Saturday 3 May 2014

Bring Back Rationing?





One way of defeating the obesity crisis, cutting food bills and improving the health of the nation at one go would be to go back to the 1940's, more or less, and bring back rationing.

This strident Youtube item running at a couple of minutes is a shock horror one that dropped into the inbox, sadly just before my fix of strawberries picked fresh from the field and cream.  It is about the vices of sugar.

With the EU banning mangoes because they are laden not just with sweetness of taste but plant diseases and enough pesticides to poison it is trouble enough.  Add to that the extensive use of antibiotics in animals in the USA and elsewhere eating is not much fun, more like a bungee jump with ageing elastic.

Going back to the past when rationing was intended to be rational eating for health and activity this Wikipedia article gives a decent summary of it.  Did we really manage on so little, allowing for all the bread and potatoes, excuse the wind, and the imaginative use of foods we would shun today?

Are we now just prisoners in a consumer society where we just do what the advertisements tell us to do and obey the psychology of shopping imposed by the retailers?  Can we escape this?

Fat chance, it seems.

2 comments:

  1. Is this article by any chance from an Irish newspaper? The pen name "Anna Liffey" suggests it might be. For many years our firm had a licensing agreement with an Irish firm of millers, based at Anna Liffey Mills, Lucan, Co. Dublin.
    They did have shortages of imported foods during the war but things like meat, cream etc were far more freely available

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  2. Picked it up from images. May well be. In this period I recall Aunts in Liverpool going back and forth from Dublin with large prams on bartering expeditions.

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