Category Archives: Series: Wartime Recipes

Food and Drink, Ingredients, Modern, Posts, Series: Wartime Recipes, Spring 2025

Of Rodents, Stockfish, and Win-the-War Soup: Surviving Starvation in Biafra

Leave a comment

By Enemchukwu Nnaemeka

Wars in post-colonial Africa, like in other places across the world, were not only fought with guns, ammunitions, and bombardments but also with strategies of starvation. Starvation as a military strategy has been employed by various groups throughout history, with the primary intent of forcing an enemy to surrender or retreat. These strategies take diverse forms, especially through scorched-earth methods such as the burning of farmlands, the poisoning or contamination of food storage or drinking water, or the outright blockade or bombardment of markets, food networks, foodways, and systems, including airways, waterways, roadways, ports, and airports. While various studies have addressed starvation as a strategy of war, especially as implemented by victors,[i] the question remains:  how have victims of war, especially civilians, survived in the face of deliberate starvation? In many instances, civilians voluntarily or forcefully give up their food to soldiers as their contribution to war efforts, making them the chief casualties of war starvation.

A group of children attempt to receive food from an aid worker.
Fig. 1. Food distribution at the Swedish Red Cross Centre in Udo during the Biafran War. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In the case of the Biafran War, civilians readily reinvented their nutrition in the face of scarcity. Between 1967 and 1970, the Biafra Republic defended itself from the onslaught of the British-Soviet-US backed Nigerian Army. Historian Egodi Uchendu found that children between10 and 18 hunted lizards and rats as a source of food,[ii] while various Christian and humanitarian organizations smuggled stock-fish—otherwise known as dried codfish, which is today consumed by Igbo people of Eastern Nigeria, former citizens of Biafra—to make up for their deficiency in protein.[iii] Before this, neither lizards nor codfish were commonly featured on Igbo menus. While lizards as a source of protein have largely fallen out of use, codfish has remained a national food source among the Igbo, serving as a reminder of how they survived the war.

Six workers unload wooden crates of codfish from a helicopter.
Fig. 2. A relief team unloads crates of codfish that were airlifted from the Nigerian cities of Calabar or Port Harcourt. Image courtesy of the CDC Public Health Image Library, #7162.

As the Biafran population faced blockades that restricted access to crude oil depots in Port Harcourt—essential for powering their war machines—they turned to processing oil palm as an alternative fuel source for warplanes and armored tanks. This shift, however, further depleted the region’s food reserves, as oil palm was also a dietary staple. Consequently, survivors who depended on oil palm for preparing soups had to carefully ration its use, giving rise to what became known as “Win-the-War” soups. These soups were characteristically thin and watery, having little protein, with salt often extracted by boiling already-salted codfish, commonly referred to as stockfish. Remarkably, the legacy of “Win-the-War” soup endured among Igbo families long after the conflict’s end. Whenever a younger generation prepares a poorly made, watery soup, older family members—who lived through the war—often tease them, jokingly calling it “Win-the-War” soup. Thus, food provides a lens through which older Igbo generations recount tales of the war, weaving personal and collective memory into everyday life.

A pan of corn soya milk sits over a fire, while a hand stirs the contents.
Fig. 3. Corn soya milk (CSM) being cooked into a bread-like food during the Nigerian-Biafran war. Image courtesy of

The stories point to the fact that an exploration of how civilian populations sourced and invented new foods and reinvented the old during starvation-ravaged conflicts is long overdue. While studies on humanitarianism in war are abundant, the ingenuity of those facing systematic starvation—how they changed their diets and adapted to scarcity—remains underexplored. Indeed, the history of Biafra is not solely a narrative of bombardment and famine. It is also a story of widespread stockfish consumption, shifting gender roles in trade and breadwinning, childhood experiences tied to rodent hunting, and the broader intersections of food sourcing and culinary innovation. These elements reveal a resilient population adapting to extraordinary circumstances, crafting new recipes and survival strategies amid adversity.

