Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (67 page)

White flour was one of the first modern industrial foods. It was produced in the late nineteenth century in the United States, where rollers were used to grind the hard American wheat. The new method produced a fine, soft, white flour. However, because the process removed the wheat germ (which is the source of the vitamins, iron and protein) it also produced a flour severely lacking in nutritional value. Thus, the entire British nation ran the risk in wartime of falling into the working-class nutritional trap of the 1930s by relying on a foodstuff which was deficient in essential nutrients. Nutritionists were in agreement that the introduction of wheat-germ-rich wholemeal bread was essential to ensure the health of the British people. When Widdowson and McCance concluded that on the whole the wartime diet was sufficient to maintain health, they had been eating wholemeal not white bread. A wholemeal loaf was made available in 1940 but it only accounted for 9 per cent of the bread which was sold. The nutritionists recommended that the extraction rate of wheat should be raised from around 70 to 85 per cent.
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But they came up against powerful interests in the form of the Millers’
Mutual Trade Association and the livestock feed suppliers, who bought the waste from wheat processing as animal feed. Both groups brought pressure to bear on the civil service not to increase the extraction rate of wheat. Industry’s objections were not the government’s only concern. Even the nutritionists acknowledged in their report that wholemeal bread went stale more quickly and that British people did not really like it.
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Less mindful of the health consequences than of public opinion, the government was unwilling to undermine food morale by making something that was greatly disliked the basis of the British wartime diet. It was not until the shipping crisis became acute in 1942 that the government was forced to outlaw white bread, the wheat extraction rate was raised and the loathed beige National Loaf became the only available bread.
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This saved one million tons of shipping space a year.
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In the meantime Widdowson and McCance had been exploring the problem of calcium deficiency in the ration. A long series of experiments, which involved weighing and analysing everything they, and a group of their friends, ate and excreted, proved their hypothesis that the phytic acid in wholemeal flour hindered the body’s ability to absorb calcium. They found that the problem could be solved by adding calcium carbonate or phosphate to wholemeal flour. It was on the basis of their work that the decision was taken to add 120 milligrams of calcium to every 100 grams of National wholemeal flour.
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Jack Drummond, who had worked on butter substitutes before the war, also insisted that margarine should be fortified with imported concentrates of vitamins A and D in order to compensate for the reduction of butter and eggs in the diet.
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The fortification of foods with vitamins and minerals was a novel measure which benefited the health of all members of society. In fact, the diet of austerity inadvertently improved the entire nation’s health in a number of ways. Although the National Loaf may have been disliked, its high iron and vitamin B content meant that the nutritional value of the working-class diet greatly improved.
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The switch to arable farming not only increased the importance of bread but also greatly increased the availability of potatoes and the reliance on these for starchy energy boosted the amount of vitamin C in people’s diets. The enforced reduction in the consumption of fats and sugars may have been painful but it was far healthier to use the plant carbohydrates in wholemeal bread as a source of energy, rather than sugar. Another beneficial side-effect
of the war was the dig for victory campaign which meant that in order to add substance and variety to their meals ordinary people took to growing and eating more vegetables.

By 1943 there were about 1.5 million allotments in Britain.
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In many of them amateur gardeners struggled to grow onions. These were probably the most missed vegetable of the war. When imports from the continent ceased, they disappeared from the shops. The loss of onions was keenly felt as they were an essential flavouring ingredient in British cookery, particularly in dishes based on the ubiquitous potato. In the winter of 1940 a father writing to his daughter Anne (who had been evacuated to Canada) complained, ‘What I would like more than anything I think for lunch today would be bread, lashings of butter, cheese and onions. Of that menu all I could get would be bread.’
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Anne’s father suggested to the manager of the hotel where he was living that they should plant a vegetable garden together and grow onions. Throughout the war, it was the case that anyone who missed onions tended to try and grow their own because the Ministry of Food’s attempt to encourage the commercial cultivation of onions was something of a fiasco.

