The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food

by Lizzie Collingham

  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.85 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.86 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.87

  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.88 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.89 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’.90 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.91

  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.’.92 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.93 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’.94 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.

  Factory canteens and British Restaurants provided the teams of food experts and nutritional advisers who were appointed to oversee the kitchens with an excellent opportunity to try to improve working-class diets. But their efforts did not always meet with enthusiasm. A former hotel chef sent to manage a factory canteen in Birmingham despaired at the workers’ resistance to his attempts to provide them with healthy, productivity-boosting meals. When he tried to cheer up a dish of boiled beef and carrots with a white sauce, there were protests. Salads and savouries were refused. The men wanted ‘fish and chips, cream cakes, bread and butter, and brown gravy over everything’. Sadly, he concluded that ‘Birmingham people do not understand food.’95

  A particularly knotty problem for the Ministry of Food was the question of how to distribute fairly foodstuffs which suffered from an erratic supply, such as tinned meat, fish and fruit, dried fruits, tapioca, rice, biscuits, dried peas, beans, breakfast cereals, suet and jellies. None of these was imported in sufficient quantities or in a steady enough flow to be able to guarantee their supply and put them on the ration. M. P. Roseveare, Principal Assistant Secretary at the Ministry of Food, came up with the ingenious points system.96 The foods were given a price in points as well as pounds, shillings and pence, and each person was allocated a certain number of points each week. The Ministry would adjust the points price of foods according to the quantities available. If they were in short supply the number of points they were worth would rise, and as they became more widely available their points value would decline. In this way consumer demand could be steered away from foods in short supply. At Christmas the number of points would be adjusted to allow for a little luxury, and Doreen Laven can remember ‘my mother and aunt sitting in the fading light either side of the living room boiler, listening intently to the radio as these increases were announced and making comments like “half a pound of sultanas, that’s not bad Grace,” or, “I’d hoped there might be more margarine.”’97 By the end of the war British households were spending about 11 per cent of their food budget using points. Given that about 30 per cent of the budget went on rationed food, another 15 per cent on ‘controlled distribution’ foods such as onions, and the rest on unregulated foods such as bread, flour, oatmeal, potatoes, fish, fresh vegetables and fruit other than oranges, a psychologically beneficial illusion of control and choice was present in the system.98 As Lord Woolton remarked somewhat condescendingly, ‘for the women it became “shopping” instead of “collecting the rations”, and this gave them a little pleasure in their harassed lives’.99

  By the beginning of 1942 the British Ministry of Food had succeeded in creating a stable system which distributed food relatively evenly across the civilian population. A Mass Observation survey of ‘food tensions’ found that 77 per cent thought that the situation was better than they had expected and a Gallup poll of the same year reported that 79 per cent of its respondents thought Lord Woolton was doing a good job.100 The high degree of satisfaction with the government was in large part attributable to the fact that it was very rare that people felt they were unable to obtain their full share of what was available. Owing to the fact that not all calories consumed were covered by the rationing system, it is only possible to arrive at estimates, but after a low point in the second winter of the war, the average British person’s calorie consumption appears to have recovered to about 3,000 calories a day.101 This was a generous amount of food
to allocate to every person in the country and indicates the fact that, despite U-boats, the shipping shortage and wrangling with US officials, the British were able to maintain a satisfactory level of food supply throughout the war. The sense that the food supply could be relied upon and that on the whole shortages were being shared out across the population appears to have made food one of the factors that contributed to good morale among the British.102

  FEEDING THE GERMAN WAR MACHINE

  The initial German ration was generous and appears to have initiated a process of levelling up, whereby the poorer families gained access to more and better food. In 1939 the Research Institute of the German Labour Front calculated that 42 per cent of working families were entitled to more food than they had eaten before the war.103 Elisabeth E. recalled that children-rich mothers had so many more sugar coupons than they needed that they were happy to give them away to others.104 Nevertheless, price rises and food shortages affected the cities, and meat, poultry, game, eggs, oil and fats all became increasingly difficult to find in the shops despite the fact that they were on the ration.105 Price-capping policies demotivated farmers from growing fruit and vegetables and grocers passed on to their customers the cost of the hefty bribes they were forced to pay wholesalers in order to persuade them to release their limited stocks of vegetables.106 Working women, who could only go shopping after work, arrived in the evenings to find empty shelves, and there was much resentment that shopkeepers held back the best foodstuffs under the counter for their wealthiest customers.107

  German workers were resentful of the fact that they were now expected to work overtime without supplementary pay, and those whose jobs were classed as heavy campaigned to have their work reclassified as ultra-heavy so that they could receive a larger ration.108 Like industrial workers in Britain, German working men felt that they did not receive enough meat and they looked on enviously as soldiers, who were not in what might be termed ‘action’, manning anti-aircraft batteries in the cities, were fed substantial front-line rations. One of the things military recruits most enjoyed was their generous meat ration. Fritz Harenberg recalled, ‘I liked the military period in the barracks. We received very good food. Cutlets … as big as a toilet lid … salad, potatoes, gravy and everything. And not once a week, many times in a week.’109 Compared to the heavy workers’ daily 171 grams of meat, the field ration of 250 grams seemed excessive for soldiers who were not engaged in actual combat. But the Wehrmacht was jealous of its privileges and resisted any attempts to cut rations among troops stationed within the Reich.110 Workers began to demand the same rations as the Wehrmacht.111

