https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20250605-how-world-war-two-changed-the-french-diet

How World War Two changed how France eats

June 6, 2025

Emily Monaco

More than 80 years after D-Day, the recipes and ingredients introduced during France’s wartime occupation are slowly making a comeback.

By June 1940, German forces had blitzed through France in just six weeks, leading more than half of the country to be occupied. As a result, French staples like cheese, bread and meat were soon rationed, and by 1942 some citizens were living on as few as 1,110 calories per day. Even after World War Two ended in 1945, access to food in France would continue to be regulated by the government until 1949.

Such austerity certainly had an impact on how the French ate during and just after the war. Yet, more than 80 years after Allied forces landed in Normandy to begin liberating the nation on D-Day (6 June 1944), few visitors realise that France’s wartime occupation still echoes across the nation’s culinary landscape.

In the decades following WW2, the French abandoned the staples that had got them through the tough times of occupation; familiar ingredients like root vegetables and even hearty pain de campagne (country bread) were so eschewed they were nearly forgotten. But as wartime associations have slowly faded from memory, a bevy of younger chefs and tastemakers are reviving the foods that once kept the French alive.

There aren’t many French residents old enough to vividly recall life in wartime France today, and fewer still would deign to discuss it. Author Kitty Morse only discovered her great-grandparents’ “Occupation diary and recipe book” after her own mother’s death. Morse released them in 2022 in her book Bitter Sweet: A Wartime Journal and Heirloom Recipes from Occupied France.

“My mother never said any of this to me,” she said.World’s Table

BBC.com’s World’s Table “smashes the kitchen ceiling” by changing the way the world thinks about food, through the past, present and future.