Within various reviews of the period, alongside the tables for a healthy nutrition, food hygiene headings were simultaneously published: they gathered both advices about what food was to be used, accordingly to different life-styles, and recommendations on how to maintain a good way of life. Such aspect especially shows how, at least in the beginning of the conflict, the food matter did not yet imply dramatic features, which soon would lead to rationing and requisitions.

Indeed, hunger soon became more and more urging and the problem of reduced nutrition became a topic of debate: which is the individual food requirement? Which food is strictly necessary and which one can instead be replaced? Which are the consequences for the organism?

Within such discussions, bread remained the main food for the population so that it was necessary to increase its production by saving as more resources as possible and by even using the so-called 'unique' bread, prepared with rougher flours, deprived only of bran, as well as of bread for mixture, obtained by wheat flour mixed with rye flour, corn flour or barley.

Due to either the confiscations on behalf of the army and to the unsustainable prices, meat, especially beef, became rarer and rarer on the peoples' tables; pulses constituted its main substitute, and both the cookery books and the official publications emphasized their nutritional properties; potatoes and polenta, as well as vegetables and garden herbs, became the main ingredients of the war cuisine.

In a situation of nutrition emergency, did the role of the economic kitchens become very important; they were popular canteens where very cheap food was offered to guarantee a warm meal to those who could not afford one. Such dining halls arose within the industrial factories to supply food, not only to the workers employed, but even to all those who were facing serious financial troubles.