  The German rationing system was equitable in that it acknowledged the need of physical labourers for larger quantities of food but, despite the best efforts of Kraut to calculate the nutritional needs of each ration class, the rations were too low for heavy workers in the physically demanding war industries. In the first year of the war, workers began to lose weight.112 Göring recognized that the high-calorie needs of miners, upon whom so much of the war effort depended, were not being met by the ration, and he issued a decree which stipulated that miners working overtime should be provided with a warm meal. Here, as so often, the German government was not speaking with one voice. Backe was adamant that the German food budget was too tight to free up extra food at Göring’s whim, and the Ministry of Food only stopped demanding food coupons in return for the extra meal after the capture of France guaranteed that the German food supply would be augmented. More often than not, the warm meal miners were supposed to receive turned out to be just some extra bread, and miners in the Ruhr area derisorily referred to the supplementary food as the ‘Göring sandwich’.113 Eventually, under pressure from employers as well as workers, the Ministry of Food created a further category of workers. Night workers and those who worked a particularly long day, either because of exceptionally long hours or because they had to walk a considerable distance to the factory, received more food.114 Overtime was often rewarded with bowls of soup, and workers who put in more than sixty hours a week or worked shifts of more than twelve hours were rewarded by 250 grams of tinned fish in oil, or tomatoes.115

  But the Ministry of Food did not feel sufficient food could be made available to increase ration quantities significantly (rather the ration was progressively cut over time) and it certainly did not feel that enough food was available to allow workers to supplement their diet off the ration. The German Labour Front tried to solve the problem of hungry workers by attempting to persuade them to eat in factory canteens. This was seen as a way of preventing the men from sharing their extra ration allocations with their wives and children. If the extra food at the canteens had been provided off the ration, as it was in Britain, no doubt the men would have been willing to eat in them. But the workers were required to surrender some of their ration coupons in return for canteen meals and they distrusted such a system, fearing the kitchen workers would cheat them of their full food entitlement.116 Given that their food intake was limited, it was natural that they preferred their wives to control how the food was cooked and eaten. In the face of entrenched resistance many factories eventually capitulated and instead provided the men with the means to warm up their own food.117

  In the winter of 1941–42 the Wehrmacht on the eastern front were bogged down, cold and hungry, the Ukrainian harvest had been disappointing and the farmers within Germany were struggling to grow enough potatoes and produce sufficient pork. Ration cuts in the spring of 1942 roused the regime’s worst fears that they were facing a protracted war without sufficient food supplies. To make matters worse, over a million German soldiers had been killed or gone missing on the eastern front. The war in the Soviet Union was proving a voracious consumer of men and materiel. From the autumn of 1941 the military began drafting industrial workers into the army, despite the fact that there was no one to replace them on the assembly lines.118 The Reich was facing serious food and manpower shortages. Nutritional research shifted its emphasis from the health benefits of an autarkic diet to research into food as a tool for maximizing physical efficiency. Robert Ley, head of the Labour Front, pronounced that ‘it was the highest social achievement to preserve the health, and thus the ability to work, of the productive people’.119 In 1942 the academic journal of the Institute for the Physiology of Work published the findings of investigations which calculated the precise amounts of calories required for a range of jobs, from foundry workers and carpenters to concentration camp guards.120 Another study examined the impact of glucose and a glucose–vitamin B1 preparation on the performance of workers in hot working conditions, and a further paper published findings on a study of ‘the impact of warm meals on the productivity of women doing night work’.121 It was found that the women’s productivity actually sank by 16 per cent if they were given a cup of warm tea, in contrast to a warm meal, which made them 10 per cent more productive.122 These nutritional studies were a rational attempt to find ways to expend every gram of food as efficiently as possible and use food and manpower resources as effectively as possible. However, when it came to feeding foreign workers the idea of using food resources efficiently was obscured by a mass of ideological principles.

  In early 1942 Hitler sought to overcome the manpower shortage by appointing Fritz Sauckel as the General Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobilization. In the same reshuffle he appointed Albert Speer as Minister of Armaments and War Production and Herbert Backe, who had long overridden Walther Darré in matters of food, was confirmed in his position as acting Minister for Food and Agriculture. Hitler looked to these three men to revitalize the war effort. Sauckel immediately set about solving the manpower shortage by importing foreign workers from the east at the rate of 34,000 a week. By the summer of 1943 there were 6.5 million foreign workers in the Reich.123

  In contrast to western European forced labourers, who received only marginally less food than German workers, the eastern workers were given completely inadequate rations. The watery soups which they were fed cont
ained agonizingly little fat and protein, and the bread they were allocated was virtually inedible. Known as ‘Russian’ bread it was made of a mixture of rye, sugar beet waste and straw.124 The work by physiologist Nathan Zuntz during the First World War had demonstrated that it was possible for a human on an inadequate diet to continue physical work right up to the point where starvation caused the failure of the vital organs.125 But in following this principle with the Soviet forced labourers the National Socialists came up against the limits of the human basic metabolic rate. They discovered that feeding one worker 3,000 calories was more effective than feeding 1,500 calories to two workers. The two workers on 1,500 calories each used up all the energy simply staying alive. The well-fed worker could stay alive and expend the surplus energy on productive physical activity. The military administration complained, ‘It is illusory to believe that one can achieve the same performance from 200 inadequately fed people as with 100 properly fed workers … the minimum rations distributed simply to keep people alive, since they are not matched by any equivalent performance, must be regarded from the point of view of the national war economy as a pure loss, which is further increased by transport costs and administration.’126 At the IG Farben factory in Landsberg only 158 of the 500 eastern workers employed at the factory were fit enough to work. A manager at a screw factory in Nuremberg was concerned that his German employees might start to sympathize with the Russian women labourers who sat in the workrooms crying with hunger.127