Famine food of vegetal origin consumed in the Netherlands during World War II

Famine has been part of human history since the foundation of agriculture. During periods of severe hunger, people resort to unconventional food that they do not or hardly eat in “normal” times, so-called famine or emergency’ foods [1, 2]. Generally, this means plants, animals, and mushrooms collected from the wild and repulsive or unfamiliar food that is normally not considered suitable for human consumption, such as fodder and vegetable waste [3‐5]. A revert to famine foods, however, implies that knowledge on wild or otherwise unconventional edible species is still present in the community. In industrialized, Western European societies, where people have become less reliant on their natural surroundings for the past century, this may pose a problem. The last time that Western Europe had to cope with extreme food shortages was in the Second World War [6]. This was particularly severe in certain parts of the Netherlands, an urbanized country with relatively little natural vegetation and a high percentage of agricultural grounds. While foraging for wild food was still common in eastern and southern Europe around the 1940s [7‐9], it had long been abandoned in the Netherlands.

In the winter and early spring of 1944–1945, food shortages were so severe that the period is known as the Dutch famine or Hunger Winter [10, 11]. During the military operation “Market Garden,” the allied troops had liberated the southern Dutch provinces, but they failed to advance towards Arnhem and cross the Rhine River. This left the northeastern Dutch provinces occupied till April 1945 and the northwestern until in the beginning of May 1945 [12, 13]. Aggravated by a simultaneously initiated Dutch railway strike on 17 September 1944 and a temporary German embargo on inland shipping that lasted several weeks, food in the densely populated western parts of the Netherlands became scarcer. However, it is hard to point out a single causing event for the famine. A complex accumulation of various events altogether led to this hunger. The extreme fuel shortages after the only domestic mining area was liberated the summer before, the rise of clandestine trade and production, the relatively severe frost from late December 1944 until the end of January 1945, and the seizing of scant resources of vegetables, fruit, cereals, fat, and livestock all worsened the situation for the urban Dutch citizens [14, 15]. The Hunger Winter made approximately 25,000 victims, mostly elder males, comparable to the Greek famine of 1941–1944 [16, 17]. The real number of victims as result of the Dutch food crisis was likely higher, as many diseases broke out due to the general lack of nutrition [18]. Consequences of prenatal exposure to malnutrition are still visible in adult health status today [19‐29].

Based on the experiences with food coupons during the First World War, the Dutch government distributed provision in the form of ration slips to be exchanged for food, clothing, and other products. Initially in October 1944, the rations had a caloric value of 1400 per day, but this dropped to 500 kcal in January 1945 [30]. For many Dutch citizens, the Hunger Winter is inseparably associated with tulip bulbs and sugar beets (Fig. 1).

Normally used for sugar production, sugar beets were distributed in early 1945 under this food distribution system and processed with tulip bulbs and potato peels in soup kitchens to feed severely exhausted citizens [31, 32]. Despite the fact that this system saved a substantial number of lives, it was not airtight in distributing the scarce food resources to those in highest need. Over 40% of the agricultural production disappeared into non-documented or illegal circuits, leaving less food to people without connections or the money to buy or barter food on the black market [33‐35].

Collecting wild food was another way to complement the official food distribution system. Wild plants and mushrooms provide a welcome source of micronutrients in times where cultivated crops are scarce and food is unvarying [36]. Anecdotal evidence exists from letters and diaries on wild collection during the World War II by people who normally did not do this [37, 38].

During previous conflicts and their accompanying shortages, like in Germany during the First World War, programmes were set up to inform the public about dealing with famine and to suggest alternative food sources [39]. The Dutch government distributed illustrated folders [40] on the collection and preparation of wild plants and mushrooms, such as common nettle (Urtica dioica L.), common chickweed (Stellaria media (L.) Vill.), and sorrel (Rumex spp.) (Fig. 2). These booklets suggest that at least some Dutch were knowledgeable about their natural environment as a resource for food. Whether these booklets reached large parts of the Dutch society remains unknown.

No previous ethnobotanical research exits on the collection and consumption of wild plant species or unconventional crops as emergency food by Dutch citizens during World War II. People living in rural areas generally have more knowledge on edible wild food than urban citizens [36, 41]. However, during 1940–1945, the need to collect wild food must have been higher among urban people, as they had no vegetable gardens or livestock as means of subsistence.

The aim of this study was to find out whether survivors of the Dutch famine still remember the species of famine food consumed by themselves or people in their near surroundings (family, friends, neighbors) in periods of severe hunger throughout the war. Our research questions were the following: (1) Which wild plants and mushrooms or other cultivated crops not primarily meant for human consumption were eaten as famine food in the period 1940–1945?; (2) Did people use the wartime cookbooks and pamphlets for preparing food with unfamiliar and/or wild collected ingredients?; and (3) Did people living in rural areas during 1940–1945 consume more species of wild plants, mushrooms, or cultivated famine food than people living in urban areas?; Do war survivors remember any adverse effects of the consumption of famine food?

We hypothesized that people who lived in rural areas during World War II consumed more species of wild food plants or mushrooms than those who spent the war years in urban areas, as the latter were less knowledgeable on these species and had limited access to nature areas to collect them.

