On Her Majesty's Secret Service is one of three Bond novels to deal with the disruption of markets and the economy.[77][i] On Her Majesty's Secret Service deals with the food supply or, as the literary analyst Sue Matheson considers it, "the Cold War as a food chain".[78] Wartime rationing had only finished nine years before the novel was published, and many readers still remembered the scarcity of food; Hugh Gaitskell, the Leader of the Labour Party, told Fleming in 1958 "The combination of sex, violence, alcohol and—at intervals—good food and nice clothes is, to one who leads such a circumscribed life as I do, irresistible."[79] The novel is "one of the more food-oriented Bond books", according to the literary analyst Elizabeth Hale.[80] Within the fifty-two days covered in the novel, eight meals are described, Bond's drinks are enumerated and his thoughts on modern cooking and the standard in French restaurants are outlined.[81][82] Writing in 2006, Val McDermid thought the threat in the novel had even more resonance for contemporary British readers than it would have done at the time of publishing, with public awareness of the BSE outbreak in the 1980s and 1990s and the foot-and-mouth outbreak in 2001.[37] With the plot to render the UK agriculturally infertile, Mills considers On Her Majesty's Secret Service to have the most terrorist-centred plot in the series.[59]
Benson states that gambling is a key theme of the novel, as it is in Casino Royale and Goldfinger. The gambling scene at the beginning of the novel leads to Bond entering a relationship with Tracy; Bond's pretence of being Sir Hilary Bray to enter Piz Gloria to investigate Blofeld is also a form of gamble, according to Benson.[83] Jeremy Black sees an unformulaic structure to the novel with the romance aspect both opening and closing the novel, which was not something Fleming did elsewhere in the series.[84] Hale analyses the novel from the point of view of individualism: the plot starts with Bond alone, voluntarily, prior to meeting Tracy; it ends with him alone, involuntarily, after her murder. For most of the novel, Bond is a solo agent, cut off from the support of his service and reliant only on his abilities; this is in contrast to Blofeld who has a large organisation to support and protect him but still ends up on the losing side.[80] For Black, the individualist tendency is also present in Bond's allies, particularly Draco, who is prepared to help Bond attack Piz Gloria in part because of their shared rejection of authority.[85] Lars Ole Sauerberg sees the assistance Draco give Bond as a manner of distinguishing SPECTRE from other criminal organisations in what he calls "the struggle of order against chaos";[86] while Draco and the Unione Corse are conventional criminals, SPECTRE pursues—and represents—what Sauerberg calls "absolute criminal anarchy".[86]
