Food at the battefields

This 6th and last lecturing period of the year, I run a capita selecta course on Food Culture with some of the students from the regular course in February in which we read and discuss classics in food culture together. Like two years ago, there is a small but dedicated group of students eager to read entire books rather than the usual scientific papers. We just finished ‘Paradox of the Plenty’ by Harvey Levenstein, a very dense but easy and often funny to read social history of eating in the U.S. spanning from 1920s to about the 1990s. One of the stories to which we awed with amazement is about the abundance, diversity and quality of the food supply and diet of American soldiers during World War II.