Our week on Rations

The first week in March 2009 was our week living on wartime rations.  Our topic for the Spring term has been World War II - the Home Front, and as part of that we thought it would be interesting to get an insight into what it was really like to live on rations - but for one week only!

Our rations:

Our food:

Our thoughts:

Sally - before rationing: Before rationing started I was amazed at what appeared to be the huge amount of sugar, fat, jam, milk and meat that were on the rations compared with what we would normally eat in a week, and it was hard to imagine at that point how anyone could feel deprived on rations.  However, as I thought about it more before we actually started, I realised that:

• The wartime diet aimed to provide 3000 calories a day for adults and older children, 50% more than what we would expect to eat today. However even when not directly under attack, the sheer hard work of 1940s living, no central heating, and walking as the most common mode of transport, meant that people's energy needs were far greater than ours today.
• Also the well-off people were coming into the war on a very different diet to ours. (For the poor, especially in the cities, the wartime rations were a huge improvement on their previous diet.)  We are a mostly vegetarian family, and we don't put butter on our bread or sugar in our tea or cereals.  We rarely eat sweets, cakes, biscuits or puddings.  For a middle-class family at the start of war, meat would have formed an important part of their diet, sugar in tea would have been usual and most bread would have been white.  Their expectations would therefore be very different to ours.
• The wartime rationing went on in some form or other for 14 years, without chance for a break or "time off".  We would be eating it for only a week, and could look forward to treats being re-instated in the very near future, which puts us in a very different place psychologically to those enduring wartime rationing.

With these things in mind, I decided that in order to re-create the rationing experience as closely as possible by not just using wartime rations, but cooking 1940s foods using authentic recipes.  I would do a completely different menu to what we would normally eat, even if our normal food would have fallen pretty much within rations.  Obviously we would have to do without all the foods (and drinks) that were unavailable during the war, and only eating vegetables and fruit that are locally grown and in season (in early March!).

Joel:

Toby:

Kirsten:

Elsa:

Jason:

Sally - after rationing. Probably the most surprising thing to me about the whole week has been how much of the rations we actually used.  The butter and sugar had looked masses, but once I was baking my own bread every day, and cooking every single snack and pudding from scratch it soon went.  We don't usually have puddings, but without a lot of the "fillers" like pasta that I would usually use, and without easy access to a variety of fruit for snacking on, we did really appreciate them. On the whole we were really full after the meals, but sometimes, surprisingly, got hungry before the next one.

The other thing that I really wasn't expecting was the length of time that these meals took to prepare.  I cook pretty much from scratch, but I cook food that is fairly simple and not too time-consuming to prepare.  I was amazed on reading the recipe for meat and potato pie that I was supposed to boil the meat in chunks for 2 hours, then assemble the pie, and then cook the whole thing for a further hour!  Of course before the war women did not work, and often had a "help" who would be doing part of the cooking with or for them - and cooking methods and preferences take time to change. How people managed who were working or volunteering, had to shop every day because there was no fridge, and had to look after a family, and do the washing by hand etc managed I really don't know. Especially when things could get interrupted at any point by an indeterminable amount of time spent in an air-raid shelter.

At the end of the week