Alice Weinreb opens her book by addressing Germany's present-day problems with obesity and the government's approach toward controlling the epidemic. Weinreb does not aim to tell the story of how Germans went from starvation to obesity in the twentieth century, yet she convincingly shows how access to food, politics, and governmentality have been tied together closely in the past. Throughout the book, Weinreb uses a broad approach to hunger, seeing it as part of political economy. Her main argument is that hunger was “essential to global projects of economic, cultural, and political modernization” (2). Her aim is to show why and how hunger and food have become “so intimately intertwined with the making of modern states and ideologies and, especially, with the making of both war and peace” (5). The book's differentiation between hunger and food remains open, though, and while hunger is at the forefront of the introduction, she also includes questions about food and satiety in the individual chapters. Weinreb uses the insights of Michel Foucault to approach hunger and food in a broad, biopolitical way. As a result, she understands hunger not as a simple biological fact but as a concern of the state.

Weinreb organizes her story chronologically, covering the period from World War I to the late 1980s. Each of the six chapters takes into consideration specific periods that were significant for the relationship between the availability of food, on the one hand, and questions of political power, on the other. Weinreb starts by looking at the food situation in wartime Germany, examining mainly the home front and describing the difficulties civilians had in ensuring they received sufficient allocations of food. This chapter retells the familiar story of how Germans were cut off from international markets—and thus food—because of the British blockade; it also stresses the point that certain raw materials were in high demand because they were needed for the production of food, as well as for war matériel. Weinreb highlights, in this context, fertilizers and glycerin, an important component in fats and oils, as two examples that were necessary for the production of both food and bombs.

The book then explores how various political groups, including eventually the Nazis, instrumentalized the poor food situation during the Weimar period. When looking at developments during the Third Reich, Weinreb explores the link between race and food in Nazi ideology, arguing that the state relied on food to create racial identity. Unfortunately, she misses an opportunity to differentiate further among various aspects of German experiences of food and hunger in this period—for example, by considering how social differences affected the availability of, and individual access to, food. Furthermore, Weinreb neglects to discuss the consequences of Nazi economic policy with regard to food. Not least because of the blockade in World War I, Nazi leaders sought an autarchic economy, an effort that utterly failed. Fats and proteins represented one of their largest supply problems, which prompted the Nazis to coin the propagandistic term Fett- und Eiweißlücke (fat and protein gap). Because fats and oils were among the most important staples, and also urgently needed for the production and maintainence of war matériel, this specific shortage had effects on both the waging of war and on feeding the Volk. Weinreb does not discuss the problem and its consequences for Nazi food policies, and is apparently unaware of the relevant literature (e.g., Gustavo Corni and Horst Gies, Brot, Butter, Kanonen. Die Ernährungswirtschaft in Deutschland unter der Diktatur Hitlers [1997]).

In a chapter on the immediate postwar period, Weinreb argues that German civilians, doctors, and politicians fought to have their hunger recognized as a marker of collective innocence. She uses examples from all over Germany, including the East, but her focus lies mainly on the Western occupation zones. She also gives special attention to the situation in Berlin and to the American-British airlift to the western part of the city in 1948-1949. The last three chapters cover the period of German division. First, Weinreb looks at factory canteens and supermarkets to link food and the postwar economies of the 1950s and 1960s in East and West. She then uses cooking to explore the particular significance of female labor in both states. Weinreb shows how women mattered to both states in various ways: as laborers, as consumers, and as domestic cooks who helped enforce desired economic and familial relations. Finally, she analyzes how the obesity epidemic began to dominate health discourses in East and West from the 1970s onward. The book concludes with an epilogue about unified Germany, which looks at the East Germans’ rapidly changing food habits in the 1990s, including their initial craving for bananas and chocolate, as well as their desire for food and brands they knew from the period before unification—a well-known instance of what is commonly referred to as Ostalgie.

Weinreb adopts a broad thematic and temporal approach, and she has consulted an impressive range of materials from both German and American archives. Yet, her sweeping approach also has certain drawbacks. In contrast to the focus on hunger suggested by the introduction, the last three chapters are hardly concerned with that theme at all. In addition, she often talks about “Germans” in general, only rarely pointing to differences in social, economic, and political status. The author also misses an opportunity in the early chapters to examine the differences between hunger, shortages, and scarcities. That is significant because a careful discussion of these various degrees of food availability at different times would have made for a more nuanced story. Finally, she seldom discusses the biographies of the major actors (e.g., Max Rubmann, Paul Ehrenberg, Walter Darré, and Hans Glatzel) and their roles in shaping the availability (or lack thereof) of sufficient foodstuffs—thus missing an opportunity to explain who was important at which point for shaping the ties she aims to show among food, hunger, and “governmentality.” Despite these shortcomings, the strong linkage between food and politics that Weinreb draws in this book—especially those regarding the political, economic, and cultural aspects of the production, consumption, and exchange of food—makes it a welcome addition to the emerging field of food studies.