Rallying Around Food

Revolutions tend to seem to revolve around a human lacking something necessary for survival. Food, for example, is second only to water in a human’s need of it to survive and a number of revolutions have used food as either an explicit cause in of itself, or a point for people to rally around.

A key example of this would be in the French Revolution. Leading up to and during the Revolution, there was famine and inflation in France. Bread prices skyrocketed. One in four people in Paris were unemployed and thus the hard job of putting food on the table became even harder. On October 5, 1789 seven thousand women marched from Paris to Versailles because they didn’t have enough food to feed their families. One woman in the crowd was quoted as having said in French “Who’s that talking down there? Make the chatterbox shut up. That’s not the point: the point is that we want bread” (McKay, 691). It was these hungry women that forced Louis XVI to move to Paris. In moving Louis XVI, these women also ended up bringing the National Assembly to Paris in consequence. There the Assembly was able to see the suffering and protests of the people.

The Russian Revolution (of 1917) also contained revolts due to lack of food. Similar to in the French Revolution, on March 8, 1917 women started riots in Petrograd (also known as former St. Petersburg) due to not having enough bread. These riots spread throughout the city and the soldiers joined the revolutionary crowd. Three days later the Tsar had given up power. These women deeply concerned about the food shortages had revolted, and the country soon followed.

In the American Revolution, food was certainly a rallying point around which the revolutionaries used even if it was not one of the top concerns. Colonists protested against acts like the Sugar Act, Townshend Duties (continuing to tax tea) and the Tea Act. To protest Britain’s taxes, the colonists would boycott certain British goods, which affected the diet and lifestyle of the colonists. While these food related protests may not have been the basis of the American Revolution, they certainly are things that people rallied around and things that people remember about today. For example, we remember the Boston Tea Party, a reaction to the Tea Act, as the culmination of the Revolution. It has become so much a symbol of the Revolution that a modern political party, the Tea Party, has used this symbol as a way to suggest and remind America what its values and roots are from.

Finally, for a more modern example, the modern Egyptian revolution seems to have started on the basis of food. Food does not seem to be the biggest issue of theirs, but it is certainly one of the ways they seem to be getting protestors out on the streets. In a New York Times article talking about how the protests are organized and created, it mentions that the activists use chants such as: “They are eating pigeon and chicken and we are eating beans all the time. Oh my, 10 pounds can only buy us cucumbers now, what a shame what a shame.” Chants such as this seem to be designed to remind people of their living conditions and thus provoke them to come protest on the streets.
If chants like this are helping to gather the masses on Tahrir Square, surely there is something about food that helps revolutions gain public force.

Ok, so if food is a common rallying point for revolutions, why is it?

Maybe, just possibly, food is such a big point to rally around because not only does it concern everyone, but the effect of not having enough food is death, and thus people react out of their instinctual needs. At the point of the matter the question comes down to whether or not one has enough food. Even if this is in the back of one’s mind and not at the forefront of their concerns, one no longer has anything to risk once they run out of food. If they rebel they may die, while if they don’t rebel they are sure to die.