A promiscuous student with whom I shared digs in Dublin once said that a good meal with all the trimmings was the greatest pleasure, greater even than sex. (So why didn't he talk about food instead all the time?)
Stirling's characters are undercover so their life is quiet for a while. There is time to think about food. But that will not last. There are hundreds of pages of action still to come in this one volume and then there will be Volume III.
11 comments:
And food can be an important tool, in a place where nearly everyone is hungry all the time.
Sheila and I are dieting and exercising currently.
As an aside, our current civilization is unusual in that thinking about food is optional -- even quite poor people can count on getting enough calories, if not a balanced diet or the foods they like.
This is quite a recent development: hence the Lord's Prayer: "Give us this day our daily bread".
In 1914, Britain was a relatively rich country, and due to free trade imported vast amounts of food of all sorts from everywhere; but the 20-year-old sons of members of the House of Lords were around 4.5 inches taller than the sons of casual laborers, mainly because they were raised on a high-protein diet.(*)
Distribution of food was severely inegalitarian, both between families and between them -- there were plenty of working-class families where the breadwinner got meat and the wife lived on tea, bread and "drippings". Overall caloric intake from all sources was just barely adequate for a majority of the population.
In most places and times, most people worried about their food supply, and what was available could change sharply depending (always) on the vagaries of weather and harvest, and (often) on war.
WW1 was the first war where whole countries tried to ration food down to the individual level. The German system was a failure, mainly because it tried to regulate food prices by setting the price paid -to- farmers, rather than the price paid -by- consumers.
Experience then and subsequently showed that it's very difficult to regulate farm-gate prices, especially where you've got a lot of small farmers who grow their own food -- which Germany did, then. If you restrict the prices they get paid too much, it becomes an administrative nightmare, in which the farmers sell on the black market and/or just cut production to what they need for themselves.
Both happened in Germany from 1914 on, along with losses due to mobilization of peasant men and their horses, and cuts in the supply of fertilizer, which competed directly with explosives for raw materials.
(Big estates are much easier to regulate, which is incidentally why Stalin imposed them in the form of "collective farms", which peasants were forbidden to leave -- they called it, in a Russian play on words, "Second Serfdom, Bolshevik.")
The much more successful systems that Germany and Britain both imposed in WW2 relied on paying farmers well (and giving them incentives and help in increasing production in the form of labor and machinery) while subsidizing the price of rationed food to consumers.
The German system worked pretty well, for Germans -- everyone else got plundered to the bone -- until the last part of the war.
The British system was so successful that average nutritional standards went -up-, and mortality and infant mortality went -down-, even with a drop in overall consumption. Especially among the urban poor, who had a dreadful diet due to a combination of poor choices and sheer poverty.
Mind you, many aspects of British rationing were bitterly unpopular, mainly because it prevented people from eating the diet they wanted -- white bread, lots of meats and fats and lots of sugar.
(*) the other factor was lower rates of childhood diseases due to better water supply, more washing, and general sanitation.
Another aside: one the main incentives for British migration during the 19th century and on into the 20th, as recently as the 1950's, was food.
You can see this in emigrant's letters home; I've read a lot of collections of those. Plenty of meat, unlimited sweets, good bread, your own vegetable garden -- these are mentioned over and over again, right down to post-WW2 times, often with things like "never have to send the children to bed hungry."
There was a joke on the Erie Canal construction sites in the 1820's, where an Irish navvy is having a letter written to be sent back to Ireland:
"And tell them I eat meat three times a week."
"But Paddy, you eat meat three times a -day-."
"Right you are, boyo, but sure and if I told them that, they'd never believe me."
Now, of course, being slim and muscular is a mark of being wealthy. This would have seemed bizarre beyond words to most of our ancestors./
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I had to laugh at your last comment, above mine! That's exactly what is happening to me, due to exercising and dieting, looking muscular and fit! A hundred years and more ago, being fat was THE sign of being well off! The US is now the land where the rich starve and the poor get fat! (Wry smile)
And I read with keen interest on how the UK and Germany handled the problem of war time food rationing in both World Wars. More successfully in WW II than in WW I.
Sean
Sean: learning from experience, more or less. "Total War" in general worked better in WW2 than in WW1, simply because people had learned from their mistakes.
Stalin not letting peasants leave the land: serfdom indeed.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Learning from experience, on how to best ration food during times of war, as the UK and Germany did in WW II, noted!
Sean
The best lesson from the experience of war is: Never Again!
Kaor, Paul!
Considering how QUARRELSOME the human race is, I am not at all confident that war will ever be permanently done away with. See Poul Anderson's thoughts on that in his preface to SEVEN CONQUESTS.
Sean
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