.

[i] George Alfred Mudge, “Starvation as a Means of Warfare,” International Lawyer 4, no. 2 (1970): 228, https://scholar.smu.edu/til/vol4/iss2/3; Bridget Conley and Alex de Waal, “The Purposes of Starvation: Historical and Contemporary Uses,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 17, no. 4 (2019): 699-722.

[ii] Egodi Uchendu, “Recollections of Childhood Experiences during the Nigerian Civil War,” Africa 77, no. 3 (2007): 408. Uchendu’s is one of few studies that capture some strategies adopted by the civilian population, especially women and children, to survive economic blockades and the subsequent food shortages they create.

[iii] Robert E. Gribbin, “Two Relief Crises: Biafra and Sudan,” Africa Today 20, no. 3 (1973): 49; Fiona Bateman, “Ireland and the Nigeria-Biafra War: Local Connections to a Distant Conflict,” New Hibernia Review 16, no. 1 (2012): 48.

 

Nnaemeka Enemchukwu earned his bachelor’s degree in History and International Studies from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He went on to complete a master’s degree in History and Strategic Studies at the University of Lagos and is currently pursuing a second master’s in History at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His research interests span the economic, migration, labor, and social histories of West Africa in the 20th and 21st centuries. His scholarship has been published in notable outlets, including the Journal of Military History (Nigeria Defence Academy), the Nigerian Forum (Nigerian Institute of International Affairs), and the African Studies Review (Cambridge University Press).

Experimentation, Family and Household, Modern, Series: Bread, Series: Canadian Studies, Series: Politics and Propaganda, Series: Wartime Recipes

Canadian Women, War, and Wheat Bread

Leave a comment

By Sarah Cavanagh

Image courtesy of Archival & Special Collections, University of Guelph Library.

While rustic sourdoughs and fancy homemade bagels have filled Canadian kitchens during the pandemic, another way to pass the time (and give even the dodgiest sourdough boule a respectable look and taste by comparison) is to recreate the thrifty bread of wartime. Many of these feature in a 1917 Canadian collection of First World War recipes, Ethel Chapman’s War Breads: How the Housekeeper May Help to Save the Country’s Wheat Supply. This 16-page recipe pamphlet, jointly produced by the Ontario Department of Agriculture and the Women’s Institutes, instructed housewives to save wheat for soldiers and cook with alternate grains–corn, barley, oats, and rye–some of which carried the unfortunate stigma of being livestock feed.[i]  

 

“Vision Your Sons, Mothers of Canada!”, The Grimsby Independent (19 September 1917): 7.

The War Breads publication flowed from the Canadian government’s decision to support Allied efforts overseas via a domestic food conservation policy in June 1917 that included domestic rationing and ensuring the continuous export of food to Britain. Subsequent propaganda campaigns targeting women were tinged with emotion, premised on patriotism and moral duty.  Housewives were asked to symbolize their commitment to King and country by signing and displaying “Food Service Pledges” in their front windows. A September 1917 food pledge advertisement headlined “Vision Your Sons, Mothers of Canada!” urged women to think what would happen if one morning, there was no breakfast for the “valiant boys” and “word went down the line that Canada had failed them.” The solution, the ad reads, was for women to forgo white flour and vary their baking by using one-third oatmeal, corn, barley or rye flour.[ii]  Meanwhile, an Ontario farmer took the unusual step of mailing his wife’s war bread by parcel post to the editor of The Toronto Daily Star to prove that less expensive oatmeal grain was not just delicious, but economical for the household and a service to the nation.[iii]

The pamphlet’s physical appearance matches the bread’s frugality, with few images, save three rather pathetic photographs of unappealing dark and deflated brown loaves on the title page. I opted to recreate a recipe for a steamed Boston Brown Bread, mainly because the cooking technique was unfamiliar to me. The recipe looked easy – a handful of ingredients like flour grains, cornmeal, baking soda, milk, molasses – and brief instructions; however, like many historical recipes, it contained tacit knowledge from the era, with puzzling terminology requiring substitutions and improvisations – some more successful than others.

