There are those for whom abstinence from food is a conscious decision and those for whom access to food is restricted. James Vernon believes the major transformation in the understanding of hunger from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, from roughly the “hungry forties” of the 1840s to the Great Depression of the 1930s, was the shift from perceptions of a moral failure, through lack either of work or of God's favour, to an understanding of poverty as a social problem—the result of food production and distribution, of war and structural unemployment, or of weakening economic systems despite the more-celebrated growing wealth of nations.1 Much of this change in perception sits alongside the history of urbanization and industrialization: of factory work that took people away from the land and agriculture but enabled the mass manufacturing that could lead to a flourishing economy capable of sustaining population growth. This was the case in those countries able to support the expansion of cities but not in those that were unable. After the catastrophe of the Irish hunger, further famines struck throughout the many territories yoked together in the British Empire while the domestic picture was one of a divided nation of rich and poor against a backdrop of generally improving nutrition based on cheap foods, such as sugar, extracted from colonial possessions. Yet, in the early twentieth century, social inequalities and the demands of the “war effort” meant that poverty, malnutrition, and the hunger marches, which began in England with the 1905 Raunds March of impoverished army bootmakers from Northamptonshire to Parliament, continued into the 1930s. Other individuals consciously chose not to eat, or to restrict their eating, such as hunger strikers, vegetarians, fasters, and dieters, who often also sought to make an ethical point within the context of the social mores around food consumption. Protestors continued the idea of sacrifice long associated with food deprivation but reversed the accepted morality of the nineteenth century by taking the principled high ground through a refusal to consume state-provided food. Which is to say that while Vernon's argument applies well to those whose hunger was not chosen, ethical considerations around the rights and wrongs of eating remained central for those who made a conscious decision to go hungry or to go without.