Tsunami, 18. Famine Food.
Yesterday, scrolling through Facebook, an article caught my eye, La hambruna española que fue borrada de la historia. It talked about what we remember in Spain as the "years of hunger" which happened in the 1940's, after the Civil War, during the Second World War. According to the article, it was more than just scarcity of food, but an actual famine comparable to the famine of the Netherlands of 1944, or of Greece during the Occupation, or even the Irish Potato Famine. Between 200,000 and 600,000 Spaniards are thought to have died during it, either directly of hunger, or of hunger-related diseases, such as typhus. The origins were not just because of the overwhelming disaster of our war, but also because of attempted state planning by Franco which failed miserably. Here, in Galicia, it didn't hit as hard because we didn't (and don't) have great tracts of land given over to commercial farming, but, rather, small plots that feed family farms, which excedent w...