Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (66 page)

Under these circumstances of increasing hardship industrial workers began to turn to factory canteens. Workers’ families were evacuated and the men were left with no one at home to cook for them. Others were bombed out and had no alternative but to eat at the factory canteen. The numbers using them rose from 800,000 to almost 5 million.
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Sybil Bannister was extremely glad of her canteen meals. After visiting Wuppertal she had returned to Bromberg, only to flee before the Russians in January 1945. She ended up in Hamburg working as a nurse for sick workers at a factory, where ‘there was a canteen … where they served up a wholesome hot-pot with very little meat in it, but certainly as much as the number of coupons they asked for, added to which (thrown in, coupon free) there was a good helping of potatoes and vegetables, which were rationed and in short supply. We lined up to fetch the soup-plate full of steaming stew.’
¹⁸¹

In Britain, as the next chapter will discuss, the diet of the working classes improved despite the exigencies of war. In Germany, even though the regime intended to spare the workers from hunger, it was the industrial working population which bore the brunt of wartime food shortages. Germany simply did not have enough food and too much of what was grown stayed in the countryside rather than being transported into the cities. By 1944 German townspeople were eating barley grits rather than meat and potatoes, and shortages in the cities had become the norm.
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The loss of the Ukraine intensified the meat and fat shortages and led to a drastic cut in sugar supplies.
¹⁸³
Nevertheless, at no time did the food situation reach the disastrous levels of the last two winters of the First World War. When food shortages were at their worst between 1914 and 1919, the meat supply afforded each person only a paltry 14 grams of meat per day, while in 1944–45 Germany had enough meat to allocate each citizen a still meagre but more adequate 48 grams a day.
¹⁸⁴
There was no question of famine or mass starvation even in the urban areas. Nor was there ever any question of social unrest or worker revolt as a result of hunger, although the
Sicherheitsdienst
constantly warned that the workers were in a dangerously critical mood. The National Socialists had so effectively destroyed
the social democratic, communist and trade union leadership during the 1930s that an organized opposition to the National Socialist government no longer existed. Ration cuts were accepted with grumbles and complaints. Those who acknowledged that working to the bitter end would help to prop up a government they detested resigned themselves to the situation, concentrated on getting on with their lives, and quietly made a concerted effort to obtain food on the black market.

As the war came to a close in late 1944 and early 1945, the black market became an increasingly important source of food. Those with possessions to barter occupied a position of privilege. Ruth P., a child at the time, recalled with sadness how her beautiful white doll’s bed, her doll Christel, and a marionette with a black pony ‘were all given away for barter for a goose and a duck, a rabbit or something. All for something to eat.’
¹⁸⁵
Those with neither possessions to barter nor useful social connections, including many families who had fled their homes in the east or lost them to bombing, found themselves at the bottom of the social order. In a letter to her husband, written at the very end of 1944, Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg wrote, ‘We sometimes have
very
little and don’t look exactly blooming. Especially at the end of each rationing period [of 4 weeks] we have virtually nothing. We get only ¾ lb of butter
each month
, a disappearingly small piece of cheese, very little meat, each only ½ lb … Even the bread is insufficient … sometimes I spend hours wishing for lots of good fat things to eat! And sweet things.’
¹⁸⁶
In contrast, her landlady seemed to be faring quite well and her Christmas celebrations included real coffee made with beans, and Christmas cakes. There was still good food to be had if one had the means to acquire it. Despite a great deal of misery and some deprivation, even the least well-off in German society were still far better off than most of the rest of continental Europe. Maria H. recalled, ‘We were hungry, actually we were always hungry, but it was not as though we suffered from starvation.’
¹⁸⁷

^*
At this point in the war he was First Lord of the Admiralty

16

The British Empire – War as Welfare

I was determined to use the powers I possessed to stamp out the diseases that arose from malnutrition, especially those among children.

(Lord Woolton looking back on his term as Minister of Food, April 1940 to November 1943)
¹

From my own investigations I became convinced that ‘cowardice in the face of the enemy’ could be traced to nothing less than malnutrition … sufficient to undermine stamina and morale.

(Stanton Hicks, founder of the Australian Army Catering Corps)
²

In 1945 the British Ministry of Health announced that from the beginning of the war it had used all available nutritional knowledge to create a ‘general policy laid down … on sound lines’ and which made it ‘possible to arrange for a balanced diet for all’.
³
This, argues the food historian Derek Oddy, was an audacious claim and one that sits oddly with the history of the British government’s attitude to nutritional reform in the 1930s. Britain entered the war with a government which had, over the previous decade, consistently resisted the idea that the state should take responsibility for the nation’s health. In contrast to Germany and Japan, where vigorous efforts were made to change and improve the population’s eating habits, the pre-war British government demonstrated an aversion to making a potentially expensive commitment to ensuring that every citizen ate well. Nevertheless, the dominant
story told about rationing in Britain between 1939 and 1945 is a heroic tale of a government seizing the opportunity presented by war to improve the nutritional lot of working people. It has also become commonplace to refer to the Second World War as the period during the twentieth century when the British people were at their healthiest. Britain certainly ended the war with a population which was eating a healthier diet than in the 1930s, and the nutritional divide between the wealthy and the poor had begun to close. A social consensus had evolved, accepted by some members of the government (but by no means all), that states must take responsibility for their citizens’ diet, health and welfare. Although the government certainly did not enter the war intending to bring about such a change, the war conferred on reformers and nutritionists a level of influence which enabled them to bring about a revolution in attitudes to food and its connection to well-being.

