Dear Blogger
The Village Home Front - FOOD
As with clothes, there is much written about wartime food rations and a general lack of food, which really does not apply to our village.
In 1939 Britain was importing 20m tons of food a year - 70% of cheese & sugar, 80% of fruit 70% cereal and fats and more than half of meat and feed for home production. It would be interesting to compare that with today`s food imports.
On 8th January 1940 50 million ration books had been produced and the most important foods were rationed - bacon, butter, sugar, then meat, tea, jam, biscuits, breakfast cereals, cheese, eggs, lard (nobody used oil) and canned and dried fruit. As you can see these are the basic foods of our died in Britain, anything else was unobtainable or expensive.
Dig for Victory was the cry, and every piece of spare land, from gardens, allotments, parks, and even the moat of the Tower of London were brought into cultivation. Potatoes and cabbage became everyone`s standard food.
The Women`s Institutemade made vast quantities of jam, being allowed extra sugar to supplement the country`s rations. People reused tea leaves, rather than to run out of such a vital commodity - everyone needs a cup of tea when their house has been flattened by the enemy. Sugar was produced from sugar beet rather than being imported from the West Indies.
The War in the Atlantic was a terrifying battle to keep us all fed, America and Canada sent us food but it came in ships manned by British sailors and attacked by German U-boats. Convoys of merchant ships brought food, fuel & munitions and were escorted by the US, Canadian and British Navies and the RAF. This is why every effort was being made to produce our own food and many advertising slogans reminded people to save the lives our sailors by eating home produced food.
Three thousand five hundred merchant ships and one hundred and seventy five warships were lost in the Battle of the Atlantic.
How was it in Ruyton XI Towns? The village was mostly cottages and these had always been provided with enough land to feed a family, right back to the Burgages of the Charter in 1308. So growing vegetables was second nature in the country. There were wild rabbits and pigeons to supplement the meat rations, not to mention the River Perry which had pike, a delicacy in Europe, and perhaps even trout. Meat had more fat on it back then and that was rendered into dripping for cooking, and eating on toast. Oil was the olive veriety and sold in small bottles for medical use.
Ruyton Dairy had been taken over by the American Kraft company in 1936. The ration of 50 - 100g of chedder per person was only possible thanks to the 4million pounds of cheese which was imported from the US every week. It is likely that the workers at the dairy were able to take a little extra cheese home with them.
Anyone who was a growing child during the second world war will tell you they were always hungry - but they were healthy, as they had such a varied diet, a small amount of meat, bacon or cheese and loads of boring root vegetables but virtually no sweets, few biscuits and only milk or tea to drink. A pound of potatoes a day for an adult was recommended, with the skin on for extra vitimin C. I have in my collection a cookery book, written in 2004, The Ration Book Diet - There certainly were no fat people to be seen in those lean 6 years.
For anyone interested in the subject, I recommend biography of Lord Woolton who somehowe managed to keep supplies of the rations available from 1939 to 1943. `Eggs or Anarchy` by William Sitwell - a fantastic read.
