And what's that, I hear you yawn cry? Well, I'll tell you since you insist - er, you are insisting, aren't you?
Can you imagine making meals each week for each member of your family, with only a single egg in its shell, half a pound of butter, the same of sugar and four ounces of bacon and ham? Seventy-five years ago, following the four months of “phony war,” this was the food ration introduced by the Ministry of Food on January 8, 1940.
I was nine months old then - and a very beautiful baby, I can remember all the ladies saying so at the time! - but as the war went on the rationing became even more fierce and restrictive as Paul Levy reminds us in The Telegraph:
That was when the British diet changed forever, and these allowances were succeeded that spring and summer by rationing of meat, tea, eggs, lard, milk, and processed foods including jam, tinned and dried fruit, cheese, biscuits and even some breakfast cereals. Few of us are aware of or remember how long rationing lasted; and the backlash to it had consequences still with us today.
I think I have mentioned before that I was evacuated out of London and away from my Mum to live the next five years with a family of strangers. They were Mr. and Mrs. Voller - I publish their names as a tiny tribute in memorium to their kindness and intelligence. Both were keen gardners whose herbaceous borders would have won prizes in better times. Without hesitation these were dug up and turned into vegetable plots - it must have broken their hearts. In addition, a large chicken run was erected from which a steady supply of eggs was produced plus, on an occasional basis, a plump chicken for the pot! In addition every conceivable type of fruit and berry was grown and served but, alas, without sugar which is why, today, I cannot eat currents of any type. But, by golly, it did us good:
Yet by most measures, food rationing was a good thing. The startling truth about this 75th anniversary of national privation is, that, as Driver insists, “for three prime reasons – scientific knowledge, efficient administration, and a newly discovered national sense of equity – Britain as a whole was more healthily fed during the 1940s than ever before (or since, some might add).” He published these prophetic words in 1983, when our current national obesity plague was just puppy fat. There is universal agreement that Britain was better nourished after the imposition of rationing than before it; last year we discovered that obesity is responsible for more than 12,000 cases of cancer every year.
I certainly don't recall seeing any of the giant 'lardies' waddling about that I see in such profusion these days.
