Food under siege : a historical sociology exploration into food and hunger during World War II and its effect on the Maltese population

Abstract

This study focuses on the sociological aspect of food and attempts to trace the impact of the siege-induced food shortages during World War II on the war generation and subsequent generations. The study set out to establish links between the 1942 experience of hunger and the modern Maltese diet by means of an investigation into the transgenerational transmission of attitudes towards food. This work employs a historical sociology framework and makes use of a mixed-methods strategy that made it possible to look closely at the role of food in the post-war family stretching back more than 70 years. Qualitative one-to-one interviews with eight war generation elders describe the pre-war diet and speak of the acute food shortages that followed during the siege conditions of the Second World War. The second part of the study makes use of quantitative tools, namely questionnaires collected from 360 'baby boom' generation respondents. The objective was to identify perceptions that were handed down from the parental war generation and any possible transmission of attitudes towards food from one generation to the next. The qualitative and quantitative strands were integrated to produce an in-depth investigation. The current diet-related lifestyle trends with a high prevalence of the metabolic syndrome and an obesegenic population, is what first triggered this research. Historical data reveals how the humble food of the Maltese cuisine underwent dramatic transformations and the local population moved away from a frugal diet to one replete with animal fat and refined carbohydrates. The war generation narratives reveal attitudes that were a result of frugality and the experience of hunger during war. The analysis establishes that some of these attitudes were successfully transmitted from the war generation to the next, namely, the 'baby boomers'. Furthermore, the study shows that the transgenerational transmission falls short as the attitudes associated with the war and post-war generations were not reproduced in subsequent generations. Both the war generation and the 'baby boom' participants agree that the very young demonstrate different attitudes towards food since, as a cohort, they did not live through the experiences of food deprivation and lack of commodities. The post-war generation participants were unable to effectively pass on tendencies inherited from their war generation parents, since their wartime experience is based on the exposure of wartime narratives and is not an embodied experience.