What did people eat during World War One? – BBC Bitesize

JACK: Potatoes, chocolate. Two of my favourite foods. What do you get if you put them together? So far, a disgusting mess!

But if I was a boy in World War One, I might have cooked this.

WARTIME BOY: Yes, chocolate potato pudding sounds great to me because during the war, we couldn’t be fussy about our food.

Before the war started, a lot of our food was brought by sea from other countries.

Without these supplies there wouldn’t be enough food to go around.

As the war went on, Germany decided if they saw a ship supplying food to Britain their warships or submarines would sink it.

So soon there was more and more of our food at the bottom of the ocean and less and less on people’s plates.

If they could find any free land, people started trying to grow their own vegetables on it.

And we began trying to save bread because the wheat we needed to make the bread wasn’t arriving on the ships anymore.

Posters told us how we could help, and recipe books and leaflets taught us how to cook with whatever food we had.

I can make soup with scraps, stuffed onions with leftover meat, and cook fish sausages.

And, because there wasn’t much wheat, we use potatoes in our biscuits and cakes instead.

That’s why I’m making a chocolate pudding with potatoes.

But food prices were still going up and the quantities were going down.

Some days I didn’t get very much dinner.

For poorer families life was getting very, very hard.

Empty shops and empty stomachs – it was horrible.

Finally, rationing was introduced to make sure that Britain’s food could be shared out fairly among everyone.

A ration book allows us to have a certain amount of some foods like meat, sugar and butter.

And that’s it. We have to make it last for a whole week.

Rationing is followed by absolutely everyone. Even the King and Queen are on a diet.

And some poorer families are able to eat meat for the first time.

Rationing has helped to stop people starving. And during the war we’ve learnt not to waste any food.

Chocolate potato pudding – delicious!

JACK: And I’m not going to waste my chocolate potato pudding either.

Bleurgh! Maybe I’ll finish it tomorrow.