Were vegetarian sausages invented during the first world war? Why did the German government slaughter 9 million pigs in 1915? Vanessa Heggie explores the surprising connections between war and pork products

It is a cliché to associate Germans with sausages, but the wurst is a good way to understand the smaller, unexpected ways conflict influenced everyday life in Germany. The food shortages caused by war have led to radical solutions, including the use of photographic chemicals to coat sausages, and have shaped the German sausage for better or (pun intended) worse. Oddly, the one story about the war-time German sausage that has become popular – that the first world war led to the invention of the vegetarian sausage – may not be quite accurate.

Schweinemord

A mass pig slaughter, or Schweinemord, had been recommended right at the beginning of the first world war by the German physiologist Nathan Zuntz. The 66-year old doctor and scientist had already spent 25 years monitoring his own metabolism, including his temperature and weight, and noticed immediately that he lost several kilograms in body mass due to the restrictions of wartime food. Bad weather and problems with the supply of fertiliser (which Daniel A Gross wrote about in this blog a few weeks ago) led to a shortage of grain and potatoes, two staple foods. Zuntz’s suggestion was to slaughter the pigs which, he pointed out, "competed" with humans for food; it was more efficient for people to consume the the vegetable and cereal crops directly than pass the calories through the animal food chain. (This argument about efficiency is still used to promote vegetarianism in response to global population growth).

In late summer 1914 the German imperial government set up an inquiry into the consequences of wartime blockades and import bans. The Eltzbacher Commission (named after its leader, the law professor Paul Eltzbacher) published its report in December 1914 with the dramatic title "Die deutsche Volksernährung und der englische Aushungerungsplan", which roughly translates as "the German people and the English plan to starve them". Zuntz was one of the advisory board, and the report recommended the slaughter of nine to ten million German pigs to free up grain and potatoes for human consumption; around nine million animals were slaughtered in the spring of 1915.

The slaughter did not solve the German food problems (not least because demand for pork remained stable while supply fell, so farmers could make significant profits from the remaining increasingly well-fed pigs). Because of this failure, during Hitler’s rise to power, antisemitic political commentators suggested that the whole Schweinemord plan had actually been a Jewish plot to cripple German agriculture and starve the population.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Could you tell your pea flour from your pork? Photograph: Alamy

Peas and photography

Perhaps the weirdest military intervention into the German sausage came with the unlikely combination of photographic chemistry and nutritional science in the 1870s. In 1877 an admiring writer in Nature commented on the "highly scientific German soldier" and his "Erbswurst", or "pea sausage". This is not a sausage in the strict sense, but rather a combination of animal fat and pea flour, which is usually sliced up and used as a stock base to make a soup (not unlike hooshes made from the travel food pemmican).

Erbswurst might not have been a culinary delight …

To the English palate the pea-sausage had an unmistakable taste of tallow, and there is no doubt that all kinds of fat and grease were employed in its production when the supplies of bacon run short

… but it was a scientific innovation, because of its casing. Faced with a shortage of animal skins and bladders to hold the "sausage", a chemist innovated a new casing made of gelatine and bichromate of potash (potassium dichromate) – the same chemical process used by photographers to make carbon-prints. The sausage mix was rolled into shape, dipped in the treated gelatine, and then left to dry in the sun. The resulting sausage was robust enough to survive being "boiled with impunity".

A pigless sausage?

While the Berlin-based Eltzbacher Committee was recommending a mass pig slaughter, in Cologne the mayor Konrad Adenauer was trying to solve the wartime food shortage by experimenting with low-meat content sausages. Instead of the pea flour that the military had used so successfully for over fifty years, Adenauer tried high-protein soy flour. His plan was to encourage people to eat more vegetable protein by disguising it as meat.

Some recent stories about the inventions of the first world war have claimed that Adenauer developed the first "vegetarian" sausage, and that he was denied a patent in Germany, but allowed one in England, because in Germany "wurst" legally has to contain meat. In fact he probably didn’t get his German patent because of an issue with his paperwork rather than the definition of "wurst", and the British patent he did get is for a method of co-preserving soy and meat by mixing soy flour with very finely minced meat. Adenauer claimed his mixture gave the soy flour a better flavour (because of the "penetration" of "meat salts") and meant that sausages could have a much higher proportion of bulkers such as flour, potato and cornmeal and still maintain a reasonable shelf life.

Adenauer’s invention was certainly a pioneering way to get people to eat less meat, by bulking out a sausage with lots of non-meat ingredients, but it wasn’t a vegetarian dish. The real inventor of the genuinely vegetarian sausage remains, as yet, uncelebrated; the first person to put soy protein in a meat sausage probably lived in China many centuries before Adenauer was born.

With thanks to Martina Dervis for help with German materials.

So who did invent the vegetarian sausage? Tweet any suggestions to @HPS_Vanessa (but no more meat sausage facts please, I’m a vegetarian … )