Tag Archives: war

Preparedness for the Unexpected: Expedient Recipes for Survival in Wartime China

By Chang Xu

If you were stocking up on disaster relief supplies, what kind of reference would you want by your side? Expedient Formulas for Military Marches (1852) reads like just such a survival guide. Compiled during and after the turmoil of the First Opium War (1839-1842) and the Taiping Civil War (1850-1864), this text wasn’t intended solely for military use, despite what its title suggests. In the preface, the compiler Luo Shiyao explained that the collection grew out of his personal encounters with everyday illnesses.[i] His project belonged to a longer literati tradition in which scholars compiled and published practical encyclopedias and daily-use compendia, creating their own textual museums of useful knowledge. Since disease during military campaigns could be especially debilitating, as Luo observed, remedies proven effective under such extreme conditions then held particular value for the wider public, meeting an urgent need for survival in wartime.[ii]

Black-and-white text fills a page of Expedient Formulas for Military Marches.
Fig. 1. Preface of Expedient Formulas for Military Marches. Digitized and online at Google Books, URL: https://www.google.com/books/edition/行軍方便便方/hylWAAAAcAAJ?hl=en.

.

The manual contains 679 recipes, organized into six sections (see Table 1). What began as a personal collection of useful prescriptions unexpectedly revealed the remarkable efficacy of “expedient recipes” (bianfang). These recipes arguably relied only on ingredients that were familiar and accessible to readers: beans, chestnuts, vegetables, tea, and other mundane materials. They didn’t require rare or costly components, nor did they depend on professional diagnoses or individualized modification. Yet, when followed as directed, they consistently produced immediate, reliable results. In effect, the manual empowered its users to be their own doctors, as Yi-Li Wu also noticed in the case of women’s medicine.

.

Section # of recipes
Preparedness for the Unexpected 26
Preventive Defense 45
Treating Injuries 117
Curing Illnesses 309
Rescue and Relief 71
Miscellaneous Addenda 111
  Total: 679

Fittingly, most of the recipes focus on treating injuries and illnesses, reflecting the compilation’s original purpose. But it is the recipes for preparing food and drink for the unexpected that appear first—framing the two as the foundation of survival. To underscore this point, Luo drew on a grim catalog of historical episodes, including accounts of cannibalism during sieges and famine, to convey the urgency of such knowledge.[iii] In response, he assembled a diverse range of recipes from pharmacopeias, medical texts, and agriculture manuals, offering practical strategies for preserving food, reducing consumption, identifying substitutes, and finding safe drinking water.

The first group of recipes, all titled “Method for Avoiding Grain and Preventing Hunger During Military Marches,” offers strategies for reducing food intake while sustaining the body during prolonged periods of deprivation. One of them reads:

Astragalus root (huangqi), 3 qian (approximately 11.19g)

Red halloysite clay (chi shizhi), 3 qian

Dragon bone (fossilized bone), 3 qian

Siler root (fangfeng), 5 fen (approximately 1.9g)

Processed aconite root (wutou), 1 qian (approximately 3.73g)

Roast [the ingredients] until dry, then pound in a stone mortar one thousand times. Refine [the resulting powder] with honey to form bullet-sized pills. When traveling urgently with no time to prepare food, eat a full meal of rice beforehand, then take one pill to sustain a journey of 500 li (approximately 165 miles). Two pills will keep you going for 1,000 li.[iv]

For readers who found the ingredients in this recipe uncommon or difficult to obtain, the manual offers more accessible alternatives. One recipe, for instance, recommends steaming asplenium trichomanes (tiejiao fengwei cao; literally, iron-foot phoenix-tail grass) together with black beans. Eating five to seven of these infused beans is said to keep hunger at bay for an entire day.[v]

Fig. 2. Asplenium trichomanes from Prof. Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé;s Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz (1885). Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Beyond simply reducing food intake, some recipes go further by offering ways to transform inedible materials into food. One recipe, quoted from the renowned pharmacopeia Ben cao gang mu (Systematic Materia Medica), describes how to render rock edible:

Gather white stones from mountain streams, and boil them in juice from scallions or with the root of sanguisorba officinalis (diyu). Once cooked, they become as soft as taro and can serve as a hunger remedy. This is called “stone soup” (shigeng).[vi]

Likely originating in Daoist texts, “stone stops” carried cultural weight in literati writings and poetry as part of the cuisines of transcendence. While Daoist sources emphasized absorbing the qi of stones produced through this cooking method, Luo’s inclusion of this recipe highlights its practical utility rather than its association with longevity-inducing nourishment found in other texts. [vii]

Food poisoning was another major concern addressed in the treatise. As Luo noted, there are cases where troops suffered from consuming poor food, resulting in swelling, shortness of breath, and death. In the “Rescue and Relief” section, therefore, he gathered guidance on identifying toxic plants and animals, as well as detecting contaminated water and spoiled fruits. He warned that if a dead animal’s mouth remains closed, its liver appears dark, or its flesh is marked with black spots, the meat should not be consumed.[viii] In this part of the collection, the focus shifts from treating the ill to equipping readers with the knowledge to avoid contaminated food in the first place.

Luo Shiyao’s effort to compile practical knowledge parallels the work of late Ming scholars who sought to collect and classify natural objects, as Benjamin Elman has discussed. Amid the twin crises of warfare and illness, Luo’s manual offered not only remedies but also a structure for navigating chaos, something tangible readers could hold onto. By using recipes, Luo drew on what Marta Hanson and Gianna Pomata have identified as the strengths of medical formulars in transmitting knowledge: their modularity and experiential basis made them easy to adapt and share.[ix] Yet such recipes typically required learned physicians to turn a generic formula into a specific prescription. Luo’s collection attempted to break from that model. His emphasis on expediency—on accessibility, broad applicability, and consistent outcomes—shifted the power of care from professional practices to ordinary individuals. It was a solitary act of hope, an effort to make order out of chaos, and to leave behind something enduring when so much had already been lost.

.

[i] The author did not specify the types of illnesses he had experience in the preface. However, based on the section “Curing Illnesses,” the compilation addresses various conditions such as coughing, colds, diarrhea, headaches, toothaches, lower back pain, as well as ulcers and skin diseases.

[ii] Luo Shiyao羅世瑤, Xingjun fangbian bianfang 行军方便便方Expedient Formulas for Military Marches (1852), Preface, 1a.

[iii] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Preface, 1b.

[iv] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Vol. 1, 1b.

[v] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Vol. 1, 1b.

[vi] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Vol. 1, 3b.

[vii] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Vol. 1, 3b.

[viii] One of the example could be found in Lin Hong 林洪 (1127-1279), “Bai shigeng” 白石羹 (White Stone Stop), in Shanjia qinggong 山家清供 Simple and pure cuisine of Master Mountain Dwelling, https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E5%B1%B1%E5%AE%B6%E6%B8%85%E4%BE%9B.

[ix] Hanson, Marta, and Gianna Pomata. “Medicinal Formulas and Experiential Knowledge in the Seventeenth-Century Epistemic Exchange between China and Europe.” Isis 108, no. 1 (March 1, 2017): 20. https://doi.org/10.1086/691411.

.


Chang Xu is an assistant professor in the Department of Transnational Asian Studies at Rice University. Her research interests cover the global history of medicine, the history of military technologies, and the interconnections between human and non-human bodies. She is currently working on a monograph derived from her PhD research at Washington University in St. Louis, which examines medical practices in military organizations during the Qing’s territorial expansion.

Gaza “War Recipes”: Cooking as Survival and Resistance in Displacement

By Noha Atef

In Gaza’s displacement camps, cooking has taken on a new meaning. It is no longer just a routine task; it has become a form of survival, storytelling, and resistance.

Since October 2023, thousands of Palestinians in Gaza strip have been forced from their homes, taking refuge in makeshift tents, often with little more than flour, canned goods, and the clay ovens they crafted. Amid this devastation, a form of digital documentation emerged: Instagram reels of people cooking with what little they have. These are not typical food videos. They are war recipes, or wasfat harb, shared in the middle of crisis.