Onion cultivation was placed under the administration of the newly established Vegetable Marketing Company. In 1941 the first large-scale commercial crop was eagerly awaited and the company set up a scheme whereby consumers could reserve their share of the onion harvest at their local grocers’ shops. The process of reservation began in September but there were protests as many people were away on holiday and missed their chance to claim a share of the onions. The reservation period was extended but with disastrous consequences. That August had been wet and chilly and this does not suit onions. The 1941 crop was not only meagre but much of it was unfit for storage. While the Company dithered, not allowing farmers to start distributing the crop until the reservation process was complete, the onions began to rot. Farmers were furious and consumers were bitterly disappointed to find that their especially reserved share amounted to a derisorily small bag of onions.
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Commercial onion cultivation improved in 1942 but there were never plenty of onions and those grown by amateur gardeners often fell victim to a blight which killed the plants or made the onions inedible.
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Onions were so prized during the war that they were given
away in raffles and as birthday presents.
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On 18 March 1941 Maggie Joy Blunt, a freelance journalist keeping a diary for Mass Observation, recorded that ‘Lady A was given an onion yesterday for her birthday. Her cook flavoured bread sauce with it and then used it for something else’.
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Gardeners had more success with other vegetables and, in particular, Britain’s gardens filled with neat rows of potatoes. If the rationing system was designed to smooth over class distinctions, when it came to gardening class differentials emerged. Virginia Potter, an American who had married an upper-middle-class Englishman, turned her one acre of garden into a smallholding where, with the help of her domestic staff, her husband and a land girl, she grew eighteen sorts of vegetables, including much-coveted onions, five different types of fruit, and kept ducks, geese, hens, rabbits and pigs. Her garden was so productive she was able to sell some of her produce to the local British Restaurant.
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This was a different order of digging for victory from the working-class family’s small plot where they might tend potatoes, a few runner beans and some tomatoes. The middle classes ate a greater variety of greenstuff, while the working classes relied more on root vegetables.
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Nevertheless, more than half the manual workers in Britain kept a garden or an allotment, and every class increased its vegetable and thus its vitamin consumption.
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The Ministry of Food made every effort to educate the British public in the principles of the new science of nutrition and, in particular, the propaganda explained the sources and importance of the newly discovered vitamins. Housewives were given instruction in how to cook vegetables so as not to destroy their precious vitamin content. Carrots and potatoes were proselytized by the cartoon characters Dr Carrot ‘the children’s best friend’ and Potato Pete the ‘energy food’. On posters Potato Pete announced that he made a good soup and Dr Carrot that he guarded your health. Carrots, it was explained, contained vitamin A which helped you to see in the dark of the blackout. They were also supposed to contain sugar, and therefore they were often suggested as a replacement for fruit.
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One Ministry of Food recipe used grated carrots, plum jam and almond flavouring to make a ‘mock apricot tart’.
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The comical characters Gert and Daisy, charladies whose husbands were in the forces, featured on the radio programme
The Kitchen Front
, broadcast at 8.15 every morning. They conveyed a variety of nutritional messages through humour.
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Lord Woolton himself would often speak on the radio. Woolton’s great talent was for propaganda and he exhibited an aptitude for informing without cajoling and always in a light-hearted fashion.
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These techniques may sound childish and somewhat condescending to modern ears but now that the idea of a balanced diet and knowledge about the benefits of vitamins are commonplace it is difficult to imagine how much these campaigns changed British people’s understanding of food.

The wartime diet may have been good for health but bread and potatoes in large quantities eventually palled. On 23 March 1943 Pam Ashford complained, ‘How I grow sick of never-ending starch – bread, bread, bread.’
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The small quantities of butter and cheese in the ration meant that there was little to add to the bread or potatoes to make them more interesting. Europeans were used to a high proportion of fat in their food and without it dishes seemed tasteless. Even though it was relatively energy-inefficient to import, the nutritionists recommended that bacon should be a staple of the ration as it added flavour to food.
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Without onions, and with the disappearance of many condiments such as anchovies and lemons, it became increasingly difficult to produce palatable meals.
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For the British, eating became a matter of filling up on fuel rather than a pleasure. By 1946 they were so fed up with their dull, flavourless food that, although there was no need for anyone to go hungry, many people were in danger of eating too little of even the essential foods because they simply had no further appetite for plain fare.
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The Ministry of Food made efforts to address the problem of monotony and lack of flavour but their inventive recipes for ‘mock’ foods seem more likely to have made meals taste worse rather than better. A mixture of margarine, dried egg, cheese, salad dressing, vinegar, salt and pepper was recommended to make up an uninviting-sounding mock crab. Mock cream could be whipped up using margarine, sugar, dried milk powder and a tablespoon of precious fresh milk.
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It would probably have been better just to do without cream. R. J. Hammond, the official historian of Britain’s food campaign, who had lived through the imposition of such dishes on the public’s taste buds, was of the opinion that ‘gastronomically speaking, nothing could be more pathetic’
than the ‘Victory Dishes’ which the Ministry of Food devised with ‘potatoes, dried egg, salt cod and the like’.
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British housewives do not appear to have shown a great deal of enthusiasm for experimenting with these outlandish dishes and most of the population got by on Spam, soya-based sausages, meat pies, tinned and powdered soup, fish paste, Bovril and cocoa.
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Hammond suggested that ‘a nation possessed of a more resourceful culinary tradition’ would have been able to do better.
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Indeed, Italian prisoners of war seem to have been able to create tasty dishes with their rations. Doree Griffin, who worked as a land girl on farms in Oxfordshire, commented enviously that a ‘gorgeous smell’ would waft from the hedgerow when the prisoners’ cook was preparing their meal. In contrast, the land girls’ staple lunch tended to be beetroot sandwiches.
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It was the upper and middle classes who complained the most about wartime food. Evelyn Waugh wrote
Brideshead Revisited
in 1943–44 while recovering from a minor parachuting injury. He later explained that ‘it was a bleak period of … privation and threatening disaster – the period of soya beans and Basic English – and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past’.
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Waugh was not alone in longing for a luncheon of plovers’ eggs and Lobster Newburg, and it was those sections of society who were used to lavish quantities of good food who suffered the most acute sense of deprivation. As a Cambridge regional food officer put it, while the poor had always had to struggle to come by food, the wealthy were, often for the first time in their lives, faced with the fact that they could not buy all the food that they wanted. In addition, they had to learn to cook in the basement kitchens which had once been the preserve of their servants. During the war it was the middle classes who talked endlessly about food.
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