(This takes 2¾ minutes to read.)
However unrealistic it was in theory, alimentary sovereignty had significant impact on everyday life in Italy before and after fascism. Alimentary sovereignty reversed wartime and postwar trends toward greater diversification in popular diet, causing nutritional levels to revert to pre‐World War I standards, standards considered inadequate and even miserable by the Italian scientific and medical communities at the time.⁶ The fascist régime reduced food imports, encouraged consumers to reduce their food intake, and mobilized scientific support for fewer calories and nutrients in diet.
A similar pattern occurred in the Third Reich.
Although expediency, contingency and inconsistency played a rôle in the unfolding of food policy, alimentary sovereignty remained consistent in its goals to subordinate the desires and nutritional needs of the Italian population to autarky. The events of the World War II greatly intensified popular hardship.
The [Third Reich’s] exploitation of Italian resources and the population, coupled with the intensification of alimentary sovereignty in wartime, led to widespread misery among many Italians. And, finally, the fascist government clearly influenced the ways in which Italians thought about food. The very nature of Italian cuisine today has its roots in fascism’s reversal of dietary trends within Italy and efforts to halt the influence of mass consumption from without.
Leading the fight ‘for freedom and for bread’ indeed. Needless to say, the upper classes did not suffer from the caloric reduction affecting the rest of the population:
Letters to Mussolini expressed disbelief and outrage that the government and merchants would even consider provisioning Germans.
(Emphasis added in all cases.)
Nutrition was already worsening before the 1940s, though. Quoting Carl T. Schmidt’s The Corporate State in Action: Italy under Fascism, page 90:
According to official sources, there has been a serious fall in both the quantity and quality of food consumed. A noted Italian statistician stated as early as 1925 that ‘the indices of food consumption prove that the Italian people, who, even before the war, were not abundantly nourished from the physiological standpoint, have been compelled to reduce still further their consumption of foods and in the last two years have been in a situation constantly less favorable; yet, in order to adapt themselves to the requirements of new labor conditions, they have had to accept a diet not in accordance with their tastes.’¹⁶ And in 1929 a Fascist deputy in the course of a parliamentary debate declared: ‘Our ration is perhaps the lowest in all Europe.’¹⁷
During 1926–35, the amount of wheat available per capita fell about ten per cent—that is, to a point apparently lower than in pre-war years. Declines in the per capita consumption of other foods during the same period were: meats, 14 per cent; olive oil, 15 per cent; butter and lard, 6 per cent; sugar, 21 per cent; fruits and vegetables, 11 per cent.*
A sharp drop in the use of salt implies that less cooked food was being eaten. Consumption of wine—a dietary staple in Italy—also fell considerably. Indeed, despite a measure of economic revival after the Abyssinian War, the consumption of almost every common type of foodstuff in 1936–7 was below the levels of the 1920s.
But, inasmuch as these data are only national averages, the food eaten by the poorer workers must have deteriorated cruelly. They may not starve, but their diet is hardly above a subsistence level. In parts of South Italy, it is reported, very many of the peasants during long periods of the year live on a single meal a day of bread and greens.
Late in the war, outright starving was common amongst civilians. Axis occupation resulted in at least eight famines: Leningrad (1941–4), Greece (1941–4), Kharkiv (1941–2), Kiev (1941–3), Java (1944–5), the Netherlands (1944–5), Vietnam (1944–5), and some of Poland (1940–5).
All of this information, while tragic, should be unsurprising. The reason that I share it is that antisocialists like to say that Fascism was better than Bolshevism in part because nutrition under Fascism was ‘adequate’. Unless one was upper‐class or infantry, it was not.