04-05-2025
Ho Chi Minh's triumph and Vietnam's history of hunger
Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the
fall of Saigon
and the biggest political triumph of a chef.
Ho Chi Minh
, who led Vietnam's long freedom struggle, started by working in ship kitchens to see the world. There are unverified claims that he trained with the famous French chef Auguste Escoffier and at the Parker House Hotel, where the Boston cream pie was invented.
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Ho's years abroad led him to the global communist movement. He returned home in 1941 to lead the Viet Minh movement for inde pendence from France. In 1944-45, Vietnam suf fered a terrible famine, partly caused by France's prewar decision to force Vietnamese farmers to switch from rice farming to cash crops like cotton and jute. When the war started, food resources were already under strain and then the fall of France aligned its colonies with Japan, who extorted rice to support its war effort. In the ensuing famine, thousands died — and the Viet Minh gained much support for its resistance to the Franco-Japanese regime.
This was a direct cause for the war that broke out in 1946, which ended with French defeat and Vietnam divided between the Viet Minh controlled north and a Western-aligned south. The communists instituted land reforms which didn't help the food situation. In 1957, the writer Nguyen Tuan disguised criticism in a disquisition on pho , the iconic Vietnamese soup. Erica J Peters, in her paper on how food came to express wider anxieties, writes: 'He wondered what pho would be like, if people had to start making it with broth made from rat meat.' And noting heavy imports from Russia, he wondered if 'people might find themselves eating canned pho '.
Nguyen's essay was to seem grimly prescient when Vietnam found itself on Cold War frontlines. The Russian backed north invaded the south, and the Americans pushed back in an anti-communist crusade. Starving the north was a key strategy, including by spraying herbicides like the notorious
Agent Orange
to destroy crops. Another tactic was to bomb signs of mass cooking, like trails of smoke or fire at night. The north Vietnamese retreated to the jungle, living off wild foods and any animals they could catch. Cooking was done in ingenious stoves designed by Hoang Cam, a military cook. The fire was lit in a well ventilated, covered hole, and smoke lead off through long tunnels where it came out under damp leaves, tur ning into undetectable steam.
South Vietnam faced a very different food situation. American food flooded the market, a surplus from military supplies that was encouraged to lure local opinion through their stomachs. Unfortunately, as Vu Hong Lien points out in Rice and Baguette , her history of Vietnamese food, after almost a century of French rule and cooking, American food was not appealing: 'While the old French cans of beef bourguignon, cassoulet or even plain cannellini beans had been treasured as a treat for all, the new tins of baked beans and frankfurters were viewed with horror by adults, but welcomed by children…'
Americans also disliked Vietnamese ingredients such as nuoc-mam , a strong smelling fermented fish sauce, which led to the decision to substitute it with soy sauce in rations for south Vietnamese soldiers. 'This calamitous decision, made by a US officer who believed fish sauce would spoil easily in the field, was a disaster for Vietnamese morale,' she writes. Such American mistakes in the field, coupled with growing resistance to the war back home, led to the chaotic departure 50 years back. Those who couldn't leave then took to small boats, seeking refuge anywhere they could.
Some landed up in India, drawn to Pondicherry by old French colonial links. In the early'80s, I remember eating delicious Vietnamese rice rolls and fragrant soup in a simple café there, that doubled up as a laundry. Sadly, they didn't stay, moving on to other countries, a diaspora created by the hungers of history.
