often deaf to official advice yet responsive to an advertising industry whose influence was not always good.

Starvation emerged as a potent political weapon in the twentieth century. Hunger strikes by suffragettes, the Irish and Indian nationalists embarrassed policy-makers in ways that would have cut no ice with early nineteenth-century governments. Hunger marches before the First World War and in the 1930s, staged as protests over unemployment and the dole, had consequences that emerged only after 1945. They symbolized a great wrong inflicted on the working classes that would be put right only by a welfare scheme that secured minimum living standards.

Hunger is a thought-provoking book. Sharply focused and tightly argued, it excludes a few peripheral topics. One wonders why Vernon chose not to explore the evolution of British diets in Victorian times. Sugar-sweetened tea, bread-and-jam and “sugar butties” were adaptations by the poor to industrial employment that alleviated hunger cheaply but also created malnutrition. More curious is the omission of the improvement in stature and life expectancy that started with the repeal of the Corn Laws. The importance of journalism in raising consciousness of hunger as a social problem is discussed, but less emphasis placed on writers such as Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Henry Mayhew. The attitude of the Church is also neglected.

Vernon's story ends in the 1940s when many newly independent nations took responsibility for huge populations. Destitute on a scale never seen in Europe, they faced an accelerated birth rate if the food supply improved. Severe famines have occurred and have been blamed on poor economic management and distribution rather than Malthus' prophecy of moral punishment. Malnutrition is a more insidious problem. In the developing world, vast numbers of people are deficient in vitamins and micronutrients because the range and volume of their food intake is minimal. Consequences include stunted growth of children, low birth weight, decreased immunity to infection and damaged eyesight. Although appropriate welfare schemes can be devised, the solution may lie ultimately in increased economic prosperity. There is little doubt that when incomes improve, the quality of food intake improves.