Grow
Your Own
The
government set up a 'Grow Your Own'
campaign.
● Farmers
were encouraged to plough up as much land as they
could.
● The
Women's Land Army was mobilised to provide workers in
place of farm workers who had been called
up.
● Public
parks, bomb sites and railway embankments were used as
allotments.
● Householders
were told to use their gardens to grow vegetables, and
many people kept rabbits and chickens.
● People
formed Pig Clubs, and shared the meat when the pig was
slaughtered. Food waste was collected in
pig bins to feed to the pigs.
In
1940 the government set up the Ministry of Food, under
Lord Woolton. It issued information to try
to help people accept the food shortages.
This included:
● a
morning radio programme (The Kitchen Front)
gave housewives recipes on how, for instance, to make
a 'tasty' dessert out of potatoes, without flour,
sugar or lard. One government tip was use
liquid paraffin (a laxative) instead of lard in baking
- the effects were devastating!
● Lord
Woolton spoke on the radio. He was
cheerful and treated housewives like he was speaking
to his daughters. He told them what food
was good for them and their families; many people
trusted him and liked him.
● propaganda,
such as jolly adverts in newspaper, bright posters and
catchy phrases and rhymes - 'the sight of potato
peelings, hurts Lord Woolton's feelings'.
Cartoon characters - 'Potato Pete' and 'Dr Carrot' -
were used to encourage people to eat more foods that
were not rationed.
● the
government encouraged people to use alternatives
wherever possible - they used SPAM instead of ham,
and British flour (which was poor quality and grey)
instead of American flour (which was white).
Source C
Bread wasted - Miss Mary Bridget O'Sullivan
was fined a total of ten pounds, with costs, for
permitting bread to be wasted. It was
stated that her servant was twice seen throwing
bread to birds in the garden, and when Miss
O'Sullivan was interviewed she admitted that bread
was pout out every day. "I cannot see
the birds starve", she said.
Bristol
Evening Post (20 January 1943).
In
1939 Britain only grew enough food to feed one person
in every three - Nazi U-boats threatened to starve the
country into defeat. But it was not just
food - Britain brought many other things from abroad
(notably sugar, tea, fruit, oil, rubber and wood) and
now all these supplies were threatened by the U-boat
attacks. The government needed to control
the supply of many things that were going to be in
short supply. It could not risk the public
anger if there were shortages, and prices went up, and
only the rich could afford things.
This
1943 cartoon shows a patriotic
householder. 
The
government encouraged recycling and salvage to try to
make the most efficient use of resources:
