“It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism,” Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett write, in Good Omens (1990).

PREMIUM

The first of these chewy snacks, made by Hershey’s, was called Ration D. The brief was to make a high-calorie snack that weighed no more than four ounces, wouldn’t melt at high temperatures, and tasted just “a little better than boiled potato”. (The soldiers weren’t meant to like it enough to binge on it.)

Hershey’s mix used oat flour, skimmed milk powder, cocoa butter and plenty of sugar.

The version approved by the Army was so hard it had to be cut with a knife. Each slab contained 600 calories or more, and was meant to be nibbled at over half an hour.

Once the war was over, the texture was softened, the recipe amended, and versions of the war-time snack remain a children’s favourite. As for army rations… well, in our changed world, they can be just about anything.

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SPAM

This rather iffy recipe came about before World War 2, but became popular amid the scarcities and rationing of the war. It was invented just before the Great Depression, as a way to make use of less desirable cuts such as pork shoulder.

It is essentially meat ground up with salt, starch and preservatives, and canned as a block.

It was cheap and bulky, so it quickly crowded shelves in homes and army storehouses. It had such an undesirable non-flavour and non-texture, though, that spam became a byword for something undesirable that turns up everywhere, and hence we have the term “spam email”.

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SOYBEAN

A crucial crop in East Asia, humans have been growing this legume for at least 9,000 years, in countries such as China, Japan and Korea.

Fermented, it forms the basis of miso paste, soy sauce and tempeh cakes.

Then, in the wake of World War 1, and during the drought-stricken years of the Great Depression, farmers in the West began to use this crop and its nitrogen-fixing properties to regenerate soil.

Henry Ford (1863-1947) became a major promoter. His chemists were able to spin an artificial silk out of it, and its oil was used by Ford in automobile paint.

Today, soybean’s utility comes at an excruciating cost. It is used on an industrial scale, as animal feed; it is used in cooking oil and biofuels; and as a source of plant-based protein for products such as mock meats.

Vast tracts of forest and rainforest land are cleared to grow it. In South America, particularly Brazil and Argentina, soy-driven expansion has contributed to soil depletion, chemical pollution and loss of biodiversity as well.

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PASTA

It wasn’t just Mussolini who was ranged against pasta, in the tense years just preceding World War 2.

He wanted Italians to switch to rice, which grows abundantly in Italy. In this way, he decided, the country could reduce its massive reliance on the imported wheat needed for pasta.

When the message went out to the people of Italy, they simply took pasta underground. Restaurants deleted it from menus but continued to quietly serve it; nonnas across the country made it from scratch, as they always had. Eventually, Mussolini gave up the campaign.

But there were others who wanted to see the back of this delicious comfort meal too.

Promoters of Futurism, a social movement born in Italy, argued that it was not nutritious, and was actually detrimental. In The Manifesto of Futurist Cooking (1930), Italian art theorist, poet and founder of Futurism Filippo Tommaso Marinetti argued that it was “no food for fighters”, and that it “makes one skeptic, slow and pessimistic”.

Thankfully, this campaign failed too, and pasta lives on.

The East, of course, has its own terrible histories of war and food: battles over pepper, communities decimated over cinnamon, people enslaved for one cash crop and another; famines engineered and then ignored.

We have not included them here because, well, we know them too well. Is there a food you cherish, that is in danger, or has an embattled history? Write in, we’d love to know.