The University of Arkansas Press announces the forthcoming publication of The Provisions of War: Expanding the Boundaries of Food and Conflict, 1840–1990, edited by Justin Nordstrom.
This collection of varied essays examines how soldiers, civilians, communities, and institutions have attempted to use food and its absence as both a destructive weapon and a unifying force in establishing governmental control and cultural cohesion during times of conflict. The contributors gathered here show us how a foodways lens allows for an innovative rethinking of the usual periodization of war and prompts a reexamination of which conflicts receive scholarly attention and how warfare is labeled and studied.
Historians as well as scholars of literature, regional studies, and religious studies problematize traditional geographic boundaries in these pages, examining various conflicts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and revealing how an emphasis on food systems enables fresh examinations of where armed interactions begin and end. Expanded chronological boundaries are sought as well, with discussions of the role of food in shaping prewar political debates and postwar realities, revealing how the echoes of war continue in successive generations, as dietary adjustments brought on by military campaigns reshape national and individual foodways and identities long after the cessation of hostilities.
The subjects covered are as varied and inclusive as the perspectives offered, ranging from geographic topics like military logistics and animal disease in colonial Africa, the making of Indian vegetarian identity, and food in the counterinsurgency of the Malayan Emergency, to investigations of hunger in Egypt after WWI and nineteenth-century American soldiers’ role in the making of US-Mexico borderlands.
Justin Nordstrom is associate professor of history at Penn State’s Hazleton campus. He is the author of Danger on the Doorstep: Anti-Catholicism and American Print Culture in the Progressive Era and the editor of Aunt Sammy’s Radio Recipes: The Original 1927 Cookbook and Housekeeper’s Chat.
The Provisions of War will be published in November, 2021, as part of the Food and Foodways Series from the University of Arkansas Press. The paperback book will be $29.95.