A steaming pot sits over an open flame.
Fig. 1. The recipe for ‘Tuna Pot,’ described by the content creator as “one of the war recipes,” is designed to maximize the use of canned tuna provided in food aid to help overcome food scarcity. Image courtesy of the author.

.

Between March and July 2024, I analyzed 100 of these Instagram reels, all produced by displaced Palestinians in southern Gaza. Using a mixed-method approach that combined content analysis with close discourse analysis, I explored how food becomes a medium through which people express resilience, preserve cultural identity, and push back against the flattening gaze of humanitarian imagery.

Much of the content comes from mothers improvising traditional stews without their essential ingredients. In each video, the act of cooking transcends the immediate need to eat and becomes a demonstration of resilience. The American Psychology Association research describes resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, or significant stress. It is not the absence of suffering, but the ability to persist despite it. In these reels, resilience is visible in the determination to recreate a dish, to feed a child something warm, to maintain rituals amid ruin.

The impact of war on the naming of dishes is particularly striking. Traditional meals, adapted with whatever substitutes are available, are often labeled as “false” or “orphan” versions. For example, maqluba, a beloved Palestinian dish typically made with chicken or lamb, is referred to as false maqluba in the camps due to the absence of meat. New dishes have also been invented based on aid parcels, often called “resilwar inventions” or “war recipes.” One such example is luncheon meat shawarma, a substitute for beef shawarma, where the canned meat is colloquially known as “war meat.”

Two dishes of eggplant fattah sit on a white board. A hand holding a spoon hovers above.
Fig. 2. An adaptation of Eggplant Fattah, a vegan traditional dish. Titled by the creator as “The Amazing Eggplant Fattah, Best Salads in the War.” The dish is elegantly plated, with a carefully chosen cooking spot to enhance its visual appeal. Image courtesy of author.

.

Some recipes carry names that reflect the emotional landscape of displacement. Displacement Molokhia marks the first meal prepared by a family after fleeing their home. Tent pies refer to the first baked goods made by a woman in a tent for her family. These names do more than describe what’s on the plate. They document a collective experience and underscore the adaptability of displaced Palestinians navigating extreme hardship.

These recipes are about far more than nutrition. They serve as psychological and emotional coping mechanisms. Resilience, in this context, is not just about enduring. It is about adapting creatively under pressure and maintaining a sense of purpose and identity in the face of chaos. Additionally, the traditional dishes were emphasized as a symbol of home, which explains the garnishing of these meals despite the scarcity of food, likely done with the intention of showcasing Palestine to the world in the best possible light. Every traditional Palestinian dish was carefully garnished and neatly presented.

In contrast to mainstream media coverage that often portrays displaced people solely as recipients of aid, these reels offer a counternarrative. They present Palestinians not as passive victims but as agents of creativity and resistance. Cooking, normally coded as a domestic act, becomes political. It offers an alternative narrative to one of victimhood. It says: we are still here, we still cook, we still care. Through these everyday acts, people reassert identity, continuity, and connection in conditions designed to erase them.

The message of resilience through food was powerfully underscored by the chosen settings in many videos. While displaced Gazans often selected what appeared to be a ‘nice’ place to cook, this typically meant a spot near a surviving tree, a powerful symbol of Palestine, or one decorated with a keffiyeh. Some framed their shots tightly to avoid capturing the surrounding devastation. In many instances, people returned to the rubble of their destroyed homes (these videos and research were published prior to the brief ceasefire in January 2025), retrieved what dishes they could, and baked sweets directly among the ruins. They shared coffee and pastries in the remnants of their kitchens. Sweets, often associated with comfort, celebration, and happiness, carried a deeper message when prepared among the ruins: we love being at home, even if it’s been destroyed.

Two hands mix brioche ingredients in a small white bowl. Destroyed buildings and rubble can be seen just behind the bowl and in the background.
Fig. 3. A Palestinian woman baking brioche in her demolished home, after retrieving her kitchenware from beneath the rubble. Image courtesy of author.

.

