H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (May, 2008)

James Vernon. _Hunger: A Modern History_. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2007. xiv + 369 pp. Notes, index. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-674-02678-0.

Reviewed for H-Albion by Matthew Hilton, Department of Modern History, 
University of Birmingham

Article 25 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)
established for the post-Second World War international order that
"everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health
and well-being of himself and of his family."[1] In short, it had become
a right for citizens of the world not to suffer from hunger. This was by
no means an uncontroversial feat, as is evident in the persistent
suffering of millions of people around the world today as such rights
remain aspirational rather than achievable. Indeed, the political
philosopher of human rights, Thomas Pogge, tells us that we avoid such
positive duties to protect the welfare rights of others by maintaining a
distance between the poverty of the developing world and our own
affluent civilization: out of sight, out of mind, so to speak, or, as
Pogge puts it, the hungry are "a remote good cause alongside the spotted
owl."[2]

Yet, in 1948, Article 25 attested to the culmination of a long history
of the politicization of hunger through which the gap was narrowed
between the material experience of the unfortunate and the response of
the providers of welfare. This is the subject of James Vernon's _Hunger
_, in which he traces the changing meaning of hunger, showing that by
the mid-twentieth century the hungry were no longer the agents of their
own suffering but the victims of modern markets and societies. In so
doing, Vernon hopes his case study stands in for an explanation of
Britain's transformation from a liberal to a social democracy.

Vernon begins his account by setting out the Malthusian orthodoxy that
hunger was an inevitable and necessary condition. Over the course of the
nineteenth century, hunger was discovered as a humanitarian issue. It
was not so much that humanitarianism was a new social impulse, but that
new forms of journalism and reporting "generated a circle of
humanitarian virtue: the journalist proved his integrity by reporting
the urgent misery of hunger and starvation; those reports elicited and
created an immediate humanitarian response among readers, whose
philanthropy in turn demonstrated their own virtue and redeemed the
lives of the recipients" (p. 29). Having transformed the hungry into
victims, all was set for the politicization of hunger. Vernon explores
how the hunger strikes of Irish and Indian nationalists, as well as
suffragettes, and the hunger marches of the unemployed, inverted the
supposedly natural laws of the market to highlight both the strength and
fortitude of the hungry, as well as the illegality of a state that
subjugated them.

By the turn of the twentieth century, it appeared that hunger might
again be depoliticized as nutritionists and food scientists seemingly
made hunger purely a technical issue. However, in redefining hunger as
malnutrition (as opposed to under-nutrition), these experts also raised
the possibility that hunger could be avoided through careful planning.
Hunger, therefore, again became a political issue as its management came
to be seen as an aspect of social welfare. Vernon then draws out a
number of case studies--the school meal, works canteen, community
restaurants, and rationing programs of the two world wars, among
others--to show how food policy became linked to social democratic
welfare while also retaining its disciplinary character as such ventures
sought to create responsible, rational consumers who would heed their
own nutritional requirements.

This is a rich and entertaining history. Vernon deals with a potentially
enormous subject extremely well. His chosen case studies are excellent.
There is great detail on the political protests of the hungry, on the
development of nutritional science as a distinct field of knowledge, and
on the post-Second World War pursuit of authentic working-class life
histories: here, the stories of childhood deprivation during the "hungry
thirties" were used to validate the achievements of social democratic
planning ("never again"). Vernon, too, is good on the location of
British social and political history within an imperial and a
transnational context. For instance, his account of the humanitarian
discovery of hunger in Britain is bolstered by a discussion of the
importance of photographic evidence of the Indian famine at the turn of
the twentieth century. And, he traces the career of John Boyd Orr,
author of _Food, Health and Income_ (1936), winner of the Nobel Peace
Prize for his research into nutrition, and first director-general of the
United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization, to demonstrate
Britain's contribution and linkage to international food policy
developments.

Vernon clearly has ambitions for what he identifies as his "difficult
second album" (p. vii). This is not a book that is merely a cultural
history of the changing meaning of hunger; it is also an assertion that
"even hunger, that most material of conditions, was also the work of
culture ... how hunger was understood shaped who actually experienced
it" (p. viii). His narrative is steeped in Foucauldian understandings of
governance and discipline. Vernon is at pains not to write a history of
a monolithic state imposing food policy from above, and he dogmatically
avoids an account of the forward march of labor triumphing over the
social and economic inequities that it believed to give rise to hunger
in the first place. Instead, Vernon sees power and government
everywhere; his agents of change are the humanitarians, philanthropists,
employers, experts, and scientists who played as strong a role in the
establishment of social democracy as any formal political movement.
Indeed, their models for dealing with hunger retained ideals of good
citizenship such that discipline went hand in hand with welfare. This,
Vernon argues, is the book's most significant contribution: his case
study of hunger complicates any neat trajectory from liberal to social
democracy, and he shows how the welfare state continued to retain
elements of both.

