Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (62 page)

What made the German food system distinctive was that while the entitlement of every ‘good’ German citizen to a decent ration was held as sacrosanct, the non-productive and racially undesirable were not accorded the same right to food. Below the normal rationing system, there operated a second tier of food allocation for non-Aryans. From August 1939 Jews were allowed to shop only at designated stores, which often charged them an extra 10 per cent. The time when they could go shopping was limited to one hour each day, after four o’clock, by which time many stores had run out of most goods.
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Lucia Seidel, who ran a grocery store in Kassel, took pity on her Jewish customers and would often package up their shopping before the day’s supplies ran out and send her young son to deliver it to their houses.
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When food shortages began to occur in the towns, signs went up in shop windows warning that scarce foods would not be sold to Jews. Those Jews who were forced into heavy labour were able to obtain a tiny quantity of meat, but by 1941 meat, fruit and butter were virtually unobtainable for most Jewish shoppers, who were also forbidden to buy tinned food, coffee and most vegetables.
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Only those with tiny children were able to buy milk. Their neighbours sometimes policed the restrictions. When one Jewish woman sent her small son to buy milk, the other shoppers protested so loudly that the shopkeepers
stopped serving him. The neighbour of another little Jewish girl would stand in front of her to prevent her from going out into the street with her shopping bag until the clock struck four.
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Refugees in their own country, forced to move house continually, shunned in the bomb shelters, unable to buy clothes or shoes, and banned from public laundries, many Jews worried most that they might starve to death.
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Even if they were able to obtain food on the black market the frequent Gestapo raids on Jewish homes meant that it was dangerous to store illegally acquired foodstuffs. By 1942 the deportations to the east were well under way. In the autumn of that year, just as the food situation in Germany was improving, a new rule ominously announced that those Jews still living in the Reich were no longer allowed to buy meat, eggs or milk, and that Jewish children were no longer entitled to special supplements.
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As the Jews were loaded on to the trains which took them to the extermination camps many were already gaunt with hunger.

The mentally ill and disabled, defined as a burden on society, were also victims of this starvation policy. In 1940 the director of a large mental hospital, Dr Valentin Falthauser, came up with the idea that his young charges could be fed a diet of potatoes, turnips and boiled cabbage, which was devoid of fats and very low in protein. After about three months they starved to death. He argued that this was a practical solution to the problem of disposing of these unproductive members of German society, as it allowed the doctors to feel that they were simply allowing their charges to die rather than actually murdering them.
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Nevertheless, the asylum prohibited the ringing of church bells at the funerals of the six or seven people buried each day so that the local inhabitants would not become aware of the suspicious death-rate in the asylum.
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The Falthauser diet spread to other institutions and ‘deliberate starvation based upon differential diets was practised in asylums throughout the length and breadth of Germany’.
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Hermann Pfannmüller introduced two special ‘hunger houses’ into his asylum at Eglfing-Haar where 429 patients died between 1943 and 1945. Pfannmüller would frequently visit the kitchens to taste the food and check that it was devoid of protein, while the cook did her best to subvert his efforts and slip nourishing ingredients into the gruel.
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It is unclear how many of the 200,000 people commonly
labelled as victims of the ‘euthanasia’ programme in fact starved slowly to death.
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The British government, unlike the National Socialists, did not spring into action on the food front as soon as the war began. Lulled into a false sense of security by the first few months of phoney war, the cabinet was surprisingly reluctant to introduce rationing. Plans were in place, which the Ministry of Food was keen to implement, but Churchill
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was reluctant to restrict the liberty of British citizens and he especially disliked placing limitations on people’s eating habits.
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Butter, bacon and sugar were eventually rationed in January 1940 and meat followed in March.
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Unlike the German ration, the initial British ration was worked out without any reference to nutritional advisers. It was very similar to the one that had been in place during the First World War and it reflected the limitations imposed by British agricultural production and the fall of imports due to the shipping crisis. There was no pretence that this would necessarily provide a nutritionally balanced diet.
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The system worked according to two principles. Firstly, the amount of food stated on the coupons represented a minimum amount of food which the government guaranteed to distribute to each person. Secondly, everyone, from miners and steel-workers, engaged in the heaviest work, to the sedentary office worker and housewife, received the same 4 ounces of bacon or ham, 4 ounces of butter, 2 or 3 ounces of margarine, 1 ounce of cheese, 12 ounces of sugar, one shilling’s worth of meat (or 14–16 ounces), 2 pints of milk and 2 ounces of tea a week.
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Children were allocated less food, but among adults there was no differentiation according to gender, class or the contribution of one’s work to the war effort. Even those members of the military who were stationed in Britain with a desk job, and who could hardly justify a bigger ration on the grounds of physical exertion, were given the same rations as the rest of the civilian population. Food Minister Lord Woolton commented in his memoirs: ‘This was not only right and just, but it was good for the morale of the civilian population, who otherwise would have been critical and justifiably envious of the armed forces.’
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The British government was aware that in a planned economy every transaction took on an aura of purpose and thus social inequalities, which in peacetime appeared to be the ‘neutral’ result of an impersonal market, would, if reinforced by rationing, take on the appearance of having been consciously created by government.
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The British working classes were deeply suspicious and believed that if there were sacrifices to be made they would end up making them while the rich sidestepped the rules.
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The British food rationing system was designed to avoid deepening social rifts, and instead to foster social consensus. Lord Woolton explained: ‘I believed that if food control were to be readily accepted by British people it had to remain essentially simple and have the appearance of justice.’
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By allocating everyone the same amount of food it emphasized its purpose as the equitable distribution of food and scarce goods across the entire population. This distribution of food resources, which apparently privileged no section of civilian society, is one of the characteristics of government wartime policy which earned it the title of ‘war socialism’.

