R. J. Hammond

“ Contemporaries can be inconsistent from choice or inadvertence; the historian is obliged to bring the whole of his allotted study to the test of critical analysis, without which, indeed, the story of food control at any rate would emerge with little meaning or usefulness.
Critical analysis calls for critical method. The writer’s principle has been to treat food strategy and tactics broadly as if he were writing military history. ”

“ This study is not intended to be an encyclopedia of food control; it does not contain comprehensive statistics, [1] assembled for their own sake, or a catalogue of every administrative order issued by the Ministry of Food. It does not set out to describe, even superficially, each and every commodity control, or recount every change in the amount of war-time rations. ”

“ For the matters with which the writer has been concerned, nothing could be further from the truth. In the first place, official skill in detecting, particularly in its infancy, a major issue of policy is great but by no means infallible. ”