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The Great War (1914-1918) Forum

Remembered Today:

All quiet on the western front


John Shaw

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On a lighter note I am reading all quiet on the western front, on page 13 I found a referance to (synthetic honey) has any pal any info as to what synthetic honey may be.

john

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Looks chemical to me ....

As the war dragged on, Germany turned to science to produce foodstuffs for the people. Several food items in use today were developed during the war. One of the biggest was the production of margarine (an edible oil product) to replace butter. Artificial honey, coffee, gravy, puddings and many other items were developed to replace items sent to the front.

John

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Alright guys, once again; it's "Kunsthonig" (Artificial honey)!

Artificial honey is the old synonym for invert sugar cream. In order to make a cream, starch sugar and starch syrup are accumulated in commercial made invert sugar.

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An excellent book that discusses this subject is "Victory Must Be Ours / Germany in the Great War 1914-1918" by Lawrence Moyer, Hippocrene Books, New York, 1995.

"Scarcities which gave birth to rationing and the black markets also led to one of the major growth-industries of wartime Germany - the quest for substitute products, Ersatz products. In the laboratories of research institutions and in back room of profit-minded entrepreneurs, agile minds wrestled with the problem of the shortages and came forth with a vast array of surrogates. Skilled German chemists ultimately produced many ingeneous products of considerable usefulness. Sometimes the process proved easy. Turning fruits into marmalade as an alternate for butter pre-dated the war as did various coffee substitutes. Germans before the war drank enormous amounts of coffee but only the upper classes drank it "pure", those with modest incomes drank coffee which had been mixed with chicory or ground kernels..."

(pp. 160-161)

To summarize, the rest of this section goes on to discuss substitutes for tea (herbs and strawberry leaves), fillers or stretchers for bread, substitues for cooking oils and fat components for fat based products, and egg substitutes, etc.

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