1941 - Food Availability

Food Availability

Britain receives her first U.S. Lend-Lease shipments of U.S. food April 16, just in time to avert a drastic shortage; by December, 1 million tons of U.S. foodstuffs have arrived.

Russia suffers her most severe winter in 30 years; Leningrad has no heat, no electricity, and little food. The Lüftwaffe destroys food stocks stored in wooden buildings, and besieged Leningraders eat cats, dogs, birds, jelly made of cosmetics, and soup made from boiled leather wallets. Those able to work receive a bread ration of half a pound per day, others get only two slices, and the bread is often made of cheap rye flour mixed with sawdust, cellulose residues, and cottonseed cake. Thousands die of starvation; before the siege is lifted in 1944, 20 to 40 percent of Leningrad's 3 million people will have died in 900 days of hunger and related disease (see politics [Stalingrad], 1942). Soviet citizens outside Leningrad receive an estimated 1,800 calories per day, but people in occupied Finland, Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands receive fewer than 1,800, and those in the Baltic states, Poland, France, Italy, Greece (and the other Balkan countries) are lucky to get 1,500.

Dutch bakers stretch their supplies of rye flour with peas and barley, giving their bread a sour taste. The Dutch brew tea from rose hips and the leaves of various wild plants in lieu of coffee or real tea, which is rarely obtainable, and the only milk available is usually skim milk (taptemelk) or buttermilk. Meat and cheese are in short supply, as are butter and margarine, and chocolate and anise-flavored products almost never seen. Rapeseed oil (raapolie) is usually the only available vegetable oil.

Germany is the best-fed of Europe's combatant nations. A rationing plan provides Germans with at least 95 percent of the calories received in peacetime (2,000 calories per day).

Japan begins rice rationing as demands of the military place a strain on supplies for the home front (see 1943). Sugar is almost impossible to obtain, but saccharin is plentiful.