Food Flash: Wartime Food Boredom

1946
Sound
1m

The Ministry of Information plays the guilt card to keep the home front from grumbling at mealtimes.

Shepherd's pie, stew, sausages, hotpot. What now reads like a typical gastro-pub menu are here used are the examples of everyday mealtime mundanity of the home front. If your parents ever conjured up starving kids in Africa when you were little to get you to eat your greens, then here is an example of the Ministry of Information employing a similar tactic.

A man is bored of stew, cottage pie and sausage and pushes them away. The narrator advises that millions in the world would want that crust he just threw away.

Dig for Victory

Keeping the nation fed and healthy was the greatest priority of the Home Front. Women replaced absent farm workers, while ordinary Britons were exhorted to 'grow their own'.

'Dig for Victory' was perhaps the most successful official campaign of the Home Front. Britons in their millions picked up their trowels, and acre after acre of parkland, waste ground - even back gardens - was repurposed as makeshift vegetable plots. Just as the factories were constantly increasing their productivity, great efforts were made to increase agricultural yields, while the 'land girls' of the Women's Land Army enthusiastically took the place of farmworkers fighting overseas.