Everybody’s Business: Film, Food and Victory in the First World War
One month after the outbreak of the Second World War, the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign was introduced in Britain in an attempt to grow more food to feed a nation in conflict, at which time the government persuaded people on the Home Front to convert their gardens into allotments in order to cultivate vegetables. Correspondingly, strategies were also created to encourage farmers to transform their land as part of the war effort. The campaign for the production of food not only concerned the need to educate in order to provide for the country, but also provided an impetus for community and patriotism. Outlining the need for home-grown products and productive cultivation of the landscape, Dig for Victory in the Second World War was a scheme that was professional from the outset involving the screening of numerous newsreels and documentaries in its implementation. That this plan was mobilised at such short notice owes a debt to the First World War, a period that witnessed the birth of film as official propaganda. However, the main disparity between the two film campaigns lies in their strategies for dealing with the populace. The Second World War was deemed ‘the People’s War,’ using the working class as central protagonists with the aim of disregarding class difference. Alternatively, the First World War deployed upper-and middle-class characters in fiction films in order to educate. These practices were put into operation despite the fact that the cinema audience during this period was predominantly comprised of those fighting starvation, and indeed those actually ‘digging for victory.’ This article analyses the strategies inaugurated in the cinematic food campaign in the First World War in both newsreels and fiction film, and traces a trajectory to the Dig for Victory campaign in the Second World War.
Representations of Food Waste in Reality Food Television: An Exploratory Analysis of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares
Food waste is a global issue with serious economic and environmental implications. Although a number of psychosocial and cultural factors have been identified, little attention has been paid to how food waste is culturally presented, circulated, and mediated. In this exploratory study, we consider how food waste is presented in the thriving genre of reality food television. Specifically, we conducted a content and discourse analysis of UK television programme, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares (RKN). We found that visual and discursive references to food waste are associated with business, food, and personal incompetency in RKN. Furthermore, food handling was constructed as a moral issue. In RKN, food waste is not resolved via specific educational interventions for food waste prevention, but through attention to broader personal, business, and food incompetencies, which are value-laden and morally relevant. We discuss the symbolic dimensions of the transformation of food into food waste by drawing on Mary Douglas’ ideas of matter out of place. We suggest that food waste research and behavior change could benefit from addressing personal, professional, and moral competencies which may not be directly related to food, but which may reduce food waste. Our analysis of food waste in a televised environment extends waste research in specific geographical locations and spatial contexts.
The Invention of the Jewish People
'All modern nation states have a story of their origins, passed down through both official and popular culture, and yet few of these accounts have proved as divisive and influential as the Israeli national myth. The well-known tale of Jewish exile at the hands of the Romans during the first century AD, and the assertion of both cultural and racial continuity through to the Jewish people of the present day, resonates far beyond Israel's borders. Despite its use as a justification for Jewish settlement in Palestine and the project of a Greater Israel, there have been few scholarly investigations into the historical accuracy of the story as a whole. In this bold and ambitious new book, Shlomo Sand shows that the Israeli national myth has its origins in the nineteenth century, rather than in biblical times - when Jewish historians, like scholars in many other cultures, reconstituted an imagined people in order to model a future nation. Sand forensically dissects the official story - and demonstrates the construction of a nationalist myth and the collective mystification that this requires. A bestseller in Israel and France, Shlomo Sand's book has sparked a widespread and lively debate. Should the Jewish people regard themselves as genetically distinct and identifiable across the millennia - or should that doctrine now be left behind and if the myth of the Jewish state is dismantled, could this open a path toward a more inclusive Israeli state, content within its borders?'