Many Mouths

Nadja Durbach is a historian of Modern Britain at the University of Utah, where her work focuses on the History of the Body, particularly in relationship to the modern state. Her research interests include anti-vaccinationism in the nineteenth century, the Victorian and Edwardian freak show, and the history of state-feeding. Nadja has received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the American Philosophical Society. She is also the author of Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853–1907 (2005) and Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture (2010).

'Many Mouths is an absorbing study of when, why and how the modern British state sought to feed its most vulnerable subjects. Durbach's major achievement is to show us how the state was literally made manifest – locally, nationally and imperially – through the practices used to feed people. This compelling book should be read by all those interested in the politics of food and its central place in modern British history.' James Vernon, University of California, Berkeley

• Introduction. The politics of pickles; 1. Old English fare: festive meals, the new Poor Law, and the boundaries of the nation; 2. Gendered portions and racialized rations: the classification of difference in British and colonial prisons; 3. Famine, cooked food, and the starving child: rethinking political economy in colonial India; 4. Tommy's tummy: provisioning POWs during the first world war; 5. The science of selection: malnutrition and school meals in the interwar years; 6. Every sort and condition of citizen: British restaurants and the communal feeding experiment during the second world war; 7. Nations out of nurseries, empires into bottles: the colonial politics of welfare orange juice; Conclusion. How the sausage gets made.