Bully beef, hard tack and plum and apple jam,

food that will be forever associated with the trenches of the Great War.

How did British soldiers get their food?

What did they eat?

And is there any evidence of it today?

One of the things that I like to do on the old is there any evidence of it today?

One of the things that I like to do on the old front line is to not just talk about the battlefields and the landscape of the Great War, but to talk about some of that Great

War history too, because it all connects to those landscapes and those battlefields and hopefully gives us a greater

understanding of what the men and the women who served on the Western Front and other theatres

of war went through and one of the most important things for soldiers when they are soldiering

is food food in an essential part of a soldier's life. A lot of his life in the

monotonous aspects of trench warfare was geared around the provision of food and the

consumption of food. So in this episode, we'll look at some aspects of food history in the

Great War.

Now it's a vast subject and we're only going to touch on different aspects of it in this episode

and there's some quite good books on it which I'll point you to onto the old front line website.

But by way of an introduction to this before we actually get to the events of 1914, 18,

if we look at food in the armed forces before the Great War,

one of the key technological changes, one of the key moments in the provision of food to soldiers

in the 100 years before the Great War was the ability to preserve food

was canning to put that food into cans or tins or preserve it in bottles.

Now in previous wars this has been a great issue.

...