There is a churlish tone to Vernon's assertions in this regard. His
references "to the powerful and enduring narrative of the labour
movement's heroic struggle" perhaps speaks of a battle fought out within
the social historical profession one decade and more ago (p. 273). More
important, though, are Vernon's claims for cultural history, eschewing
any causal structural explanations, especially of a material kind. It
results, in this work, in a certain fragmentation of his subject; for
example, the connections between chapters and case studies is not always
apparent, especially when he refuses to impose any grand narrative on
what could link the politics of the hunger march with the politics of
the hunger strike. Both were politicizations of hunger but neither were
the consequence of any apparent causal phenomenon. At times, it means
his narrative becomes rather descriptive, especially when running
through the seemingly endless committees and institutions devoted to
food and nutrition policy between the wars. In addition, it focuses the
research on experts and professional forms of knowledge that make the
book increasingly parochial. The imperial and transnational context is
lost in the latter chapters, as Vernon travels through the more familiar
territories of food policy in Britain, which seemingly take him away
from the subject of hunger. These chapters make this a book very much
about Britain for all the wider claims of its title.

Nevertheless, his emphasis on professional knowledge about hunger means
he provides the food equivalent to the sort of work that has been
conducted by the likes of Nikolas Rose into the "psy" professions and
the disciplining of the self in the twentieth century (_Governing the
Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self_ [1999]). Clearly, this has its
merits, not least because it admits to the plurality of politics and
power and embraces a whole range of other actors who have had an impact
on British social and political life. Future work could be done on the
types of expert committees Vernon uncovers and which mark the linkages
between nineteenth-century philanthropic voluntarism and the more
professionally managed nongovernmental organizations of today. Although
Vernon would recoil at the suggestion, one could almost see in the rise
of these experts a material explanation for social change. "The rise of
professional society," as Harold Perkin put it (_The Rise of
Professional Society_ [1990]), is certainly not the type of history that
Vernon is after, but in his desire to distance himself from what he sees
as traditional labor and political history, he does create a new breed
of hero out of his bureaucrats and technocrats. Indeed, there is a
curious optimism in Vernon's narrative, and he ends his book on a
political note, seeing in these expert, professional, nonsystematic
solutions to social problems a pragmatism that could well be applied to
many of today's pressing inequities. In this regard, this is social
history that seeks to rescue the middle-class liberal from the enormous
condescension of posterity.

But other structuring narratives might also be suggested. One that
appeals to this reviewer is the material base offered by rising mass
consumption and the development of consumer society as the basis of
citizenship. To this end, hunger--or nonconsumption--represents most
clearly those who are excluded and denied citizenship. In this regard,
it is easy to see how hunger is a political tactic in consumer society:
nonconsumption is as prominent an intervention as any symbolic image in
the society of the spectacle. Hunger was and is the glaring anomaly of
society's "progress," and thus the spread of mass consumption and the
attendant assumptions about prosperity made hunger all the more
political. By choosing not to consume, the hunger striker appeared to
deny the legitimacy of a society supposedly guaranteeing a decent
standard of living. The authorities were well aware of the politics of
consumption. As Vernon tells us, when Mahatma Gandhi fasted in 1943, the
British removed him not to a prison but to the Aga Khan's palace outside
Poona. They publicized the splendor surrounding the ascetic nationalist,
such that Gandhi was reported in the British press to be on a "Luxury
Fast" (p. 77) Gandhi, too, was aware of the consuming aspects of his
politics. His fasts ought usefully to be situated alongside his
boycotting of British goods and his promotion of domestic-made products
in the _swadeshi_ movement.

There is, too, a further international dimension to "acquiring the right
not to be hungry" (p. 15). The social democratic experience of
continental Europe is absent from these pages, as is the articulation of
a "freedom from want" so central to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New
Deal. Transnationally, Victoria de Grazia's _Irresistible Empire:
America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe_ (2005) has most ably
discussed the movement to measure and compare living standards between
the wars. These indices ought to be placed alongside Vernon's account of
social nutrition since they fed into such declarations as Article 25 of
the UDHR. By ignoring these aspects of the debate, Vernon overemphasizes
the importance of Britain in the period prior to 1945. In his refusal to
examine the advocacy of prominent British-based nongovernmental
organizations to tackle issues of global poverty and hunger thereafter,
he likewise underemphasizes Britain's continued contribution to
transnational understandings of hunger (the shift from aid to trade in
international development policies from the 1960s could have taken this
cultural history of the changing meaning of hunger one stage further).

Nevertheless, this is still a compelling account. At the very least,
what _Hunger_ does is continue to unpack the meaning of the political
and the social within modern British studies, which will further fuel
other investigations of this sort. What Vernon's deliberately unromantic
approach to the past has done is point to both the very spectacular and
the very ordinary elements of the politicization of an issue. It is to
be expected that future studies will continue to explore the multiple
sites of power, politics, and governance in a similar manner.

Notes

[1]. UN General Assembly, _Universal Declaration of Human Rights_,
Resolution 217A (III), 1948.

[2]. Thomas Pogge, _World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan
Responsibilities and Reforms_ (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 26.


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