Food Policy, Nutrition and Government

Any historical account of the policies of governments about food must start with famine.In the Revelation of St John the Divine, Famine is portrayed riding a black horse preceded by War and Desolation and followed by Pestilence.Accounts of famine abound from the very earliest recorded writings to the present day.Usually famine has been due to failure of crops, with drought, as in the current disaster in Ethiopia, the foremost cause.However, flooding, war and destruction of crops by pests have also been important causes of famine.As far as the response of government to famine is concerned, we know that Constantine the Great sent food to Antioch in AD 331 as did Theodoric the Great to Venice in AD 520.But it is probable that it was the special problem of the unpredictability of the great annual inundation of the River Nile in a country with no rain that first forced a government to develop a policy to prevent famine.According to Genesis, Chapter 41 : '(Joseph) gathered up all the food of the seven years of plenty which were in the land of Egypt . . .and gathered corn as the sand of the sea.(Then) the seven years of famine began to come as Joseph had said.There was famine in every country but there was bread to be had throughout the land of Egypt.Then Joseph opened all the granaries and sold corn unto the Egyptians.'An Egyptian inscription of great antiquity gives an authentic description of famine and of the clinical manifestations of starvation associated with repeated failure of the Nile flood.Over the centuries the British Isles have not been untouched by famine and I will return to two ~gth-century examples of government famine policy in due course.But the first unequivocal and decisive action by the British government in a nlltritional matter came not in respect of famine but in relation to the prevention of scurvy at sea in the Royal Navy.The story of scurvy is a story of lessons learned and then forgotten, only to be relearned and then forgotten again.