This informative and richly detailed comparison of alimentary policies across Europe's dictatorships brings together international experts to explore the dynamics of food, the state and the individual. It will become a standard reference point for scholars of modern food history.

Bryce Evans, Liverpool Hope University, UK

This is a highly readable, informative and comprehensive collection setting out the politics of food across 20th-century European dictatorships of diverse political hues.
From Mussolini's propaganda drive for autarky and national self-sufficiency in Italy, through women's everyday procurement and consumer practices as they navigated interminable queues, ersatz ingredients and displayed their 'culinary ingenuity' in the post-war Eastern European dictatorships, to state-imposed famine in Francoist Spain and the Soviet Union under Stalin, the book convincingly demonstrates how what people ate, how food was produced, and how people procured, prepared and consumed it, was always a thoroughly political issue in the dictatorships. The policies and practices of food drew farmers, advertisers, merchants, shopkeepers, housewives and many more into the dictatorships' transformative ideological programs. Still, we see how the power of food was complex and contingent, evoking tradition as well as modernity, conspicuous consumption as well as parsimony, abundance as well as lack, compliance as well as resistance. In sum, this edited collection is a very welcome addition that should be enormously useful for students, teachers and researchers interested in food history and histories of dictatorship alike.

Kate Ferris, University of St Andrews, UK