This paper proposes an empire-wide understanding of the scarcity, availability, and employment of food resources during the First World War. Syria suffered the most horrific effects of the empire’s food crisis throughout the war. The famine in Syria, where it claimed as many as half a million lives, and probably more, has attracted some scholarly attention in the field of Middle Eastern history, though it remains far from well-understood. Nor has the famine in Syria made any inroads into the international historiography on the war beyond our field. This is somewhat puzzling, as historians of the First World War have been striving to move away from a focus on the Western Front and to include now the Eastern front, as well as the war’s effects in Africa and Asia and to write a global history of the war. This paper broadens the geographical and chronological context of the Syrian famine by connecting it to the history of hunger and starvation in the empire as a whole. Locusts appeared in Western Anatolia as early as spring 1914, for example, prompting the implementation of laws and regulations on how to fight the destructive insect. The governor of Edirne, moreover, sounded alarm bells in fall 1914, warning the interior ministry of impending famine in his province, as did the governor of Beirut, and, in 1915, the governor of Yemen. Down to the sancak and village levels, the representatives of local government – and often the people directly themselves – turned to Istanbul and described the home front as a battlefield of survival. These interactions were at once calls for help and exercises of resistance against the state’s demands for food and further requisitions. Local governments answered the state’s collection of grains with their own requests for thousands of uniformed soldiers to be used for agricultural labor. The paper examines the hunger crisis across the empire and connects it to the military’s need to feed its army. The paper also connects the home front to the military front, by examining the effects of the Anglo-French naval blockade, and the lack of provisions on the Gallipoli peninsula during 1915, where the scarcity of food threatened the continued conduct of military operations. Often separated by hundreds of miles, soldiers and civilians, the battlefront and the home front, were connected by the food crisis, with death always lurking at the door of both.