In recent years, histories of the Second World War have increasingly focused on the minutiae of everyday life: from the effects of sleep deprivation at the height of the blitz, to love and sex, friendships, leisure, and, of course, food and consumption. As Mass Observation frequently noted, such activities commanded more public attention than news from the front or the grand narrative of the unfolding conflict. This was only natural; almost everyone experienced and talked about the hardships and excitement, the disruption and opportunities of life on the home front. The issue of food—its consumption, rationing, and allocation—elicited much comment, and understandably the British government and its Ministry of Information (MoI) took note. Government food policy and the propaganda that surrounded it were considered to be a significant influence on morale. Such publicity provides the focus for Richard Farmer's first book, The Food Companions.

Farmer's monograph considers the multiple dimensions of the cinematic portrayal of food and consumer behavior in Britain in the Second World War. It opens with a broad contextual chapter on Ministry of Food (MoF) publicity before moving on to contrast the MoF short film program with depictions of food consumption in the commercial mainstream cinema. While the former is clearly necessary, the latter provides the more interesting and potentially significant discussion. Farmer traces audiences' varied encounters with food in film from the image of communal dining in the British restaurants to the sumptuous feasts portrayed in the Gainsborough melodramas that provided a form of indulgent escapism for salivating viewers to the marginalization of the black marketeer, “the rat in England's storehouse,” and the construction of national identity through the ritual of tea making and drinking that both solidified the wartime community and marked out the other. Farmer makes perceptive and telling observations about how images of food both informed the public about practical measures to alleviate shortages and allowed them to live vicariously until victory might return them to a world of plenty. His decision to move beyond the canon of classic wartime cinema to incorporate Champagne Charlie (1944), Gert and Daisy Clean Up (1942), and Old Mother Riley is particularly welcome.

While Farmer's account is focused, inevitably for such a study, it occasionally overstates the importance of food in film: food alone did not “distinguish between the national ‘self’ and its international ‘other’” (224) in Alberto Cavalcanti's 1942 film, Went the Day Well?, for example. However, this does not mar a solid contribution to scholarship. Farmer's interpretation is especially strong when confronting the tensions within propaganda about food and its fundamental instability. He deftly shows how frictions inherent in the construction of what came to be understood as the people's war, defined by class, generation, gender, and region, were played out in MoF and feature film propaganda. Depictions of restricted goods provoked particular excitement, notably within films imported from the United States: “Someone should tell Hollywood that food is rationed here,” advised a 1941 letter from a housewife to fan magazine Picturegoer (172–73). Farmer notes the deterioration of public attitudes toward rationing and government intervention in food policy as the defeat of Germany became increasingly likely and its associated effect on publicity campaigns (140). However, such comments require more evidence than Farmer sometimes provides. In order to fully demonstrate that “British consumers were able to maintain contradictory positions on the same subject” (225) and to explore the peaks and troughs in popular opinion on food that in turn were likely to have affected how cinematic appeals and portrayals were received, Farmer's research could have benefitted from a more detailed and deeper reading of Home Intelligence reports, Wartime Social Survey, British Institute of Public Opinion polls, and indeed Mass Observation. The complexity of this issue is amply demonstrated in Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska's study of Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption, 1939–1955 (2000). While Farmer's work considers a rather different set of questions to those posed by Zweiniger-Bargielowka, closer attention would surely have substantiated his central thesis.

Farmer's first chapter contains tantalizing discussions of the context in which film publicity operated, suggesting that a more broadly conceived book would have made for a more satisfying read with the potential to raise questions as to how various MoF and MoI initiatives, such as Food Facts and Kitchen Front, intersected with, reinforced, and potentially undermined one another. Imaginative appeals to eat the National Wheatmeal loaf “because white bread made the table cloth look dirty” and the MoF's invention of the “Effluviator,” which “pump[ed] the odour of products baked with National Flour onto a street from a shop on Piccadilly” (38), surely deserve a place within the history of British propaganda at war. A wider scope might also have allowed a discussion of continuity and change within MoF publicity, drawing on Mariel Grant's work on Propaganda and the State in Inter-war Britain (1994). The Food Companions, nonetheless, with its lively and readable style, opens up an important area for propaganda studies that no doubt this author and others will want to pursue further in the future.