THE IMPERSONALITY OF NUTRITION IN ORWELL’S 1984

Mahek Khwaja
7 min readApr 7, 2020
Caption: Rationed food stall during wartime. Image Source: https://foodandcity.org/how-to-make-do-in-wartime/

During times of political turmoil when the normality of society gets questioned, medicine comes in straight contact with the ‘humanist’ who finds it difficult to trace the old perpendicularity between food and body. This dilemma is well-drawn in George Orwell’s 1984 where in a wartime dystopia, characters need to maintain impersonality while dealing with food.

Winston as a citizen of Oceania (Britain), struggles as a clandestine humanist against what he is offered to dine on. He does not starve, at least in his adulthood but he misses fulfillment via food during wartime. Ironically, Orwell refers to the Ministry of Food as Ministry of Plenty that holds itself responsible for distributing a certain ‘number’ of food to masses without acknowledging the personalized relationship of food with human body.1 The initial reference Orwell makes for food is a public announcement of the new ration sanctioned by Ministry of Plenty. From this very first allusion we know that food in Oceania is a quantity. The “Victory Gin” that gives off “a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit”; Winston takes it in the morning as a member of Party for a nervous shock like a “dose of medicine”. At the café, Orwell draws a bleak imagery of Winston and Syme’s regulation lunch including “a metal pannikin of pinkish-gray stew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one saccharine tablet.” Later, Winston identifies a leftover pool of that stew with “a filthy liquid mess that had the appearance of vomit”. 2

Now we must not right away start pitying Winston for being a victim of a country on war. The political decisions to regulate nutrition in a certain way had some rationale. After World War I, Britain started wartime ration planning in 1938 for as another war was anticipated, Britain did not want axis powers to starve British population in enmity because then Britain relied for 70% of its food supply on imports. In 1938 ration booklets were ready to be circulated and in 1941 Lord Woolton was elected as the Minister of Food. Woolton was well-aware that war demands sustenance from nation. There is direct link of food with a healthy population that is capable of contributing to the war, that is why he worked closely with Wilson Jameson, British Chief Medical Officer and Jack Drummond, Chief Scientific Adviser to make sure that rationed food accords with required nutritional value. He realized that public awareness for nutritional channelization is extremely important so he set goals for Ministry to treat British as “consumers” and educate them, especially women with nutritional vocabulary.3 The government wanted public to extract maximum level of nutrition from little quantity available. For this cooking leaflets, public demonstrations and morning health shows were aired to convey to public that how the few items rationed, if not that savory, are nutritionally adequate and intelligent management techniques including growing vegetables on kitchen-front, preservation and canning, and low-budget recipes are required for a better placement on table. 4

The Food Ministry knew from instances as with Napoleon that health issue remains at the heart of any war so there was this famous Widdowson and McCance experiment on four voluntary students, Mac’s mother-in-law and Widdowson and McCance themselves, that what minimum food rationing can keep them going? As researched by Laura Dawes, their diet included one egg a week, a quarter of a pint of milk a day, a pound of meat and 4oz of fish per week, no butter and just 4oz of margarine. But they could eat as much potato, vegetables, and wholemeal bread as they wanted, with eight guinea pigs for three months. For better results the objects also went for intensive physical exercise including fortnight walking, cycling and mountaineering and luckily there were no spectres of oedema, scurvy or anaemia. 5

The Ministry did well for the most it could but that does not mean that citizens did not suffer from war-time rationing. We find lack of flavor, vitality and abundance in the form of nutrition reaching to a humanist.

When Winston sits to eat pale-coloured gravy, his spoon dribbles a long streak of it while he resentfully scrutinizes the physical texture of life: “Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this …a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes.”6 These meals took much longer time to eat, wholemeal bread was difficult to chew and rationed food high in starch caused flatus and dysentery. Moreover it was difficult to cook that inventively with limited ingredients. By the end of first two years of rationing, War Cabinet presented a paper to local authorities on reported unsatisfactory health indices, higher infant death rates and rising tuberculosis rates.7

With scarcity in food supplies, transport facilities were also inadequate and there was lack of staff to deliver food to rural areas. Professor KyriClaflin from Boston University writes in his review for Lizzie Collingham’s The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food, how rationing committees rationed minimum food that could keep prisoners at least walking while higher authorities feasted on black market. 8

