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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1665 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 23, 2025

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Anyone with knowlege about the UK food shortages post WWII. The rationing was almost 10 years in peacetime. It is absurd. How did this clusterfuck happened?

Speculation: The UK was in the midst of massive decolonization. I'd make sense to conservatively ration food if you're in the midst of a divorce from your agricultural suppliers.

My dad's knowledge of it is limited to preferring horse over whale meat.
The key point is that it wasn't actually necessary, but the labor party thought that the war economy was a path to socialism, so they kept it going in peacetime. Rationing was just another tool, not an emergency measure.

Remember, they had total control over television and radio*, began nationalising every industry, and started other "economic rationalisations" that were going to bring them closer to the Soviet role model.

It's hard to find a history of it. One of those things everyone who writes the history books doesn't want to talk about, outside of some niche monographs I can't find scans of. People laugh at 1984 without realizing how close to reality Orwell's model already was.

/* banning all non-government broadcast media was an official labor party policy until the 80s. The conservatives finally managed to allow a single private channel managed by a semi-government agency in 1955.
The next conservative government in 1970 even managed to allow a non-government radio station, after labour had made themselves unpopular jamming the pirate radio stations people actually wanted to listen to, soviet-style.
(I still remember coming to America and being shocked they had fourteen tv channels rather than 4. When someone told me about cable and satellite I thought they were lying)

The key point is that it wasn't actually necessary, but the labor party thought that the war economy was a path to socialism, so they kept it going in peacetime. Rationing was just another tool, not an emergency measure.

Churchill and the Tories were re-elected in 1951, long before the end of rationing. It’s true that there were plenty of actual socialists in Atlee’s party, even some communists, but he was only one of them to a limited extent. Many bold actual commie plans, like bank nationalization, never really happened. Others, like bus and haulage nationalization, were quickly reversed when the Tories came back to power.

The problem with repealing rationing, which they did want to do, was that the situation was pretty dire. Food produced had been steady or in decline since the 1870s despite a doubling of the population, while the livestock sector relied on feed from devastated areas or those now in the Soviet bloc. Imports were expensive as Britain paid its war debts. The truth is the country was just much poorer than it had been.

I mean, they ended rationing over the course of 3 years after getting into power. Tea in '52, and finally meat in '54. That's pretty good for disassembling an entrenched government program!

One of those things everyone who writes the history books doesn't want to talk about.

This is what makes the most interesting topics. But that explains the existence of tankies.

I asked him, apparently they very rarely got horse meat because it was off-ration and expensive. Their biggest meat treat was the occasional sheep head you could get by being friendly with the butcher. Again off-ration as wastage, skinned and boiled in the traditional English manner of course.
Whale was basically only available after the war. He remembers there being a special shop for off-ration meat.
Visiting relatives in the country was the first time he'd ever had enough butter to cover a slice of toast. He ended up with some skeletal issues from malnutrition, particularly bowleggedness that's really come back to bite him in his old age.

I should offer to cook sheep head for him sometime. I've only ever taken the tongue, but apparently the cheeks are quite good. God knows how you go about skinning it though: only ever seen that done in France. If it's anything like as tough as the back of the neck, it'd take a sharp knife and a lot of patience.

You hang the sheep, make e small hole near one hoof then take an auto tire pump and pump air inside till the skin cleancly separates.

I've always heard that, but never done it. All the ones I do are EZpeel like rabbits because they're 4-12 months old, but if you were doing old mutton that would probably help.

The head is very different in that the skin attachment is a lot more direct.

Sheep’s head is quite good, simmered in a gravy with wine and aromatics added. I definitely would want someone else to skin it though, and that’s coming from someone who processes his own deer and feral hogs on a regular basis.

I'm wondering if you can peel from the flaps left under the jaw from cutting the tongue out. Or even punch forward from the neck.
Will do a full head shear on some and try it this year.

What do you do with e.g. brain and sinuses? In France they were sold all-in iirc, eyes and everything.

Hogs must be an absolute bastard. Do you skin or scald?

Hogs must be an absolute bastard. Do you skin or scald?

Skin. It’s not that difficult, actually easier than deer. Just takes a second fridge and some big buckets for the hams.

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