2024 Fashion On The Ration Challenge

Cherryfudge

I hope your Denby Homestead teapot made it safely home, @Nelliegrace! I collect Homestead and some pieces are in daily use. It's very durable.  

Cherryfudge

I've just ordered a book on the strength of reading a stub on Kindle: 'Loved Clothes Last - how the joy of rewearing and repairing your clothes can be a revolutionary act' by Orsola de Castro (pub 2021).

Has anyone read it? What are your thoughts?

PollyWollyDoodle

Don’t know that book, sorry.  Goodness what a lot of posts in the last 24 hours! 😄 good to see the village hall being used so much. 

Fab socks, @Laura_Elsewhere, I am still struggling through a pair I started ages ago, I just don’t love the feel of them and am not enthusiastic about finishing them. However I’ve been distracted by quickly crocheting some poppies for a local appeal.  

Interesting debate about diet. Yes, there were always some overweight people (by the way, Pip, you definitely need to look at Giles cartoons!) but not the numbers we see now.  Most people ate home-cooked food three times a day, there were no ‘snacks’.  Most people also took a lot more exercise just because life was harder - physical work, gardening, cleaning, washing by hand, walking because few people had cars.  And no UPF - a lot of sugar, true but it was consumed in foods like cakes and pies (and ladled into the ubiquitous British cup of tea).  

I speak as one of the overweight majority myself.  I think UPFs are a huge problem (no pun intended), not something I ever eat now but I’ve had my fair share of ‘convenience’ food in the past. has anybody read the blog by the lady who was going back to food rations as a way of losing weight?  

maryb

I follow her Facebook group.  Very interesting.  When the Eat/Lancet Diet for the Planet was announced a few years ago, I looked at the quantities and thought Hang on!  I’m sure I’ve seen these before.  It is very similar to ration quantities except for meat where it seems more restrictive - hard to tell since WW2 meat rationing was by price.  But the egg quantities were also very restricted.  Anyway that got me interested in rationing so I had a half hearted attempt to see if I could stick to it.  Tea would have been a problem!  But surprisingly the fat ration was ok.  I assumed I kept some backyard hens but I don’t use enormous numbers of eggs most of the time.  I couldn’t have coped with the most limited ration of milk but the more generous amounts would have just about been ok.  Cheese was hard - I don’t use it in cooking every week but when I do I doubt the weekly ration would have been enough

so it was an interesting experiment Not as difficult as I thought, probably because I cook from scratch anyway but it would have been desperately wearing to have to manage like that for 14 years

So after that I found this thread and here I am.  This is my second year and I completely blew the budget last year and the first half of this year because I lost two stone and had to replace my entire wardrobe.  But I haven’t needed to spend any coupons since June as all my new last year winter clothes are fine.  So going forward I hope to manage better

Nelliegrace

I am using the average WW2 ration quantities again this year, it has become our normal way of eating. It is not difficult, shopping like Mum used to, except that we have the advantage of the freezer and can buy larger more economical quantities, portion them up, and shop our weekly amounts from home. 


Four ounces of loose leaf tea is plenty for the two of us, we top the pot up with boiling water for a second mug, or a thermos flask for later. My Denby teapot got home safely thank you @Cherryfudge. Ground coffee was available and not rationed.
The average meat ration of one shilling and two pence is now worth £3 each. Offal and sausages were not rationed, neither was rabbit or fish. Ham or bacon was a separate ration. Tinned food was rationed by points.
We have sufficient butter, cheese, lard, and British rapeseed oil and spread for margarine. A pound of sugar a week is more than enough for our cakes and jam making.
Milk would have been a problem, even with the added dried milk ration, but for my invalid’s extra ration. Cream was banned though we had “top of the milk,” and nobody had heard of yoghurt or kefir. We keep a few hens in the garden, so have eggs to spare.
There were work canteens and the new British Restaurants which provided basic dinners at set prices, and the better off could eat out regularly, though only one meat or fish course was permitted. In 1941 the National School Meals Policy was introduced, which had dietary guidelines to improve children’s health.

Laura_Elsewhere

I'm about a half-hour drive from Bridgnorth, @Nelliegrace - maybe next summer we should have a mini-meet there!  

It's always tricky trying to decide just how good rationing was for health- after all, we generally live longer nowadays by quite a long way, although that is starting to drop, they think... but when you look at almost *any* measure of health, the generation that grew up with rationing in childhood plus the NHS come out as very very healthy indeed, so I reckon there's definitely something in it! 

Have I mentioned the chap who did a serious nutritional analysis on a spreadsheet of all mentions of food and drink in the Famous Five books?! Interestingly, it all comes out as very healthy indeed- very little sugar, just an occasional jam tart or square of chocolate... but masses of bread (pre-industrial!), butter, cheese, gallons of milk, some cream, ham, chicken, pork, plenty of radishes, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, onion... and only a very occasional lemonade or ginger beer, despite the quotation people always come upw ith, of "lashings of ginger beer!" which isn't actually in any of the books and I think comes from the brilliant parody by The Comic Strip in the 1980s, Five Go Mad in Dorset...  

