[History nerd post]
There's a book called
Eating for Victory: Healthy Home Front Cooking on War Rations, which is a collection of recipe booklets the British government published in World War Two to help people work with the very limited food rations available. By modern standards (even modern normal-sized people, let alone the FA herd), it really is appalling how poor they were. By modern standards, you might say some of the advice borders on OCD , like "I am obsessed by the thought that I must never, EVER waste a single edible calorie of food." Except in Great Britain during the war, you really did need to obsess over not-wasting a single calorie, because the island really was in danger of not having enough to feed everybody.
The book includes tips on how to use food modern people would likely toss in the garbage or scrape down the disposal: save the bread crumbs on your plate, to make soups thicker. When you boil vegetables, do not throw the water away, because it contains vitamins, so use it as the base of a soup, but use it RIGHT AWAY before it goes bad .... etc.
IIRC, for an adult the typical ration included one fresh egg per week, plus one dozen dried powdered eggs per month -- maximum 16 eggs per month in all. Sometimes things got bad enough that the fresh-egg ration was reduced to one egg every two weeks. The only bread you could buy was a brownish whole-wheat loaf. It was illegal for bakers to sell white bread, because baking white bread wastes calories and nutrients compared to making whole wheat from the same amount of wheat flour.
What follows is cut and pasted from a
UK history site:
This is a typical weekly food ration for an adult
:
- Bacon & Ham 4 oz
- Other meat value of 1 shilling and 2 pence (equivalent to 2 chops)
- Butter 2 oz
- Cheese 2 oz
- Margarine 4 oz
- Cooking fat 4 oz
- tard cum 3 pints
- Sugar 8 oz
- Preserves 1 lb every 2 months
- Tea 2 oz
- Eggs 1 fresh egg (plus allowance of dried egg)
- Sweets 12 oz every 4 weeks
