Tag Archives: food security

A Good Soup Day

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Time is slipping by and my good intentions are going with it. They always do. Julia cooked again tonight, or, to be accurate, heated up the soup she made yesterday and made egg mayonnaise sandwiches. We have enough filling to make egg sandwiches tomorrow too.

The soup was carrot and squash (carrots from ASDA, squash from a neighbour). It had quite a lot of chilli in it. It was spicy enough to wake me up, but stayed within the bounds of acceptability. In my younger days I would test myself against chillies, but these days I prefer to enjoy my food rather than compete against it. It’s a little bit annoying when she hardly ever makes soup but just throws a few things together and makes it better than I do.

I will have to cook tomorrow, and am thinking of pizza. Not very adventurous, but we have pizza bases and I have no inspiration. We do have plenty of carrots though, so I may try something new. I don’t see why thin slices of root vegetable won’t work on pizza . . .

I may think about that before I try it. I have ordered our ASDA shopping for Friday and if we get parsnips this week I may try that pizza, though I may just try a vegetable bake instead. I can’t believe that I just said “if we get parsnips”. What sort of world is this? Are we back in 1940. We ran short of onions in 1940, you know,  It seems strange, but even in 1940 we were buying  a lot of food from abroad (as we were in 1914). It takes a war to make people concentrate on food security, then we let it all slip again. Of course, we now have so many people it would be difficult to feed everyone. Even if we could feed everyone it wouldn’t quite work as we couldn’t, for instance, grow rice. It seems we might, however, be able to grow durum wheat in the eastern counties and make our own pasta. (The hagberg number they talk about is a measure of its suitability for baking – the higher the better. It’s  a farmer thing. At harvest they talk of little else other than yield, moisture and hagbergs).

An older humorous postcard for today –  Great War vintage.

 

Book Review – Eggs or Anarchy

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Eggs or Anarchy by William Sitwell

Paperback: 368 pages

Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK (9 Feb. 2017)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1471151077

ISBN-13: 978-1471151071

Between the wars the government took the view that we should produce what we were good at and import the rest. This meant we were importing about 60% of our food, as we had been doing in 1914. The problem was that the Germans had more efficient aircraft and submarines in 1939.

Fter a successful retail career, Lord Woolton took on the job of sourcing the millions of uniforms needed to equip a new army. He was surprised to find that having ordered the trousers he had to order the fly buttons via another government department.

He managed to sort it all out, and then took on the task of organising food supplies, including issuing millions of ration books and developing a system that was fair to all.

He didn’t just have U-Boats to worry about, he had Churchill and his attempts to use shipping for moving troops. Then he had to organise storage for food in places where it wouldn’t be bombed, make sure our suppliers didn’t overcharge us and iron out inefficiencies in distribution at home. The title refers to the fears that order and morale would break down if he was unable to get the rations out.

One of my favourite moments was when he told visiting American politicians that he would prefer their ships to their good wishes. He was not a conventional politician, having come to it late in life.

As for the famous Woolton Pie… Well, you’ll have to read the book to find out his thoughts on that.

It’s an interesting subject, though the writing doesn’t always reflect this, and poses a few questions about food security, which we are going to have to answer in the coming years.