A similar revolution took place within the British and Commonwealth armies. In 1939 the standard of cookery in British and Australian military messes was abysmal: the cooks were poorly trained, underpaid and took little pride in their work. During the war the dreadful food undermined military morale. In the field the British empire’s troops were still reliant on an innutritious diet of bully beef (corned beef) and biscuits, just as they had been during the First World War. The nutritional research of the inter-war years had made it pos-sible to recognize vitamin deficiency diseases, and the emergence of symptoms of vitamin deficiencies in British, Australian, African and Indian troops fighting in North Africa, Burma and the Pacific created pressure to reform army diets. There was a new sense among the British and Commonwealth governments that men called upon to sacrifice their lives for their country had a right to expect a decent level of care in return. Medical officers and quartermasters began to ask themselves what soldiers
should
be eating, rather than concentrating on simply sending them what food was available. The quartermasters of the empire’s various armies were stimulated into researching new ways of supplying soldiers, at their bases and on the front line, with nutritious food.

DR CARROT – GUARDING THE BRITISH NATION’S HEALTH

The ration which was introduced in Britain in 1940 had been calculated without any reference to nutritional advice. Despite the version of events which the Ministry of Health was to present as the official narrative at the end of the war, neither the Ministry of Health nor the Ministry of Food consulted the emerging group of nutritional scientists in order to draw up a ration which was nutritionally balanced. The ration simply reflected the food that was available.
⁴
However, the British population was being asked to expend far more energy than in peacetime. In the war industries shifts of ten to twelve hours became the norm, and people were asked to take on extra wartime duties which made for an arduous working week.
⁵
A worker in Portsmouth described how his life had become far harder: ‘Take last weekend. I was at work all day. I did ’Ome Guard till four in the morning. Then I had to start work again at six!’
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There were concerns that the austere diet would provide too little energy and nutrition to maintain the war effort. It was only as these anxieties began to emerge that the government turned for expert advice to the nutritionists, whose work they had for so long ignored.

In fact, on their own initiative, the intrepid biochemists Elsie Widdowson and R. A. McCance had already set about testing ‘how far food produced in Britain could meet the needs of the population and enable them to fare well’.
⁷
McCance recalled that ‘this was fun’ even though the diet the scientists put themselves on in the autumn of 1939 contained such small quantities of meat, cheese and sugar that it was ‘considered intolerable by our critics’.
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They filled up on un-restricted amounts of wholemeal bread and potatoes, and after three months on the diet, over the Christmas holidays of 1939–40, they subjected themselves to fitness tests which included bicycling to the Lake District from London and long hikes with weights in their rucksacks. They concluded that a minimal wartime diet was adequate to maintain health and fitness in all respects except the calcium intake, and immediately began a series of experiments to work out how the calcium deficiency in the diet could be remedied.
⁹

Meanwhile, in June 1940, the government finally convened a Scientific Sub-Committee on Food Policy, six months after rationing had been introduced. The committee was dominated by agricultural scientists, whose main concern was food production rather than consumption, but it also included Britain’s leading nutritionists – Professor E. P. Cathcart, Professor Sir Edward Mellanby and Sir John Boyd Orr – all of whom had conducted research into the deprived diet of Britain’s poor.
¹⁰
Jack Drummond, a nutritional biochemist at University College London, was appointed as the Chief Scientific Adviser. It was only now that a long-term plan was drawn up by the scientists, who tried to ensure the ration diet was nutritionally balanced.
¹¹

The influence of the Scientific Sub-Committee was felt most by the officials in charge of the food import programme within the Ministry of Food. They were instructed to consult with Drummond on the types of food to prioritize. It took about a year for the scientists and administrators to work out a satisfactory system for the consultation process, but from the middle of 1941 it began to work well. It was through this diffuse influence that nutritionists probably had the most powerful impact on the British wartime diet. The Ministry of Food used bread as the staple food. This was a more efficient use of food resources, as feeding wheat directly to humans maximized its energy-giving potential, while feeding wheat to animals wasted much of the energy in the grain. During the First World War the government had prioritized total calories and had relied almost entirely on bread to feed the population. In the 1940s, however, the new nutritional knowledge emphasized the need for protective foods and recognized the importance of animal proteins in the diet. The nutritionists on the sub-committee recommended that frozen and canned meat and calcium-rich condensed dairy products should be given priority for importation. This ensured that during the Second World War the entire population was able to supplement its bread intake with these protective foods.
¹²

Nutritionists by no means exercised unlimited influence over government food policy. In the first two years of the war they tried in vain to persuade the Ministry of Food to switch from white to wholemeal bread. It was ironic that in its reliance on bread as the wartime staple, the British government adopted the strategy of the much-criticized working-class housewife of the 1930s. In
The Road to Wigan Pier
George Orwell described how the poor in pre-war Britain filled up on bread and margarine. ‘For breakfast you got two rashers of bacon and a pale fried egg, and bread and butter … for tea there was more bread and butter and frayed-looking sweet cakes which were probably bought as “stales” from the baker.’
¹³
While the middle classes in the 1930s spent just 3 per cent of their food budget on bread, it absorbed 12 per cent of the working-class budget.
¹⁴
Unsympathetic observers condescendingly pointed out that this was a reflection of the ignorance of housewives who spent their food budget unwisely. In fact, working-class women had discovered that filling up on bread was the most effective way of staving off hunger when faced with poor cooking facilities and a very small amount of money.
¹⁵
During the war the government followed the same principle and at its highest point wartime consumption of bread per person reached 1.8 kilograms a week, in comparison to the consumption of about 650 grams a week in the 1990s.
¹⁶
The problem was that the bread, which formed the substance of both the 1930s working-class and the initial wartime diet, was white.