In fact, while giving the ration the appearance of equity, this principle made it deeply inequitable. In the first two years of the war the British underwent a painful period of adjustment to wartime conditions. Food prices rose and the poorest families and those in low-priority occupations were worst affected. Christopher Tomlin, a stationery salesman whose family’s weekly income amounted to £3 15
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., declared himself ‘white hot with fury at recent price increases … We can’t afford to pay the extras on milk and eggs. It’s a good thing for munitions workers who earn £5 a week … it’s a bloody disgrace for families in circumstances like mine.’
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Pam Ashford in Glasgow recorded shortages of eggs, fish, onions and milk in the city. It was working-class women who initially bore the brunt of rationing. They tended to sacrifice a large share of their meals to their husbands or children. Those families with adolescents struggled the hardest as the young adult ration was often too small for a growing teenager. Families with small children did better, as the children’s ration was generous and could be shared out among the rest of the family.
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In 1941 the sugar ration was cut by 4 ounces. This was felt hardest by the poorer families, who relied on sugar as a primary source of energy. Air raids during the Battle of Britain made matters worse, as women often did
not bother to cook an evening meal, instead taking sandwiches and cocoa into the shelters. Government surveys in 1940 and 1941 found that the energy level of the British diet had fallen by 7 to 10 per cent, and the diet of the poorest third of the population remained deficient in vitamins and calcium.
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In particular, the government was concerned the population was not eating enough to sustain the longer and harder working hours which were called for by wartime mobilization.

FEEDING THE BRITISH WORKING CLASSES

The British Ministry of Food’s thinking was that bread and potatoes should not be rationed as they were the main energy-giving foods in the wartime diet. In theory, this meant that British workers did not need supplementary rations because they could boost their energy intake with unrationed foods.
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However, it is much harder to consume the 4,000 calories a day required by a man engaged in heavy physical labour if most of the energy is supplied by bulky foods. Men working in heavy industry regarded meat as an essential source of nutrition and complained bitterly that the ration provided insufficient quantities for working men. The wartime social survey of 1942 found that 42 per cent of men in heavy industry and 45 per cent of those in light industry did not feel that they were getting enough food to stay fit and healthy. The equal ration for everyone demonstrably disadvantaged miners, steelworkers, dockers and shipyard workers, who were found by the survey to be significantly less well nourished than the middle classes.
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It was clear to the Ministry of Food that action needed to be taken to provide workers with more food. Rather than introducing a complex system of differentiated rations, the Ministry decided to provide workers with canteens where they could buy extra meals. In 1943 it became compulsory for all firms employing more than 250 people to set up a canteen. Working men’s canteens served double the meat allowance permitted in an ordinary restaurant. By the end of that year there were 10,577 factory canteens and 958 on docks and building sites and at mining pit-heads, supplying the men with hot, meat-based meals for one shilling or less.
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The needs of manual workers in the countryside, who were too
dispersed to congregate in canteens, were addressed by the Rural Pie Scheme. Food manufacturers, including a subsidiary of Lyons, made meat pies and delivered them to the Women’s Voluntary Service, who then distributed them to farm workers. The demand for pies grew so large that Lyons had to set up satellite pie plants in their provincial bakeries.
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Agricultural workers also received an extra cheese ration as this made for a portable lunch, but many land girls complained that the cheese disappeared into their landlady’s larder, never to emerge in their sandwiches.

Supplementary to the factory canteens was a network of what were originally termed ‘communal feeding centres’. Despite presiding over the administration of ‘war socialism’ it is said that Churchill could not stomach the communist image evoked by the name, and instead christened them British Restaurants, which he felt had a more patriotic ring.
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They were set up partly in order to maintain social harmony. A middle-class housewife writing for Mass Observation in October 1941 registered her resentment that the air raid protection workers and police had their own canteens run by the Women’s Voluntary Service, where they were provided with hot meals at midday. While she agreed that ‘it’s only right that miners, blastfurnace men, dockers, shipyard workers, agricultural workers etc. should have the lion’s share of meat, cheese, sugar and butter’, these men, who in Bradford had nothing to do but sit about playing cards, were able to eat egg, sausage or fish and chips, scones, biscuits and jam tarts off the ration ‘at jolly low prices’.
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At the other end of the scale there were the rich and privileged, who were able to evade food restrictions and eat well at fancy restaurants. Even though a maximum charge of 5 shillings was imposed on restaurant meals in June 1942, the real cost of the meal was covered by phenomenally high prices for wine or a fee for using the dance floor. Anthony Weymouth, a middle-class professional, only ate in restaurants if someone else was paying.
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British Restaurants appeased these resentments by providing the entire population with affordable opportunities to eat off the ration. In September 1942 the laboratory technician Edward Stebbing ‘paid [his] first visit to a British restaurant and had a very good lunch; stuffed lamb, potatoes and cabbage, date roll and custard, and a cup of tea, at the very modest price of 11d.’.
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Much has been made of
the significance of British Restaurants. In fact, only 5 per cent of the population ate in them on a regular basis, choosing to go to one only if they could not get home for lunch.
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However, taken as a whole, the system of canteens, restaurants and the pie scheme proved an efficient way of ensuring that extra food was channelled into the stomachs of the working population. Don Joseph, an apprentice at an aircraft factory in London during the war, recalled, ‘many families had double the official ration because they ate at their place of work’.
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Every day he ate lunch, as well as sandwiches during his two tea breaks, at his work’s canteen, and three times a week he ate his supper at the technical college canteen where he attended evening classes.