Palestinian food has always been tightly woven with questions of land, belonging, and resistance. But these war recipes reveal a new dimension: food as protest, as witness, as archive. In the absence of proper kitchens or ingredients, displaced Gazans are creating a digital record of survival, one that blends taste, memory, and defiance.

References

American Psychological Association. Building your resilience. https://www.apa.org/topics/resilience.

Heldke, Lisa. Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Holtzman, Jon D. Uncertain Tastes: Memory, Ambivalence, and the Politics of Eating in Samburu, Northern Kenya. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Masten, Ann S. “Ordinary Magic: Resilience Processes in Development.” American Psychologist 56, no. 3 (2001): 227–238.

Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.


Noha Atef is an Egyptian media scholar, educator, and consultant. She is an Assistant Professor of Journalism at the University of Galway. With a background in journalism, she transitioned into academia, focusing on digital humanities and media studies. Atef has held positions at universities and think tanks in the UK and Canada. As a consultant, she advises journalists and researchers in the Arab and Euro-Mediterranean regions on producing impactful social science research, including policy papers and industry-focused studies. Her work, published in both English and Arabic, has reached audiences across the Arab world, Europe, and Asia. She is also a recognized media commentator, providing analysis on various platforms.  

Intimate Experiences: War and Food in Lee Miller

By Karina Elizabeth Vázquez

There are only a few steps between my living room and kitchen, so a section of the library stands directly opposite to a countertop stacked with cookbooks. It wasn’t until I began to think about what to write about Lee Miller (1907-1977), her work as a war correspondent, battlefield photographer, and her relationship with gastronomy, that I realized that two books sit opposite one another, one in the library and one in the kitchen: The Unwomanly Face of War (2017) by Svetlana Alexievich and Lee Miller: A Life with Food, Friends & Recipes (2017) by Miller’s granddaughter Ami Bouhassane. The texts engage in a necessary dialogue between what is expressed in testimonies from women of the Russian army collected by Alexievich and what is present in the lives of Lee Miller, the surrealist muse and photographer, the war correspondent for Vogue, and the brilliant chef. War is an extremely intimate experience, says Alexievich, and in their testimonies, women who participated in the war speak about what happened and didn’t happen to their bodies. During the war they didn’t feel like women; upon returning, their bodies had become dead, they had lost their menstruation, they had to deal with the scars, and they felt no desire. The burden of rebuilding daily life, following gender mandates, forced them to silence the trauma of that violent experience. What did Lee Miller feel in her body during the war? She too experienced silence. Upon returning from the war, she filed all her photographic material in the attic (rediscovered by her son, Anthony Penrose, only after her death in 1977). She instead found in the intimacy of the kitchen, in culinary creativity, a healing mechanism.

An overhead view of a history and photography book laying on a kitchen counter
Fig. 1.  A view of the author’s kitchen/library, courtesy of the author.

.

Biographers and critics have pointed out that Miller led several lives: as a model and surrealist artist of the 1920s and 1930s, a fashion photographer of the late 1930s, a war correspondent and combat photographer from 1944 to 1946, and a creative chef from the postwar years until her death. Miller’s photography and culinary art are not separate and share a common spirit. There is a continuity between the surrealism of her early years, her experience at the front—where, as photojournalist David E. Scherman has noted, she used her culinary skills and knowledge to search for non-perishable foods and herbs to add flavor to rations and cooking stews in helmets—and the imagination and attention to detail of her later cooking.

Bright recipe and photography books lay open across a kitchen counter
Fig. 2. An alternate view of the author’s kitchen/library, courtesy of the author.

.

Two images that have the body as a common component come to mind when I think about the relationship between war and food in Lee Miller’s work. The first is the photograph Severed Breasts From Radical Surgery In A Place Setting, from 1929, where the luminosity of her lens captures the violence inflicted on the female body by showing a removed breast served on a plate, ready to be eaten. The image denounces beauty standards, medical discourse, and eating norms, which coalescence as if they were simultaneously a scalpel and a utensil that intensely intervene in the female body and feelings. It’s clear that, even in her time as Man Ray’s muse and fashion photographer, Miller was a correspondent in another war and a photographer on another battlefield.

