By Kate Rix

When James Vernon’s father was growing up during the 1930s and World War II in Britain, food was far from abundant. Hunger was common, and the memory of going without would remain powerful for that generation.

Professor Vernon, who directs Cal’s Center for British Studies, teaches courses about the history of food and hunger in Britain. As a history teacher, Vernon requires students to digest historical readings and also to reflect upon their own relationship to hunger and food. For the first paper due for his undergraduate course, “Hunger: An Unnatural or Modern History?”, he asks students to explore “why hunger interests you, what you think it is, and why we need a history of it.”

To facilitate his research he spent a semester in the Townsend Center for the Humanities where he worked with other faculty, including some who were also researching the politics of hunger.

In analyzing the impact of hunger on politics, Vernon notes in his recent book Hunger: A Modern History, that the generation that grew up during Britain’s “Hungry ’30s” also often supported the New Right of the 1970s. The memory of intense hunger pangs, it seems, don’t dissolve with a good meal.

On the contrary, says Vernon: welfare services for the hungry in the 1930s were often punitive in nature and left needy people with the feeling that their poverty was their own fault. After World War II, welfare services had not shaken the earlier stigma—an association with shame that would have political costs.

By the late 1970s, Margaret Thatcher’s critique of the Welfare State resonated with the generation of voters still stung from the shame of having needed help. Her exploitation of that sentiment—she had slashed a popular program that provided a bottle of milk every day to all school children—helped deliver the support she needed to become Prime Minister in 1979.

“This may help us explain the puzzle of why Thatcher, and Reagan for that matter, were so successful at capturing some working class voters,” says Vernon.

He breaks Britain’s history of hunger into three periods: The mid-1800s, when news reports of hungry families launched hunger into the public eye as a humanitarian issue; the late 19th century, when hunger became a political issue and a sign of government failure (that period gave birth to one of the cornerstones of British social services: the school meal); and the 20th Century, when the state began to respond to hunger and creative the modern Welfare State.

“The Welfare State always failed to live up to its ambitions,” he says. “There were never as many schools built as promised, never as many having school meals, and many of the things they did brought back memories of soup kitchens and charity. People felt ashamed.”

Too vivid were the memories of Dickens’s England: the “work houses” for the poor, where impoverished families were separated and forced to work under cruel conditions. The schools and hospitals of the new Welfare State were often housed in the old workhouses, where real-life stories straight out of Oliver Twist had taken place.

Even the ubiquitous school meal, instituted in the late 1800s, came to smack of paternalistic social engineering.

“School meals weren’t developed because it was so dreadful to have hungry children, but because the state had introduced compulsory education,” says Vernon. “They were worried hungry children couldn’t learn properly. A good part of what the school meal was also about was civilizing people, giving lessons in how to behave around the table, using knife and fork. It was a form of welfare that was designed to provide what contemporaries described as a social education.”
 
For all its flaws, Vernon argues, the same concern with addressing hunger as a social problem led British nutritionists to take a central role in the discovery of hunger as a global issue through the League of Nations.

This is what interests Vernon: social attitudes around food and the ways people eat. What is it like to do this work in the Bay Area, where the relationship to food could be called almost obsessive? There are some interesting parallels, he says.

The organic movement and Alice Waters’ work bringing healthier foods into school cafeterias can be seen as growing out of an ideology similar to the one at work in Britain: Teach the poor that their food habits are unhealthy and train them to adopt a healthier way of eating.

In Britain today, a similar movement has gained momentum—but with a bit of a backlash. While salads have become common in some British school lunchrooms, a few women have gained notoriety for selling British chips and meat pies from a food trolley outside schools. Their fare is, needless to say, selling like hotcakes.

“These battles,” says Vernon, “are about what are the appropriate things we should eat and how should we eat them. What a historian brings to the discussion is to point out that we can track the changing way we think about and behave around food over time. There is a history to our current politics of food.”