THE VETERINARY FOOD INSPECTION ON THE ITALIAN FRONT IN THE TIMES OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

The Veterinary inspection of food in the armed forces has its forerunner in Napoleon Bonaparte who with his genius had first understood that \u201cl'arm\ue9e marche sur son estomac\u201d: to be victorious, an army must make use of a perfect logistic and well-fed and healthy soldiers, conditions that strongly depend on a rich, balanced and extra-safe diet. The soldiers must eat completely safe food and the food inspection performed by the Veterinary Corps of the Italian army have had this goal since the First World War. One century after the First World War, the procedures for carrying out a health food inspection have taken enormous steps forward. Nonetheless, the documents of the time and the photographs that fortunately we have kept attest that even 100 years ago the meat inspection made by the Veterinary Officers of the time was carried out even then with great professional skill. At that time the attention of the Army Veterinary Inspectors focused mainly on the pre- and post-slaughtering controls of cattle and swine, which were the main sources of meat for the soldiers. The veterinary control of slaughtered carcasses focused on the detection of clinical signs and pathological lesions of the main infectious diseases of the beast, such as tuberculosis, brucellosis, trichinosis and taeniasis, to avoid the consumption of meat from animals suffering from these zoonoses. In our poster we have collected some of the most suggestive photographs of those moments and those people who dedicated all their veterinary professionalism and sometimes even their own lives to safeguard the health of the soldiers. In those images, we can capture moments of life that highlight that \u201csimple peasant poverty\u201d that characterized the Italy of those years, but it strikes in our opinion one aspect: the chorality of the people who crowded the photographs of those moments. It was not simply the desire of everyone to appear in the photograph. In our opinion it was rather the pride of belonging to a working group, each with their own rank of military or their professional figure of civilian, but all united by the honest will to do the common good