Censorship

The purposes of the attached booklet are sufficiently described in the introduction on page 10.

Copies of the booklet are being distributed to all Officers and Assistant Officers. Any member of the Service is at liberty to read it and Section Heads are asked to ensure that anyone who wishes to do so is given the opportunity.

The booklet is graded SECRET. It has not been made an accountable document but it should be given the security protection appropriate to its grading. It is not to be taken out of the Office.

Any recipient who after reading the booklet wishes to dispose of it should return it to Secretariat.

A.Y./F.W.-B.
01.05.2026

A brief overview

Camille Marie Fillioux opens the issue by mapping the whole terrain of food and censorship, arguing it starts the moment the movement of ingredients, techniques and tastes gets interrupted.

Lars Holdgate takes us into the WWII British kitchen, where the Ministry of Food used propaganda films and radio to keep morale up while hiding what rationing really looked like.

Chris Fite-Wassilak follows mould and mites, and how a 1903 film magnifying cheese mites set off a hygiene panic that still haunts the cheese counter.

Then there's Andrea Volken on how dairy erases the mother, Genomic Gastronomy baking air pollution into meringues, and Ning Yan hiding messages inside the food itself.

That's six of twenty-five.

The rest you'll find between the screws: censorship as militarised order and rationed appetite, as platforms and algorithms quietly deciding which foods get to matter, as erasure and euphemism, and as the small acts of resistance that slip through anyway.