Hunger in Urban and Rural Areas, and Children on the Move

Perceptions and bias help explain animosity over food supplies between urban and rural civilians. While differences in rural and urban hunger existed in some places, caution should be exercised when attributing the destitution of urban dwellers to greed or acts of self-preservation by rural farmers. Greater proximity to major food sources did not always equate to greater access to food. Furthermore, proximity to food in both urban and rural areas was not fixed, but changed over the course of the war and its aftermath. People fled or were forced from their homes in both urban and rural areas. This movement of people blurred rural and urban distinctions as people from the countryside flocked into cities and people in the cities took shorter trips to the countryside to search for food. Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of predominantly urban children travelled temporarily to rural landscapes in the early 1920s. Analyses of anthropometric measurements of school children in Germany and Austria suggest that rural and urban differences were small. During the War, children in Vienna may have suffered more nutritional deprivation overall then in other parts of Austria, but after the War, Viennese children had the fastest rate of recovery.