When in the novel, Winston meets Julia to commit the ‘sin’ in the garden, Julia produces a small slab of chocolate from the pocket of her overalls. Julia, being a volunteer at Anti-Sex League and being “good at games” too, confesses to Winston that she got it from “Black market”. The fragment of chocolate that melts on Winston’s tongue with a delightful taste, stirs a memory “moving round the edges of his consciousness of something strongly felt but not reducible to definite shape…”.9 This chocolate becomes reminiscent of a time when food was ‘real’ and ‘vital’ because it was not the normal “brown crumbly stuff”, tasting like a “smoke of rubbish fire”. It was “dark” and “shiny”, “wrapped in a sliver wrapper”.10 Chocolate also relates to a ruthless memory from Winston’s childhood. When Winston’s father “disappears” during the war, his “spiritless” mother continues to feed them with whatever available. 11 One day when after several weeks, a chocolate ration is issued, Winston not only has his own precious morsel of chocolate but snatches his little sick sister’s share too, leaving her “wailing” and “dying” in her mother’s breast. This draws a stark contrast between Winston’s mother, a simple woman who only has access to normal rationed food, and Julia, who being a shrewd acquaintance to the inner party, can provide her beloved “real sugar” and “real coffee”. 12

This puts to us another shortcoming of food rationing that ration cards only entitled you to purchase a certain amount of food but even then “you still had to come up with money”. 13 With rise in war expenses there was already inflation and unemployment. Rationing in this context meant that no matter what amount is written on your ration card, there is a group that does not have money even to afford that minimal amount like Winston’s mother and then there is another group at the next extreme that is rich but even to them an equally shared amount of food is available at fair prices. The latter then have two options to deal with this scarcity; either obey the instructed or gain access to black market.

Some of the food items simply disappeared from Britain because they had to be imported all the way from America. Salt and coffee were seldom rationed. Fresh oranges were restricted for sale, when occasionally imported they were allowed only for children because the Food Ministry observed some deficiency in children growing without citric acid. Bread was first never rationed and oddly rationed later. It was a tasteless wheatmeal that was available to everyone. Butter which was a regular part of every British table was replaced by National Margarine supply. People had to use real butter inventively then. There are accounts where people would sweet-talk to canteen women for extra butter on a scone and did not eat it there, instead scraped it at home. Lemons and bananas simply disappeared even from black market; kids growing up during wartime did not see banana for first time until they were ten or twelve. 14 That is why Mr. Charrington’s rhyme fragment “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s!”, puts Winston and Julia in nostalgia after which they discuss remembering oranges and lemons as if they are talking about some magical food from some other world. 15

Health Ministry could not or intentionally did not expose a clear deterioration in health or rise in death rates, probably because the instruments they had to measure public health were blunt and outdated. But we see that there is a clear rise in deaths due to respiratory tuberculosis. There are instances of stunted growth in families whose red-meat nutrition got governed unlike their well-off diet during peacetime. We cannot claim that nutrition was the major cause of any negative health graph because there were issues like pollution, unclean cities and above all mental unrest that could have contributed to that but we can see so far how people sensed a dehumanization of nutrition. 16 The quality and quantity of food that the Ministry announced via its stringent policies remained impersonal to humanists like Winston, who at the end of the novel drinks a “horrible” mouthful of gin and painfully accepts that in this is “his life, his death, his resurrection”.17

REFERENCES:

1 Orwell, George. “ONE.” In 1984, 8. New York: Signet Classic, 1977.

2 Ibid., 44.

3 Cook’s Info. https://www.cooksinfo.com/british-wartime-food/ (accessed July 15, 2018).

4 Ibid.

5 Dawes, Laura. “Fighting fit: how dietitians tested if Britain would be starved into defeat.” Guardian Today. September 24, 2013. (accessed July 15, 2018).

6 Orwell, 1984, 52.

7 To those who served. http://tothosewhoserved.org/uk/civ/uksocpolicy/chapter25.html (accessed July 20, 2018).

8 KyriClafin, Professor. May/June 2011. https://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1158 (accessed August 4, 2018).

9 Orwell, 1984, 102.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid., 134.

12 Ibid., 117.

13 Cook’s Info. BWF.

14 Ibid.

15 Orwell, 1984, 121.

16 To those who served. TTWS.

17 Orwell, 1984, 241.

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Mahek Khwaja

Mahek Khwaja works in higher education publishing in Karachi. She shares stories to reclaim her creative control.