The transformation of everyday life imposed by the world of war on women’s lives and bodies appeared through Lee’s lens in critical montages that indicate the same thing as the testimonies collected by Alexievich: for women, above all, war is murder and, furthermore, a hard daily labor in which feeding themselves and caring for others occupies most of the time and space that survives the violence. I think of “Homeless: Like The Women Of German-Invaded Countries, German Women Now Cook In The Ruins”, a photograph taken in Nuremberg in 1945. Cooking is an act that never occurs in a vacuum, even when it is the result of the violent destruction of the meaning that, for better or worse, orders our hours and days.

The second image is the recipe for “Cauliflower Breast,” which appears in one of the photographs accompanying the article “How to Make an Art of the Happy Weekend. The Personal Strategy and Beautiful Food of Lee Penrose,” by Bettina McNulty, published in House & Gardens in 1973 (and reproduced in Bouhassane’s book) under the title “Cauliflower Mayonnaise.” As Bouhassane points out, this time the breasts are served by invitation only, a clear indication that Miller is positioned differently than in that 1929 image: equally critical, but probably more tired and, as a result of that tiredness, willing to create differently. I visualize Lee Miller in her kitchen, imaginatively searching for opportunities to counter what her camera captured at Buchenwald. Cooking is also a form of remembrance; dishes can become memories. Once again, I turn to Svetlana Alexievich.For her, memories are not impassive narratives of the past, but creative acts that allow us to rewrite our lives. And I can see Miller, with her recipe books, concocting something simple and disruptive like an “Onion Upside-Down Cake, and later on, as Bouhassane recalls, laughing and disappointed after winning a culinary contest that had a bag of onions as a prize. Her relationship with the culinary world, before, during, and after the war, was a way of being present, of relocating herself as a mechanism of resistance.

.


Karina Vázquez (Ph.D., University of Florida) teaches and researches Latin American literature, and cultures, visual studies, and critical pedagogy. She the Director of Community-Based Learning (CBL) in the Department of Latina American, Latino & Iberian Studies at the University of Richmond. Her teaching specializations include Spanish language and seminars on work and gender, food and culture, and graphic novels. In 2023, Dr. Vázquez co-curated the exhibition Jay Lynn Gomez: Domestic Scenes Reconsidered / Jay Lynn Gomez: Otra mirada sobre lo doméstico at the Joel and Lila Harnett Museum at the University of Richmond. Some of her publications on Latin American literature and culture, literary and visual representations of work, CBL, and food studies can be accessed through https://scholarship.richmond.edu/lalis/.

Remembering Francisco Solano López’s Foodways in Paraguay

By Bridget María Chesterton   

Map highlighting the territorial disputes of the War of the Triple Alliance
Map highlighting the territorial disputes of the War of the Triple Alliance. By Hoodinski, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The defeat of Paraguay by its powerful neighbors, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, during the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) left the country in ruins. The complex causes of the war can be boiled down to the fact that Paraguayans sought to limit the growing power and influence of Brazil in Uruguay’s politics and economics. As Paraguayans held off their enemies over a number of years, the Paraguayan military and population was forced to feed itself on nothing more than oranges, manioca (yucca), and the occasional emaciated cow. It was a military and a country on a forced starvation diet.

The President and dictator of Paraguay, Francisco Solano López (popularly known by his military title “el Mariscal”), had led his country into this disastrous conflagration that left more than 90% of the male population dead from battlefield injuries and disease, but mostly from starvation. Struggling to understand Paraguay’s defeat in war, post-war intellectuals were quick to blame Solano López. However, by the 1930s, narratives about the war were changing. A new Liberal elite born after the war began to remember Solano López as a “hero” who saved the country from being totally dismembered by the allies. This stemmed from the logic that, while the country was certainly defeated in the war, it—and its people—remained.    

