Abstract
The quote above points to one of the major problems in Europe after the Second World War: the poor state of food supply. During and immediately after the war, outright food shortages occurred regularly, mainly due to the collapse of grain production and imports, and many of Europe’s inhabitants had considerable difficulty reaching sufficient daily calorie intakes. However, such undernutrition is not what the quote is about. Instead it is about malnutrition: by 1949 endemic hunger was nearly ended in Europe, but malnutrition persisted. It was caused by overly monotonous diets based on grains and potatoes; the challenge, then, was to increase the intakes of foods providing a wider variety of nutrients. Such foods were often labelled ’perishable foodstuffs’, the most important of which were meat, fish, eggs, dairy products, and fruits and vegetables.
Human nutrition is becoming more and more a problem of balance … What is most harmful is not occasional fasting, but prolonged and unremedied malnutrition, which eventually slows down the activity of a whole nation. Endemic malnutrition is, therefore, the enemy, but victory lies not only in increasing production, though this is of course necessary, but also, and perhaps to a greater extent, in a more even distribution of the foodstuffs produced, a sphere in which transport plays a technical role of the first importance.1
Secretariat of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, 1949
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Notes
For a vivid articulation see Gunnar Myrdal, ‘Twenty years of Economic Commission for Europe’, International Organization 22(3) (1968): 617–28.
For a recent UNECE history and further references see Yves Berthelot and Paul Rayment, ‘The ECE: a bridge between east and West’, in Yves Berthelot (ed) Unity and diversity in development ideas. Perspectives from the UN regional commissions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2004), pp. 51–131.
For this approach see Erik van der Vleuten, Irene Anastasiadou, Frank Schipper and Vincent Lagendijk, ‘Europe’s system builders’, Contemporary European history 16 (2007), pp. 321–47.
It builds on Thomas Hughes, Networks of power. Electrification in Western society 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1983).
For a masterful narrative see Massimo Montanari, The culture of food (Blackwell 1996; Italian orig. 1993), published in Jacques le Goff’s The making of Europe series.
David Grigg, ‘The nutritional transition in Western Europe’, Journal of historical geography 22(1) (1995), pp. 247–61
Grigg, ‘The changing geography of world food consumption in the second half of the twentieth century’, The geographical journal 165 (1999), pp. 1–11
Derek Oddy and Lydia Petráňová, ‘The diffusion of food culture’, in Derek Oddy and Lydia Petráňová (eds) The diffusion of food culture in Europe from the late18 th century to the present day (Prague: Academia 2005), pp. 18–28.
John Kim, ‘Nutrition and the decline of mortality’, in Kenneth Kiple and Kriemchild Conée Ornelas (eds) The Cambridge world history of food, Vol II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000), pp. 1381–9; William Muraskin, ’Nutrition and mortality decline: Another view’, Ibid., pp. 1389–97.
Gretel Pelto and Pertti Pelto, ‘Diet and delocalization: Dietary changes since 1750’, in Robert Rotberg and Theodore Rabb (eds) Hunger and history. The impact of changing food production and consumption patterns on society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983), pp. 309–30.
This comparative agenda was defined in Hans Teuteberg (ed.), European food history. A research overview (Leicester: Leicester University Press 1992).
It characterizes, for example, John Burnett and Derek Oddy (eds), The Origins and Development of Food Policies in Europe (Leicester: Leicester University Press 1994)
Adel P.den Hartog (ed.), Food Technology, Science and Marketing: European Diet in the Twentieth Century (East Linton: Tuckwell Press 1995)
Peter Scholliers (ed.), Food, drink, and identity. Cooking, eating and drinking in Europe since the middle ages (Oxford: Berg 2001)
Marc Jacobs and Peter Scholliers (eds), Eating out in Europe. Picnics, gourmet dining and snacks since the late eighteenth century (Oxford: Berg 2003)
Carmen Sarasúa, Peter Scholliers and Leenvan Molle (eds), Land, shops and kitchens. Technology and the food chain in twentieth-century Europe (Turnhout: Brepols 2005)
Oddy and Petráňová (eds), The diffusion of food culture in Europe (Prague: Academia 2005).
Beyond Europe the nation-centred framework of analysis is also dominant, for example Warren Belasco and Philip Scranton (eds), Food nations. Selling taste in consumer societies (New York: Routledge 2002).
For further discussion and references see Erik van der Vleuten, ‘Toward a Transnational History of Technology’, Technology & Culture 49 (2008), pp. 974–94. See also the introduction to this volume.
The concept is thus much older than often assumed: Roger Thévenot, A history of refrigeration throughout the world (Paris: IIR 1979), pp. 105–6.
Explicitly in Erik van der Vleuten, ‘In search of the Networked Nation’, European Review of History 10 (2003), pp. 59–78.
Compare Barbara Orland, ‘Milky ways. Dairy, landscape and nation building until 1930’, in Sarasúa, Scholliers and Van Molle Land, shops and Kitchens, pp. 212–54
Shane Hamilton, ‘Trucking country: Food politics and the transformation of rural life in postwar America’, Enterprise & Society 7 (2006), pp. 666–74.
Vander Vleuten, ‘In search of the Networked Nation’. Inspired by Ingo Braun, ‘Geflügelte Saurier. Zur intersystemische vernetzung grosser technische Netze’ in Ingo Braun and Bernward Joerges (eds) Technik ohne Grenzen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1994), pp. 446–500.
David Wightman, ‘East-West cooperation and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe’, International Organization 11(1) (1957), pp. 1–12, on p. 1.
For a survey see David Wightman, Economic Co-Operation in Europe. A study of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (London: Stevens & Sons 1956)
Jean Siotis, ECE in the emerging European system (New York: Carnegie endowment for international peace 1967)
ECE, ECE, The first ten years 1947–1957 (Geneva: United Nations 1957)
ECE, Fifteen years of activity of the Economic Commission for Europe1947–1962 (New York: United Nations 1964).
For a sceptical view see Brian Tew, ‘Economic co-operation in Europe’, The economic journal 67(265) (1957), pp. 110–11.
Food and Agriculture Organization, European programmes of agricultural reconstruction and development (Washington: FAO 1948), p. 5.
Jean Siotis, ‘The secretariat of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe and European economic integration: the first ten years’, International Organization 19(2) (1965), pp. 177–202.
Historians in the UN Intellectual History Project count producing and propagating such ideas among the most important UN contributions to development: for example Louis Emmerij, Richard Jolly and Thomas G. Weiss, ‘Economic and social thinking at the UN in historical perspective’, Development and change 36(2) (2005), pp. 211–35.
International Chamber of Commerce, International transport of Perishable Foodstuffs. ICC Brochure no. 149 (Paris: ICC 1951). Thanks tofrank Schipper for providing this document.
UNECE, TIR Handbook (New York/Geneva: United Nations 2002). For Conventions and signatory lists see www.unece.org/trans/conventn/legalinst.html (accessed 21 April 2007).
Beatrice Rohen, 50 years of Trans frigoroute International. A retrospective of the early years and the most important developments (Bern: 2005); Statutes 29 June 2005, available on www.transfrigo.com (accessed 25 February 2009).
For a discussion see Raymond Hopkins and Donald Puchala, ‘Perspectives on the international relations of food’, International Organization 32(3) (1978), pp. 581–616, on p. 610.
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van der Vleuten, E. (2010). Feeding the peoples of Europe’: Transnational Food Transport Infrastructure in the Early Cold War, 1947–1960. In: Badenoch, A., Fickers, A. (eds) Materializing Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230292314_9
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