Food is not a side issue

In her work examining the architecture of international relations in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, Professor Patricia Clavin sees the way that food and food (in)security is continuously thrust into the margins. The problem of feeding populations in the late 19th century was viewed as a problem for the private realm, businesses and families, rather than a problem for the state. With the advent of various wars, including the First World War, feeding the population and ensuring food security became an issue for the state for the first time. But this is unusual, Clavin explains, 'history is not the big set moments of 1919 or 1945 or even 1990, where you get this architecture of international relations. It is changing all the time in response to things people are doing on the ground'. 

People search for food in lower Austria, winter 1918

Her recent interest is on pioneering female biologists who became nutritionists in the First World War. One, Harriette Chick, worked at the Lister Institute and conducted research in Vienna in 1919, a city at the heart of the Allied powers naval blockade. Chick conducted research demonstrating the importance of cod liver oil and vitamin C in helping babies and young children recover from malnutrition, caused from deprivations of war. And as part of that process, Professor Clavin explains, Chick receive free food samples from private industries, including cod liver oil from Norwegian fishermen and shipments of Bovril. This illustrates, she says, the role of the private market and private finance, and the ways 'business relations do not sit on the same timeline or work in the same way as state conflict'. Professor Clavin provides another example of chemical fertiliser companies in the United Kingdom and Germany who continued to do business during the Second World War, via neutral Sweden, despite the states being at war.

Dr Harriette Chick with colleagues at the Lister Institute. (Wellcome Collection.)

Business relations do not sit on the same timeline as state conflict

Professor Clavin became interested in history as a child, as a way to understand her own family history and the vagaries of chance that had brought her parents, one Irish, the other German, together. Both her parents' families were farming families and this history probably also sowed an interest in food as a topic of research. 'We would go to my mother's family farm in Germany for the summer and help. I think there is a bit of me, even though I've never lived on a farm, that this interest connects me back to their worlds and their understanding of food production. They were really good gardeners. I am drawn to this because it is a connection back'. Clavin goes on: 'some of the answers to the challenges we face now partly lie in how we imagine the future but some of it is also recovering the knowledge that my parents had, that many of us have forgotten'. 

There is also something about the role of women as identifiers of food insecurity that interests Professor Clavin. She explains, 'we had enormous humanitarian aid in Europe after both the First and Second World Wars, which brought food security to people. But the problem is actually seeing food as a humanitarian issue and not a fundamental one. By labelling food as a humanitarian problem, we push it into a second order category, rather than seeing it as a priority. In 1919, states wanted to hang onto the right to blockade because they wanted to use famine as a weapon of war. And of course, it is a double-edged sword, because you can get food to people during war time if you label it as a humanitarian need. But that also means it is second order to the right to wage war'. This is partly a gendered problem, with pioneering women campaigning for the rights of the child and what became the right to food, but at crisis points we see food as item five or six on a priority list. 'For people who are experiencing acute hunger or famine, it is not priority five or six', she says. 'Food insecurity changes people's bodies, their life prospects. Children with rickets, if you don't treat them, they never recover. This is seen and understood as really important and yet food insecurity is moved to the margins in times of crisis. Part of the reason for this is because food is deeply gendered'. It is women in families searching for food to feed their children for whom food is the number one priority. Those men of state, waging war, see little of their effects on the ground.

By labelling food as a humanitarian problem, we push it into a second order category, rather than seeing it as a priority

Yet despite these challenges, Professor Clavin is positive about the future. 'I am optimistic about the fact that it is perfectly possible to have cooperation in times of conflict; that we consistently have scientific breakthroughs which could enable us to make the world more secure in terms of food and food provision. I am optimistic about knowledge and the power of technology'. History is a helpful way to undertake and make sense of the world we live in currently. 'History exposes that the challenges [of the food system] are not new. It lays bare some of the processes that you might intuit and part of the historian's job is to make it visible and show how complex it is.'