One of the compensations of old age is that what seems to the young ones to be ancient history is still fresh in my memory. I remember having a conversation with a friend once and said that he would no doubt remember what it was like after the war. He looked at me and said “Stanley, I was born in 1952!” It's all just like yesterday to us older end and many will remember rationing in WW2. Looked at from today's point of view the small amounts of food we were allowed seem ludicrous but while we didn't have plenty, we certainly didn't have want because the War Coalition set up the Ministry of Food and they did a wonderful job of making sure that while we were deprived in many ways we didn't starve.
It went further than this. In 1946 a man called Jack Drummond was appointed chief adviser on nutrition at the MOF and his advice was followed. The result was that by 1946 the overall health of the population was better than it had been in 1939. I am lucky to be one of what has been called 'the last healthy generation'. The reason why this happened was that in the years just before the war the science of vitamins and nutrition had advanced enormously and while we were short of food, we were getting far better food of the highest quality.
You might wonder where we went wrong, very few people are short of food today but far more are malnourished in the sense they are eating the wrong foods. In a time of comparative plenty we see the rise of what are called 'The Western Diseases', obesity, allergies, diabetes and breathing difficulties. This is due largely to the fact that the government was faced with a choice after the war, continue to pursue quality or go for quantity and end food rationing. They chose the latter, threw money at the agricultural industry and encouraged modern farming methods which, though they produced quantity, degraded soil quality and the nutritional value of what had been natural products. This was followed by the rise of the food processing industries whose goal was profit, use the cheapest ingredients, modify fats to give longer shelf-life and persuade us we were 'time poor' and needed ready prepared food.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever heard about modern foods was “If your grandmother wouldn't recognise it, don't buy it!” Another handy dictum is, “The more packaging, the worse the contents”. We have escaped 'want' in the sense of shortage of food but invented a new version, want of good balanced nutrition. I often wonder what Sir Jack Drummond would have thought had he not been murdered with his wife and daughter in 1952 while camping in France. All that improvement destroyed by the end of the very thing he spent his life fighting against, want.
Plenty became the enemy. Arthur Entwistle and Vera shopping.