Sausage ban for wartime German soldiers
Germans were banned from eating sausages to help with the First World War effort.
Zeppelin airships were a key weapon for the Germans during the 1914 to 1918 war but production placed a huge demand on cow guts, used to make hydrogen holding cells, researchers have found.
It took more than 250,000 cows to make a single airship and the intestines became so precious that making sausages was temporarily made illegal.
Details of the use of cow intestines were found in a document prepared for the US National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1922.
It read: “Each butcher was required to deliver the ones from the animals he killed.”
The ban also applied to occupied Austria, Poland and Northern France.
Dr Hugh Hunt, a University of Cambridge engineer, uncovered the ban while working on a TV documentary, Attack Of The Zeppelins, which will be shown on Channel 4 on Monday.