ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the role of global and imperial trade in the development of British food habits, highlights the omnipresence of imported commodities in British diets and the significance of this to national identity. It then establishes the wartime food context and its negative consequences on food imports before turning to an exploration of the consequences of this situation on the population by examining contemporary women's narratives of their wartime experiences. By the dawn of the Second World War, British food practices and eating habits had been shaped by decades of imperial and global trade. The contemporary material on British women's wartime diaries provides an interesting new gendered perspective on the relationship between local consumption and global trade. However study of this topic clearly needs further extension to include working-class housewives to provide a fuller global history; the predominance of middle-class volunteers in Mass Observation is a limitation.
