A Taste of Army Life

Food and military identity were inextricably linked in the British Army: rations were a thrice daily indicator of the men's separation from their civilian selves. The soldiers were what they ate, but they were also where and how they ate; the grubby rapacity of the barrack dining hall, the absence of civilizing cutlery and the unfamiliar food delineated their new role as clearly as any uniform. Institutional feeding facilitated the erasure of self, an unhelpful attribute in the military world. Men's accounts indicate the conflict between their appetites and what they all too often regarded as oppression in a dietary form. © The Social History Society 2012.