A total of 78 interviews were completed (41 face-to-face interviews, 13 digital questionnaires from our online survey, 19 hand-filled questionnaires sent by post, three by e-mail, and two telephone interviews). Four incomplete online-survey responses were discarded. Of our urban group (n = 52), nine persons or their parents lived in Rotterdam, The Hague (23), Leiden (13), Amsterdam (6), and Schiedam (1) at the time of the liberation in 1945. Our rural group (n = 26) consisted of six persons from Utrecht, one from Amersfoort and 19 persons that lived in other municipalities with less than 50,000 people on the 1 of January in 1945. The average age of the participants at the time of liberation was 12, with birth dates of the interviewees between 1910 and 1947. Three interviews were completely “second-hand,” as participants were either very young during the war or born afterwards, but remembered stories from their parents on famine food consumption during the war. Not all war survivors experienced similar food shortages: 24 interviewees explicitly described extreme hunger, while 14 people said they did not remember to have suffered from severe hunger. Four of these latter claims, however, were highly contradictory to their stories that followed the question on personal experience of hunger during the war (e.g., “having to go to bed often without any food” or “living on one sandwich a day”.

The 78 interviews resulted in a list of 14 cultivated species (including four fodder species, six ornamental species, and three species of waste material), 21 wild plant species, and three wild fungal species. The complete list of emergency food species mentioned during our interview is listed with scientific and author names, families, vernacular names in Dutch and specific uses in Table 2. Emergency food species include common nettle (Urtica dioica), “that everyone was looking for in Amsterdam,” according to one participant. Horse chestnuts (Aesculus hippocastanum L.) were “ground and sold as coffee powder, but had to be thrown away because it tasted completely rancid”. Dahlia bulbs (Dahlia spp.) were consumed, although they had “no caloric value, but did give a satisfactory feeling”. The 16 most frequently mentioned species are listed in Table 3.

On average, 3.4 emergency food species were mentioned during the interviews. The number of species ranged from 1 to 10. Not all species from the written sources listed in Table 1 (wartime cookbooks, leaflets, or pamphlets) were mentioned during the interviews. Whether our participants (or their families) had not consumed them or whether they had forgotten them or were unaware of this because of their young age during the war can no longer be traced. The war survivors mentioned to have consumed 27 of the 45 species or varieties described in the cookbooks and literature. A total of 18 species or specific plant parts were only listed in written sources but not reported by our respondents. However, an additional 11 species were mentioned during our interviews but could not be traced as being consumed as emergency food in the literature.

When we analyzed the results of the free-listing exercise only (Table 4), the three most frequently mentioned famine species were the same as in the combined dataset (Table 3). Sugar beet had a by far the highest salience index, followed from a distance to tulip bulbs and the by potato peels and stinging nettles.

The data of all groups indeed had unequal variances (Table 5). Rural people consumed higher numbers of wild species than urban people (Fig. 4). War survivors in rural areas ate significantly more famine food species than people in urban areas (Fig. 5). No significant difference was found between the number of cultivated famine food species consumed by urban and rural people (Fig. 6).

Only three of the 78 respondents were familiar with wartime cookbooks and pamphlets. Another three (relatives of) war survivors learned about the possibility to consume products like tulip bulbs and sugar beets from newspaper articles. The majority of the participants said they or their families knew what to eat from other people in their surroundings: “everybody suddenly knew that products like tulip bulbs were edible.”

When war survivors were asked about any illness or adverse effects due to eating certain famine food species, the majority (76%) could not recall this anymore. The few ailments resulting from eating famine food were sore throats from the consumption of (raw) sugar beets (n = 8) and tulip bulbs (n = 3). Three participants also reported stomachache after eating sugar beets and tulip bulbs. Two persons remembered that the bad quality food from the soup kitchen made them vomit. Nearly all participants explicitly expressed negative opinions about the food served in soup kitchens, calling it “revolting,” “utterly disgusting,” or “making people sick.” Several persons said that even long after the war, the scent of the sugar beet processing plants in the Dutch countryside still made them nauseous, as it reminded them of the war. Although we did not explicitly ask for it, seven participants (9%) said their family possessed a garden in which they grew their own food. The rapid transformation of land into family vegetable plots is also described in literature [37]. Several participants mentioned that they or their family members had stolen food.

Not only vegetables and starch crops were scarce: luxury goods like coffee, tea, and tobacco were also unavailable for normal prices. People’s ingenuity was not limited to primary food sources, as they also substituted coffee, tobacco, and tea by surrogates of natural origin. Chicory root was mentioned 15 times as a common coffee substitute during the war. The root was roasted and ground to make a powder that could be used to brew coffee. Leaves of blackberry (Rubus spp.) were one of the many species served as a tea replacement. The large leaves of butterbur (Petasites hybridus (L.) G.Gaertn., B.Mey. & Scherb) were dried and smoked to substitute tobacco.

Our research shows that the once crucial knowledge on wild edible plants and famine food sources is still present among elder Dutch citizens. Even after 71 years, this knowledge has not yet disappeared from the Dutch society and probably will not vanish anymore with the current widespread access to information on wild food sources. Plant identification, however, is still a skill that has to be taught in practice. The information on famine food sources supplied by several institutions was not distributed widely. For the necessary revival of this knowledge during the 1940s, people needed to consult a small group of mostly elderly people who still had the know-how. Inhabitants of rural areas listed more wild-collected plants than people who had spent the war in cities, while the number of cultivated famine food species they consumed during World War II did not differ. Rural people consumed more famine food altogether than urban citizens. Apart from some written reports on poisoning by wild-collected food or ornamental bulbs, our participants did not remember major complications caused by the consumption of famine foods, as long as they were well prepared or at least the hunger greatly overruled the possible uneasiness caused by them.