Throughout the First World War, food shortages provoked a series of disturbances across the world and acted as catalysts for wider political discontent. Women, as family provisioners, were often foregrounded in demonstrations against the increasing cost of living, and a ‘female consciousness’ has been observed in the food protests that took place in 1917 in Melbourne, Barcelona and New York. The phenomenon has been most systematically analysed in Berlin where Belinda Davis has suggested the sympathetic recognition of the political legitimacy of food protests may have delayed the revolution in Germany until 1918. As soon as the British blockade became effective, shortages and price rises led to public anger being expressed on the streets. Women of lesser means led the calls for a ‘food dictatorship’ and the subsequent state system of rationing did alleviate some of the distribution problems of the private market. However, military control of the food supply was not sufficient to cope with the privations of the ‘turnip winter’ of 1917–18 and Berlin consumers soon gave up on their earlier social compact with the government. By November 1918 housewives had joined workers in attacking a régime they felt did not respond to the basic everyday needs of the populace. Of other national food-shortage contexts the most spectacular is, of course, that of Russia in 1917. Although the implications for gender and consumerism have not been explored here, the food supply crisis has been recognised as ‘both symptom and intensifier of the overall dislocation and then breakdown of national economic and social life’ prior to the revolution.