Cthryn

“It was a very common thing to find rat-dung cooked in the rice; our pea soup, made from a kind of black pea cultivated abundantly through the South, and fully ripe when gathered, was always covered with pea bugs, which floated on the top; cabbage soup was sometimes substituted for the pea soup, and this was worse, if possible, than the other, as only the outside leaves, covered with worms, were used in making it. The peas, or cabbage, as the case might be, were boiled with the meat, — either corned beef or bacon, — which was put into the mess kettle without being properly prepared and cleaned, and frequently our meat rations consisted of ham and shoulder bones from which the juicy parts of the meat had been cut before they were issued to us, as though they had been refuse from the town or from our own guards. The water in which everything was cooked was taken from the Dan River and was very muddy, so that the soup always contained more or less grit.” {37}”
― Patricia B. Mitchell, Yanks, Rebels, Rats, and Rations: Scratching for Food in Civil War Prison Camps

“The newly won freedom appears as a curse; he is free from the sweet bondage of paradise, but he is not free to govern himself, to realize his individuality.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“Bread made of inferior flour, which was occasionally sour, was issued. The meat was rusty bacon or beef-neck. Twice in one year we had good cuts of beef, but it was so far decayed as to be offensive. Occasionally we had a few worm-eaten peas, and twice I saw some small potatoes . . . . Rats were caught in and about the sinks, and sold freely. The slop-barrels were raked, and bread-crusts were fished out, to be dried in the sun and eaten.”
― Patricia B. Mitchell, Yanks, Rebels, Rats, and Rations: Scratching for Food in Civil War Prison Camps

“Thousands of bushels of grain would ferment and rot at one station; hundreds of barrels of meat stacked at another, while the army starved because [of] ‘no transportation!”
― Patricia B. Mitchell, Confederate Camp Cooking