One challenge was finding a mould for the bread. The recipe suggests using a one-pound baking powder can, a testament to the ubiquity of the beautifully decorated baking powder cans produced by American manufacturers like DeLand & Co. and the frugality of the housekeepers who saved the containers for alternate purposes.[iv] I opted for a modern-day metal coffee can.  Graham flour proved difficult to find, and soured milk? I keep my milk in the fridge, so the addition of lemon juice turned my fresh milk into a lumpy substitute. Adding molasses to the flour/soda/milk mixture produced a gorgeous soft-brown coloured dough. 

Image courtesy of Sarah Cavanagh

The recipe instructs placing the mould in a “kettle” of boiling water, allowing the water to rise halfway up, trapping the steam with a tight-fitting lid. How big is a kettle? The only kettle I have boils my morning tea, so I substituted a large steel pot; the coffee can sat just below the rim inside. As the water began to boil, the coffee can bobbed up and down like a sailboat in the Atlantic, knocking the lid off the pot. Precious steam exited like a genie out of a bottle. Eyeing the nearby closet, I grabbed a metal coat hanger to quickly secure the lid in place, bending the wire through both pot handles and across the top of the lid, which was (mostly) successful. After the suggested three-and-one-half-hours of steaming, I removed the can from the water, wrestling to free the bread from its mould, resorting to an inauthentic can opener to remove the can bottom. The bread itself was a rich rusty brown colour, exceedingly dense and moist. My husband, whose parents lived through the Depression and the Second World War, adored it. It reminded him of his mother’s cooking, proving the sensory power of food and its connection to memory. For me, the texture was coarse, and it lacked flavour. The experience of making the bread was more satisfying than the actual eating of it.[v] 

Image courtesy of Sarah Cavanagh

This historical recipe highlights elements of wartime cooking: uncomplicated, practical, frugal. The bread preserved well on the counter for five days, a tribute to the power of the working-class staple, molasses. The four-hour time commitment illustrates domestic structures which bound women to their home. And while there was friction between urban and rural women about who was making the greater sacrifice, government-mandated food substitution was generally embraced by Canadian housewives. Interestingly, Chapman later wrote that a promise made by the government Food Controller to remove “the thing that troubled most women” was the key to securing their cooperation. The quid-pro-quo? A government Order-in-Council banning the use of grain of any kind for the distillation of potable liquors.[vi] Temperance and patriotism, it seems, went hand-in-hand. Alas, little chance of washing that coarse brown bread down with a shot of whiskey.

 

[i] Ethel M. Chapman, War Breads: How the Housekeeper May Help to Save the Country’s Wheat Supply (Ontario Department of Agriculture: Women’s Institute Branch, 1917). 

[ii] “Vision Your Sons, Mothers of Canada!”, The Grimsby Independent (19 September 1917): 7. 

[iii] “Maist Economical Is Oatmeal Bread: Another Experiment in Wheat Substitutes Which May Be Tried on Hubby,” Toronto Daily Star (30 July 1917): 8. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

[iv] Advertisement for DeLand & Co’s Chemical Baking Powder, Wikimedia Commons.

[v] Diane Tye, “‘A Poor Man’s Meal,’” Food, Culture & Society 11, no. 3 (1 September 2008): 344.

[vi] Ethel M. Chapman, “Voluntary Rationing at Home,” Maclean’s Magazine (1 January 1918): 42-43, 62-63. 

 

About 

Sarah Cavanagh is a senior History/Canadian Studies student at Brock University.

