The artist Chittaprosad captured the trauma of the Bengal famine with his eloquent woodcuts. I grew up looking at his work, and hearing stories about the hunger that stalked the region, especially the countryside, during the famine. “Ma, fain dey,” went the cry. Fain is the starch of rice, and hundreds of thousands of people begged for the starch that many households discarded while cooking rice. And later, of course, I read about the famine and Winston Churchill’s believed role in it.

All this came back when I was going through a very powerful book called The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food by Lizzie Collingham (again, gifted by a friend — what will I do without my army of friends?).

Unequal distribution

The famine and the deaths, many have argued, could have been prevented. Churchill and his war cabinet could have sent grains to India, but decided not to, opting to reserve food for Italy in case it fell to the Allies during the war. And this is just another example of the linkages between war and food.

“Death by famine lacks drama. Bloody death, the death of many by slaughter as in riots or bombings is in itself blood bestirring; it excites you, prints indelible images on the mind. Death by famine, a vast slow dispirited noiseless apathy, offers none of that. Horrid though it may be to say, multitudinous death from this cause … regarded without emotion as a spectacle, is until the crows get at it, the rats and the kites and the dogs and the vultures very dull.”

The book opens with these words of newspaper editor Ian Stephens, commenting on the 1943 Bengal famine, which killed three million Indians.

Collingham traces the role of food as one of the causes of international conflict in the 20th century. In the last of quarter of the 19th century, the urban population in Europe shifted from a grain-based to a meat-based diet, she writes. “This development went hand in hand with the emergence of a new global food economy. Germany felt disadvantaged by the terms of the international food trade, dominated as it was by the United States and Great Britain and its empire.”

Soldiers were among those who faced the brunt of the food crisis. She writes, for example, how Indian soldiers fared in the Army during the Raj. “British soldiers in the Indian army did not receive a generous weekly ration, but their 16 ounces of bread, beef and milk, 8 ounces of vegetables, 10 ounces of potatoes and 4 ounces of onions, plus sugar, salt and tea was generous in comparison to the Indians’ miserly 24 ounces of atta (ground wheat for chappatis) or rice, 3 ounces of lentils, 2 ounces of potatoes and ghee (clarified butter for cooking), sugar and salt,” she writes. By October 1942, the British soldiers’ intake of calories had gone up to 4,500 calories a day. But food shortages in India meant the Indian government was reluctant to increase the Indian soldiers’ rations. The number of soldiers in the Army in India had increased from 2 million to 3 million. Earlier, soldiers came from what were considered martial groups. Soon, they were being recruited from everywhere. The food crisis led to artisans and labourers volunteering in search of regular paid food. Underweight men joined the army, she writes: “As a result the army collected together a ragged assortment of men…”

It is believed that during the years of the Second World War, 19 million died in conflicts across the world. During the same years, more than 20 million died from starvation and malnutrition.

War deaths are not just about brave men fighting for a country or a cause. They are also about men, women and children begging for starch.

The writer likes reading and writing about food as much as he does cooking and eating it. Well, almost.