Forces Sauces and Eggs for Soldiers: food, nostalgia, and the rehabilitation of the British military

This article identifies, and considers the political implications of, the association of the contemporary British military and British soldiers with nostalgia. This aspect of the discursive project of rehabilitating the British military post-Iraq has not hitherto been theorized. The article analyses a set of exemplifying texts, four military charity food brands (Eggs for Soldiers, Forces Sauces, Red Lion Foods, and Rare Tea Company Battle of Britain Tea) to ask how nostalgic rehabilitation of the British military unfolds at the intersections of militarization, commemoration, and post-2008 “conscience capitalism”. I outline how military charity food brands are a form of “conscience capitalism” through which the perpetuation of militarized logics are produced as a notionally apolitical social “cause”, rendered intelligible within the terms of existing commoditized discourses of post-2008 vintage nostalgia. I then ask what understandings of British soldiers and the British military are constituted within the...