Better Food For Our Fighting Men ─ Matthieu Nicol

A photobook exploring the military, logistical and psychological dimensions of feeding soldiers through archival images from a US Army research centre.

Better Food For Our Fighting Men is a publication by Matthieu Nicol, editor and founder of the creative consultancy and communication agency Too Many Images. The book brings together photographs, mainly made in the 1970s and 1980s, from the archive of the US Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center near Boston. Still active today, the centre employs both military personnel and civilian contractors with the mission of improving the everyday life and diet of American soldiers. For the world’s most powerful military, feeding troops presents major logistical, psychological and food-safety challenges: bacteria are an enemy, and the supply chain is a vital and highly complex system of distribution.

The laboratory’s aim is to provide nutrition and sustain morale across every kind of terrain and military structure, from officers’ mess halls and self-service buffets for enlisted ranks to battlefield canteens and survival rations for command units operating behind enemy lines. Solving this logistical puzzle is like forcing a square peg into a round hole: once the optimal daily nutritional requirements for the human body have been determined, the next challenge is how to preserve and transport food effectively. A glossary of 24 entries explains the abbreviations used in the image captions and identifies staples of the typical soldier’s diet, while tracing the new technologies that enabled the food industry to manufacture and supply them.

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Title: Better Food For Our Fighting Men
Artist: Matthieu Nicol
Publisher: RVB Books, 2022
Format: Softcover, perfect binding
Size: 170 × 110 mm
Pages: 192
Language: English
Edition: First edition
ISBN: 978-2-492175-22-0