A Menu of Hunger: Wartime Food and Civilian Survival in Britain, Italy, and Colonial India During World War II

This paper examines how food scarcity shaped civilian life and memory during World War II through a comparative study of Great Britain, Fascist Italy, and colonial India. Rather than focusing on military logistics or state policy alone, it uses food as a lens to explore how ordinary people navigated disruption, rationing, shortages, and hunger in everyday life. Drawing on cookbooks, memoirs, oral histories, government campaigns, diaries, and famine testimonies, the paper analyzes mock foods, ersatz foods, and survival foods as evidence of lived experience under wartime conditions.

The paper argues that wartime food practices reflected unequal systems of power, access, and control. In Britain, strong state planning and rationing systems created what may be described as “managed scarcity,” where substitutions and dishes such as Woolton Pie helped households maintain a sense of stability and collective participation. In Italy, fascist autarkic policies, unstable supply systems, and reliance on the black market produced “unstable scarcity,” where improvisation and ersatz foods became central to daily survival. In colonial India, imperial priorities and uneven rationing systems turned scarcity into catastrophe, leaving many civilians with little opportunity for substitution at all as the Bengal Famine pushed communities toward survival foods, starvation, and death.

By comparing these three cases, the paper demonstrates that wartime food was never simply about nutrition. Food practices reveal how civilians experienced inequality, political power, and social disruption during the war. The paper also explores how World War II wartime experiences shaped postwar memory, from British nostalgia surrounding ration-era resourcefulness to Italian associations between wartime deprivation and cucina povera, and the lasting trauma of famine in India.