Okay I’m gonna get my nerd on here for a minute because one of the things I love about history

Okay I’m gonna get my nerd on here for a minute because one of the things I love about history is what people did at home. Forget your huge wars and royals and whatnot, how did they handle feeding themselves and going to bed?

World War II is a great time for studying this sort of thing because of the need for rationing. Britain in particular had a time of it because once you cut off access to, yanno, the entire world it becomes a very tiny island without a lot of resources to self-sustain. There’s no orange groves in Britain, for instance. Plus global trade meant relying on things from other countries. For example, Britain grew its own cereal crops (eg. wheat, barley, etc) for centuries but then it was cheaper to import them from America so farms turned away from that to focus on things like meat and dairy production. To give an idea of scale, in 1939 Britain imported something in the neighborhood of 20 MILLION tons of food.

So the start of World War II meant not only having to figure out where in the ever loving fuck the food was going to come from, but having to completely revamp farming as the nation understood and was set up for it. Many of us know the West Wing quote about how during WWII FDR said the US would produce 50,000 airplanes and instead managed 100,000. Britain had to do the exact same thing with food.*

(*Note: other countries did as well, of course, such as the US which is where this artwork is from. I’m focusing on Britain to keep this simple though.)

The way you make up for that 20 million tons of food is both by making more and using less.

Making more is a fascinating study on the topic of how farming was changed forever in Britain. But the key takeaway for the purpose of this discussion is what also ties in with using less: People had to pitch in.

These days we think of WWII and we know the stories of victory gardens, Make Do and Mend, ration books, and so on. We remember how people during this time dug in, found inner strength, and did what they needed to do.

But the thing is that didn’t happen automatically.

At the start of WWII preparations went into place. People were taught about blackout curtains and preparing for gas attacks (a reasonable worry after WWI) and so on, but the war didn’t hit them on the home front right away. This led to a period of time of people basically looking around and going huh, we did all this for nothing. Whole buncha hype for no reason.

It was only with time that the danger started to get close, and the need for the extra food came into play. And even then it wasn’t as though ration books were handed out and people went whelp, guess that’s goodbye to meat and sugar for this week! People still had to be brought on board with the concept.

Hence the need for artwork like at the top of this post. “A Fair Share” was a key phrase at the time. It was used to remind people and teach them that they and their neighbors were all in this together. Heck, not just them but their loved ones on the front lines: if you hoarded food, for example, that meant more food was needed, more work for everyone else, more that might have to take the risk of being imported, more chance that ships might get shot down by Germany bringing those supplies to you. You had to do your fair share and thus get your fair share.

Mind you it also helped that leaders stepped in and did the same. Now granted it’s propaganda of a sort but even so the royal family used ration books. Queen Elizabeth 2 (then only a princess) famously used them to get enough cloth for her wedding dress. Of course the royal family had resources the average person did not, not the least of which was their own farm, but even so they understood the importance of showing that they were doing their part.

The other thing about rationing that people don’t realize is that it didn’t stop when the war ended. Most know that rationing got harder and tighter over the duration of the war but it’s not like VE Day suddenly made the food appear. World War II ended on September 2, 1945. Rationing ended July 4, 1954.

(That wedding dress I mentioned earlier? She got married in 1947. Still using ration books.)

So when you look at the above picture, realize that it’s more than just a quick comment about a single concept. Know that it was about a people who were told of a danger, had the knowledge to prepare but thought the requests for it were exaggerated, were hit hard once the danger arrived, may or may not have had exemplary guidance from those in charge on what to do, even so had to dig deep and learn how to work with their neighbors and countrymen to embrace entirely new ways of living so that they all could survive, and who had to keep working and sacrificing for that survival long after the active danger had passed.

…which of course is COMPLETELY unlike any situation we find ourselves in today.

Ahem.