Global Exchange, Modern, Series: Japanese Studies, Series: Politics and Propaganda, Series: Wartime Recipes

Meals on Wheels: The “Kitchen Cars” and American Recipes for the Postwar Japanese Diet

Leave a comment

By Nathan Hopson

From 1956 to 1960, the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) sponsored a fleet of food demonstration buses in Japan (“kitchen cars”) to improve national nutrition and fuel the nation’s economic recovery with more “modern” and “rational” cooking methods and, most importantly, ingredients (i.e. American agricultural surpluses: wheat, corn, soy, and to a lesser extent meat, dairy, etc.) The concept was first floated to the US by Dr. Ōiso Toshio, chief of the health ministry’s nutrition section, 1953-1963. Along with the school lunch program instituted under the US occupation, the kitchen cars became one of the most important tools for marketing American farm products in Japan. The school lunch program, centered on bread and (reconstituted skim) milk until the 1970s, taught young Japanese new tastes. The kitchen cars taught their mothers to reproduce those flavors at home.

The initial fleet of a dozen buses, operated by the Japan Nutrition Association (a semiprivate organ of the health ministry), reached over two million people in towns, villages, and apartment blocks across Japan. The nutritionists staffing the buses put their professional imprimatur on the many novel foods they demonstrated, and distributed samples, nutritional pamphlets, and the day’s recipes to their audiences of mostly housewives. The kitchen cars were wildly popular. When US funding expired, local Japanese governments built their own to meet public demand; the number exceeded 100 by the end of the 1960s. Though it is difficult (impossible?) to quantify, the kitchen cars contributed in subtle but profound ways to transforming the postwar Japanese diet.

Despite their popularity at the time, today the kitchen cars are mostly forgotten. When they are remembered, it is mostly for destroying “traditional” Japanese dietary patterns and contributing to the “Westernization” of the diet during the period of high economic growth. This backlash stems in part from the fact that American financing was hidden not just from the public, but also from all those who staffed or assisted with the kitchen cars. Still, in the short run, these buses were a win-win for the US and Japan. America’s Cold War “Food for Peace” campaign put agricultural surplus to work supporting a critical ally, and Japan received enormous amounts of free or cheap food and generous development loans.

Figure 1: Kitchen car demonstration in rural Aomori, year unknown (probably 1950s). Courtesy of the Aomori Prefectural Museum.

The photo above shows a typical scene from a day in the life of the kitchen car. The audience crowds around the back of bus, which opens up like a thrust stage for the nutritionists to perform upon. The gathered women listen intently, some taking notes. The kitchen installed in the rear of the bus is the state-of-the-art chrome and gadgetry emblematic of the new postwar “bright life” of happy consumerism. The nutritionists in their white lab coats bring the authority of science. The foods they are preparing may not seem like the stuff of American farm surplus propaganda, but as Ōiso himself observed, “Propaganda is truly effective when people don’t notice it.”[1] To wit, the noodles are most likely soba: buckwheat mixed with (American) wheat. Even subtler is the use of sautéing, undoubtedly in (American) corn or soy oil. This kind of gradualist approach, expressed in slogans such as “Flour-based food once a day,” helps explain both why nobody suspected American involvement and why the kitchen cars were so popular and effective.

Few detailed records of 1950s’ kitchen car menus remain, but those that do are consistent with accounts from the 1960s. A list of favorites from mid-decade Okayama prefecture includes milk donuts, udon stew, sautéed amaranth leaves with liver, fried meat and vegetables with ketchup, vegetable cream soup, fried soybean fritters, chicken and peanuts in tomato sauce, bok choy with peanuts and mushrooms, and cheese sponge cake. Roughly simultaneously, the prefecture’s public health center sponsored competitions for original, tasty, nutritious, economical foods (about ¥20 each) using ingredients like soy, skim milk, and flour. Winners included vegetable omelets, fried tofu-wrapped sardines, fried sardine balls, and mysterious entries such as “nutritional bread” and “nutritional fried dumplings.”

These lists lend credence to the remarks of Richard Baum, Ōiso’s initial American collaborator. In a 1978 documentary, Baum expressed immense satisfaction at the kitchen cars’ success. As he explained, “the housewives would come out and gather around and learn how to make different wheat foods. And then they would get to sample the wheat foods. And they found these very delicious and so they would say ‘Oishii desu. Mō sukoshi’ [This is delicious. A little more, please].”[2]

[1] Quoted in Takashima Teruyuki, Amerika komugi senryaku: Nihon shinkō (Ie no Hikari Kyōkai, 1979), 106.

[2] Quoted in Takashima Teruyuki, Shokutaku no kage no seijōki: kome to mugi no sengoshi (NHK, 1978).

This post is part four in an ongoing series by Hopson on the history of nutrition in modern Japan. You can read his previous post here. This entry is based on his article “Ingrained Habits: The ‘Kitchen Cars’ and the Transformation of Postwar Japanese Diet and Identity.” Food, Culture & Society, November 2020.

British Studies, Family and Household, Modern, Series: Politics and Propaganda, Series: Wartime Recipes, Women and Gender

Waste Not, Want Not: Feeding the British Home Front: Women’s Interconnectivity in the Second World War

Leave a comment

By Kelly A. Spring

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the start of food rationing in Britain during the Second World War. On 8th of January 1940, the British government instituted a system of food controls, which was all-encompassing for the home front population. Items such as meat, cheese, tea and butter were put on the basic ration, while other foods such as tinned goods, rice and cereal could be purchased through a points system, whereby individuals received 16 and later 20 points per month to spend on these foods. Goods were assigned so many points by officials in the Ministry of Food, depending on availability of supplies, offering consumers a measure of flexibility in their diets beyond the basic ration.[1] Ration amounts fluctuated throughout the war as supply levels rose and fell according to shipping losses from U-boat action, domestic agricultural outputs and the needs of the military.

Queue for food rations, London, 1945. Image credit: Wikimedia commons.

The nature of the restrictions and their pervasiveness in society required everyone to use food resources wisely to feed the home front. But it was primarily to housewives that the nation and the government turned to make the ration programme a success. Through food rationing propaganda, officials called on married women to use their cookery skills to sustain their family’s consumption needs under the food controls. Such propaganda suggested that women, who could effectively provide nutritious meals to their loved ones by stretching limited consumables, were fulfilling the idealised domestic role in wartime.[2] However, in reality, not all housewives took up domestic roles with gusto, nor did they act alone in the battle on the kitchen front. Other women within the home and in the community often assisted housewives in their task of providing meals in the domestic environment. As a result, women’s responses to the food situation were much more diverse in scope and complexity than the image of the ideal housewife would lead us to believe.

The weekly ration for two people, UK, 1943. Image credit: Wikimedia commons.

My paper, ‘Feeding the British Home Front: Women’s Interconnectivity in the Second World War’, presented at the conference, ‘Waste Not Want Not: Food and Thrift from Antiquity to the Present’, explored the links between sustainability and women’s roles in wartime Britain. Using oral interviews, my research demonstrated that through associations both within and in connection to the home, women utilised their interconnectivity with other women to successfully sustain the consumption needs of home front families in a time of conflict and food insecurity. My paper illuminated the multifaceted work of grandmothers and single women in conjunction with housewives to facilitate and maintain the food levels in the home during the Second World. Overall, this paper provided a more nuanced understanding of the intricate structure of women’s food interactions. It showed that the British food rationing programme relied not simply on housewives’ individual efforts, but it depended on the cookery interactions of a community of women, who creatively pooled their culinary knowledge and resources to successfully maintain the food security, health and nutrition of a nation at war.  

[1] For a discussion of the points system and the foods included in it, see: Norman Longmate, How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life During the Second World War (London: Pimlico, 1971), pp. 141-142. 

[2] Kelly A. Spring, ‘“Today We Have All Got to be Fighting Fit”: The Interconnectivity of Gender Roles in British Food Rationing Propaganda during the Second World War’, Gender & History, 32/1, March 2020, pp. 1-27 (early view online February).