These new national narratives took many forms, including recipes. In 1931, Raquel Livieres de Artecona published the first Paraguayan cookbook. She stated in the introduction that it was written in the new “nationalist orientation [for] public education.” [i] For Livieres, the primary purpose of her book was to educate Paraguayan students about their glorious culinary past.

Newspaper article featuring picture of Raquel Liveres de Artecona.
Fig. 2. Image of Raquel Liveres de Artecona, in the public domain.

These recollections and recipes—based on the oral testimonies of women who remembered the war—proved to be powerful reminders of the importance of culinary survival after a devastating defeat.[ii] As an oral historian, Livieres recorded the memories of female survivors and their recipes. Not only did she collect the recipes, but she also named each individual woman who contributed to her collection. While it is impossible to tell where in Paraguay many of these women lived, it is most likely that the majority of the women lived in and around Asunción and were both white and elite, like Livieres. Even though not all Paraguayan women were included in this tome, some of the war’s survivors are remembered and also acknowledged and given a place in the broader history of Paraguay. By preserving these voices, not only had the country and its women survived the war, but its food traditions had also made survival possible. It was fundamental, then, to honor the past with foods that were beloved by the nation’s most important war hero, el Mariscal.

Livieres’ book, one of the few works written by a woman in the Liberal era (1904-1936), highlights the “heroic” food choices of el Mariscal.[iii] Written at the height of Liberal era politics in Paraguay and immediately following the broad educational reform in 1925 that refocused education in Paraguay along nationalistic lines, the text aligns with the new educational plan developed in the country.[iv] The cookbook was designed to be used in public schools in home economics courses throughout the nation and as a result found a wide audience among female Paraguayan students. As noted by the famed Paraguayan Liberal-era writer and intellectual Manuel Domínguez in the prologue of the cookbook, the book highlights “how our forefathers fed themselves” and thus “was one of the reasons, tested in war, behind their nutritive strength.”[v] During the Liberal era, Paraguayan food memory thus became a place where Paraguayans could take pride in their nation. 

Exploiting ideas of historical revisionism surrounding Solano Lopez, certain recipes in the cookbook were highlighted as “preferences” of the newly minted hero of the war and of Paraguay more generally. Writing that “a cream cake” and a “tomato jelly” were favorites of el Mariscal, Livieres taps into a clearly patriotic national narrative and a shared food recollection that honors the memory of Solano López.

A Spanish version of Livieres de Artecona's recipe for Tomato Jelly with Wedges
Fig. 3. Image used with permission of the owner, Carlos Vera Abed.

An English translation of Livieres de Artecona's recipe for Tomato Jelly with WedgesThrough this text, teaching women about the recipes from their nation’s history was a way to build the country’s heroic past for new generations born after the war. Thus, the text serves as a foundational intellectual work for the new Liberal era in Paraguay. Acknowledging Liveres as an intellectual in her own right gives women a place in the making of a new Paraguay.

 


 

[i] Raquel Livieres de Artecona, La Cocinera Paraguay (Asunción: La Colmena S.A. 1931), np.

[ii] Livieres de Artecona, La Cocinera Paraguay, 10.

[iii] For more on the remaking of Solano López as a national hero, see Bridget Maria Chesterton, The Grandchildren of Solano López: Frontier and Nation in Paraguay (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013).

[iv] David Velázquez Seiferheld, “’Desratizar la enseñanza es una tarea auténticamente nacionalista…’: La polémica sobre el nacionalismo y la Escuela Nueva. (1925-1941),” Historia de la educación – anuario 16 no. 2 (December 2015).

[v] Manuel Domínguez, “Prolog,” in Raquel Livieres de Artecona, La Cocinera Paraguay (Asunción: La Colmena S.A., 1931), np.

 


Bridget María Chesterton is Professor of History at Buffalo State University where she teaches Latin American History and Commodities Histories. Her current book project is entitled Hotel Guaraní: The Brazilianization of the Paraguayan Middle Class during the Stroessner Era and is currently under contract with the University of Pittsburgh Press. She has also published in Food and Global History, Journal of Women’s History, Hispanic American Historical Review, and Journal of Social History among others. Her email is chestebm@buffalostate.edu.