1918 - Food Availability

Food Availability

British food rationing begins with sugar January 1 and is extended in February to include meat, butter, and margarine. By summer it includes all important foodstuffs except bread and potatoes. Fresh meat is rationed by price, and consumers are required to buy from a particular butcher to avoid deception. Ration books are issued in July and the bacon ration is raised from eight ounces per week to 16 ounces. Other rationed commodities include eight ounces of sugar, five ounces of butter and/or margarine, four ounces of jam, two ounces of tea (weekly).

Britain's milling extraction rate is raised to 92 percent, up from 81 percent last year, with soy and potato flour mixed in to stretch Britain's short wheat supplies. The bread is dark and unattractive.

France rations bread and restricts consumption of butter, cream, and soft cheese. Manufacture and sale of all confectionery is banned.

Average per-capita British consumption of "butchers' meat" falls to 1.53 lb. per week, down from 2.36 in 1914. Average per-capita sugar consumption falls to .93 lb., down from 1.49 in 1914, but calorie intake remains close to 1914 levels and the British eat far better than do their enemies.

U.S. sugar rationing begins July 1, with each citizen allowed eight ounces per week. The U.S. Food Administration orders severe limitations on use of sugar in less essential food products, including soft drinks. As shortages of sugar continue, the Administration prepares to declare the entire soft drink industry nonessential and to order the industry closed down for the duration, but the threat fails to materialize and sugar prices begin to soar (see 1920).

U.S. Food Administrator Herbert Hoover asks for voluntary observance of wheatless Mondays and Wednesdays, meatless Tuesdays, porkless Thursdays and Saturdays, and the use of dark "Victory bread."

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture David F. Houston issues a circular May 2 entitled, "Use Soy-Bean Flour to Save Wheat, Meat, and Fat." It gives recipes for "victory bread," soybean meat loaf, and soybean mush croquettes, but few U.S. farmers produce soybeans, few facilities exist to process the beans, and few stores carry soy products (see agriculture, 1920).

"Hunger does not breed reform; it breeds madness," says President Wilson in an Armistice Day address to Congress.

All food regulations are suspended in the United States in late December but remain in effect in Britain and Europe.