Within a long and ‘total’ war, involving every part of the society, such as World War One, it was inevitable that not only the army's needs could be taken into accounts, but also the civil population's, which, being involved too, strove to reach the final victory.
Food supplies were to be guaranteed to the whole nation at war and, for this reason, the role of the State became progressively more and more central and pervasive, through the creation of new administrative divisions and authorities, which somehow became ministries with war purposes, such as that for Arms and Munitions or that for Food Supplies and Food Consumptions.

The first ‘total’ war of history not only completely changed the relationships among the nations and caused the massacre of millions young soldiers at the front, but it also affected every country’s civil population’s way of life, by causing irreversible changes within the State’s offices, as well as within the relationships between the public power and the population. For the first time did civilians become the protagonists of the war, both as victims of the armies’ and the governments’ violence and as actors of the complex social and economic life organized at the inside front of all the belligerent countries.
Both the civilians' and the troops' nutrition are therefore two sides of the same medal. On one side the matter of the troops' subsistence represented a key issue for the unexpected continuation of the conflict. On the other side the progressive reduction of the food supplies, owing to either the food rationing and the Government's confiscations, or the depletions and raids on behalf of the enemy troops, made the population's conditions more and more difficult. The birth rate and the diseases' spread were the drastic consequences of such situation.
Indeed, the continuation of the war made more and more precarious the difficult balance between the front-line and the inside front, as far as concerned the research for the means of livelihood. Difficulties to find basic needs led, on one side, to forcibly change the nutrition habits, in terms of both the quality and the amount of food; on the other side, to invent means and technologies able to provide an alternative to the traditional production and consumption methods.
The diet underwent a considerable reduction of the use of both meat and butter, replaced by oil, pulses and vegetables, which became the main ingredients among the various cook books in times of economic hardship. Both hunger and food rationing urged the citizens to an agriculture for survival, by transforming their gardens into cultivated lands. Publications of the time, including instructions about how to grow a war vegetable garden, therefore underlined the absolute need to make every available plot of land productive.
The wheat crisis too affected the diffusion of 'cheaper' products rather than traditional bread, not only for their costs but even for the relationship between the food quantity and its nutritional substances.
The concept of frugality was then extended to every aspect of the daily life; from re-using the wastes for the food preparation to the invention of new cooking systems, to the war gardens crop, to the development of innovative techniques for the bread production.
Section At home faces the matter of the civil population's nutrition through two itineraries: Nutrition in war time, based on the topic of food and nutrition; War gardens faces the problem of the transformation of gardens into cultivated lands.