I think we definitely like their kind of meals- we didn't plan a cooked meal last night so had plates full of 'nibbles'- slices of a ham I baked in the week, slices of cheddar, Egremont russet apples, a handful of walnuts, some cherry toms I bought on offer for my parents' visit last week, a couple of homemade jam tarts (about half the size of bought ones), and a wodge of Dorset apple cake (wholemeal flour and a ton of apples, and I halve the sugar in the recipe). Oh, and a couple of dates  

It was a real feast!

diminua

I mapped rather than rigidly stuck to the food rations for a period. To my surprise I found that for the basics - if you swap veg food and tinned fish for the meat ration and accepted going over on margarine but being under on cooking fat and ditto with confectionery and sugar - I was ok. Not too far adrift at all.  Of course in the real 1940s that wouldn't be possible, I'd have to make biscuits or a cake myself and eat that through the week, and vegetarians got extra cheese to make up for no meat (but I'm not 'really' vegetarian, and I'd have to give up fish to do that - and I could see myself getting very. very tired of constant cheddar cheese).  

Milk was only possible if I switched back to full fat, which I've actually stuck with as I realised I just use more if it's semi skimmed, so it's counterproductive. 
I was a long way down on eggs - which is bad actually, as I know I don't always get enough iron from my diet, and would be resolved by my baking cakes rather than buying pastries and calling them 'confectionery'. 

What I would have found really, really difficult though was things like marmite and pesto and bags of raisins. I ended up about 50 coupons overspent on tins and dry goods.

And inevitably a lot of the things I wasn't counting - like fresh tomatoes and citrus and olives and all the delicious breads that liven up my diet - simply wouldn't be available.  I also drink a lot of coffee, which saves the tea - but again would it really have been available in those quantities or would I be doing unnecessary trips up to Soho to get the good stuff? 

Edit: confectionery, - e not a

PipneyJane

@Laura_Elsewhere that sock is beautiful.  Good luck making its twin.  I’m not certain I could from reading your note, although I do feel your pain.  Recently I partially frogged a sock started a decade ago and never completed, because the 50g skein ran out of yarn three quarters of the way down the foot and I only had 2 skeins of that yarn.  (I’d tried to buy extra from the manufacturer’s website, and failed.). Now that I have a recipe for afterthought heel socks and know how economical they can be, I decided that, if I frogged back to the start of the heel, there should be enough yarn to do a pair of those, possibly with short-row heels (since they’re very similar).  Took me quite a while to find the chart I’d made of the lace pattern, since I’d cobbled it together based on a sweater I’d knitted.  This is what they look like now:



Sadly, I didn’t take a photograph prior to the frogging, but I’ve now added a photo of the chart to my Ravelry page, in case it goes walkies again.

@Nelliegrace, at £3/person/week, your meat ration is actually very similar to the amount DH and I set aside for shopping at the Butcher’s, i.e. £40/month.  It’s the 1lb of sugar a week that gobsmacks me because, even with my baking, I’m not sure I could get close to using that up regularly.

@PollyWollyDoodle  I completely agree re UPF’s, because they’re designed to never make you feel full.  Sugar can be as bad, because it causes an insulin cascade/vicious cycle where you eat a sweet, which rapidly raises your blood sugar, simulating your body to produce a lot of insulin, which causes your blood sugar to collapse, which makes you very hungry very rapidly, which triggers you to overeat/eat more sweets.   

(I was the fat kid, who became a plump adult, who went through the diet cycle a couple of times - hence the multiple sizes in my wardrobe - and, having lost weight because of my illness, I do not want to get any larger, because it is so lovely that my clothes now fit well.)

- Pip

Sarahspangles

I looked at the sugar ration and assumed that was for biscuits or cakes. But then, do you get enough eggs and fat to bake those?

You could make fatless sponge if you had eggs, or scones if you had fat. Buttermilk would be useful for scones. Apart from those and putting three spoonsful in your tea, I suppose you could make some sweets and home made preserves to eke out your ration.

Nelliegrace

An interesting challenge @diminua. I think that the 1940s vegetarian society offered a lot of support and advice to members.
Carolyn at https://the1940sexperiment.com/ uses vegetarian recipes.
Vegetarians and those who didn't eat dairy foods or eggs had to register with their local Food Office in order to be issued with a special ration book. So whenever they went to collect their rations, they were allowed to buy more eggs, cheese and nuts, instead of meat.
Ration points would have bought dried beans, lentils and split peas for protein. Fresh and salted fish was not rationed but tinned fish used a lot of ration points.
Grated carrot was used to replace some of dried fruit in a cake recipe. Children were given raw carrot as a treat to replace lollies and ice creams.



Bottling tomatoes would have saved using points to buy tins. 
Marmite would have been available readily, a byproduct of Burton on Trent’s brewing industry.
W H Whittards and Co were in the small ads in The Times, and would deliver coffee by post. They moved to Chelsea after the blitz destroyed the Victoria Warehouse in Mansell Street. 
Pesto would have to be home made. Olive oil was sold in little bottles at the chemist, so not under food rations.

3rd September 1940, The Times, page 1.