Whilst taking the dog for a walk today I came upon a troop of wild mushrooms (wood blewits) and within 20 mins I’d filled a carrier bag of the gorgeous goodies. Mushrooms are rich in protein and the quantity I gathered today would be enough to provide a good meal for at least eight people - all for free and in mid December too when there isn’t much else around, even in the best kept small-holding.

And that got me thinking about food resources and rationing during WW2 .....

My mother’s family had always maintained a large vegetable plot but with the outbreak of war, the introduction of rationing, food shortages (particularly of fats and protein) and the exhortations to "Dig for Victory" ... their vegetable garden was soon greatly extended: leeks replaced lilies; potatoes, peonies. They’d also always kept a few chickens for eggs and had usually fattened up their own goose for Christmas, and in addition grand-dad, my mum’s father, who had been a mariner all his life, had in retirement kept the whole family well-supplied with sea fish … until all his boats were commandeered in May 1940. Thereafter he was forced to simply dangle a baited line over the harbour arm while "doing his bit" as a volunteer coastguard.

So they were by no means "townies" completely divorced from the sea or land. And yet while mum’s wartime diaries record regular trips to fish for flounders in the river, and seasonal excursions to collect blackberries, there is never any mention of greater foraging for wild food, whether berries, nuts, fungi or whatever. Similarly whilst the nation as a whole was being encouraged to turn every available corner of land over to cultivation, to eat more vegetables and less meat, and to use every last scrap of food produced … I can find almost nothing, official or otherwise, encouraging greater use of the country’s wild food resources. Yet dandelions, nettles, blackberries, chestnuts, acorns ...  were all readily available, even in cities. I wonder why, though I can think of several possible reasons:

I wonder if the wartime authorities were not keen on encouraging civilians to go wandering around and poking their noses into every copse and hedgerow - which might be hiding a pillbox or supply dump?

Were they perhaps afraid of encouraging a glut of poisonings from uninformed people eating poisonous berries and mushrooms, especially when there was a fear of mass poisoning from gas attack?

Was it perhaps thought better to leave nature’s wild bounty as an un-rationed perk for those in the know such as farming folk who were already being squeezed to produce more food but not for themselves?

Or was it simply that if the government had started encouraging people to eat "weeds", such as nettles and dandelions, and even quelle horreur, snails! ... then it would have been exceedingly bad for morale being far too indicative of just how bad things really were?

So why was the immense bounty of Britain’s wild food never, at least officially, exploited?

One thing was exploited, at least - rose hips. IIRC you could actually get paid for collecting those for the production of rose hip syrup as an antiscorbutic, as there was less citrus fruit imported and thus a risk of vitamin C deficiency in children..

Found a reference to it here :- http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/user/15/u533515.shtml

Our school had sunny autumn afternoons off to forage for wild rose hips - this was towards the end of the war. These were weighed and we got points on our war effort cards. Eventually these were redeemed  by way of jollies according the points earned for which you were given a military rank. So I was a General before I turned eight. I could have been a Field Marshall had my mother allowed all of her copper antiques to be smelted down. Jollies included free cinema tickets and rides on local park boats etc.
Wild food such as rabbits, pheasants and ducks were used for barter trading - eggs, fish and shoes etc. Semi rural communities quickly learned how to cope well. Long after the war there were also pig clubs with rotas of helpers and food providers given a share out.

Ah yes - I'd completely forgotten about the collection of wild rose hips.

And on reflection I'm not sure how accessible much of the countryside was. My mother's family were only a short walk from the South Downs, but in wartime large areas of the Downs were off-limits having been turned over to War Office use. Either that or they were being ploughed up for the first time in centuries and turned into arable food factories in which hedgerows, copses and bosky woods were generally unwelcome. In the same way all the good mussel beds being situated on groynes and sea walls, were now also off-limits and secured away behind miles of barbed wire, tank traps and mines.

But nevertheless to the best of my knowledge Lord Woolton (Minister of Food) never made any reference to the nutritious benefits of nettles or dandelions ... both of which are readily available nearly all year and easily substitute for spinnach and lettuce. Even in these affluent times, in France they are still both regularly gathered, and more for their flavour than to eke out meagre rations.

This is something I did not know existed, the World Carrot Museum;

http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/history4.html

K-Rations;

from wiki;
The K-ration was also criticized for its performance in the China-Burma-India (CBI) theater of operations, where difficulties in supply from bases in India had resulted in widespread and monotonous use of the K-ration for light infantry forces of the United States, as well as Nationalist China and the United Kingdom. Many soldiers, including the U.S. unit known as Merrill's Marauders and British Chindit forces in Burma had for five months lived primarily on K-rations, supplemented by rice, tea, sugar, jam, bread, and canned meat rations, which were dropped to them by air. In the case of the Marauders, whose diet consisted of 80% K-rations, severe weight loss (an average of 35 pounds per man) and vitamin deficiency were noted, which may have also contributed to a decline in resistance to various tropical diseases. A British medical officer reported that, of 209 Chindits examined at the end of this time, 182 had lost up to 30 pounds and 27 had lost from 30 to 70 pounds. Deficiency diseases such as pellagra and beriberi were diagnosed. One of British General Orde Wingate’s units in the Dehra Dun area was visited by quartermaster logistics officers some months after they had last eaten K-rations. At the sight of a box of K-rations carried by the visitors, two of Wingate’s men vomited.

A story from the BBC's Peoples War site about a pig club;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/89/a4464489.shtml

Wasn't everyone much healthier during the war? Restricted sugar/fat intake and lots of lovely veg to fill you up?

And isn't it true that - despite the terrible trauma of it all - depressive illness was rare and suicide rates actually went down?

Temperance wrote:

Wasn't everyone much healthier during the war? Restricted sugar/fat intake and lots of lovely veg to fill you up?

Temp, I believe that was indeed the case. I'll try and find some stats.

One of the chain of "British Restaurants", set up during the War. Originally called "Communal Feeding Centres", the name was changed at Churchill's insistence as it sounded too Communist for his liking.

There is an interesting article about food rationing here;

http://www.cooksinfo.com/british-wartime-food




"The result of these efforts was that, despite the deprivation, the British population actually ended the war tremendously fit and healthy: healthier than they had been before, or have been since. Children in general were even taller and heavier than those before the war. Infant mortality rates went down; average age of death from natural causes increased, meaning civilians just plain lived longer."

I always thought the song, "Yes, We Have No Bananas" dated from WWII, but apparently it was written in 1923 - something to do with a banana blight in Brazil. The song, however, was very popular during and just after the War. I can just about remember it as a little girl in the 50s - I thought it was very funny. From Wiki:


The term has been resurrected on many occasions, including in during rationing in the United Kingdom in World War II, when the British Government banned import of bananas for five years (a particularly harsh act for both supplier and consumer because the British Empire had a trading agreement or cartel with banana producers from the Windward Islands in the Caribbean). Shop owners put signs stating "Yes, we have no bananas" in their shop windows in keeping with the war spirit.

There were few fat children as I recall but we also had more animal fat with suet    puddings and yummy dripping. Eggs were     preserved in isinglass  whatever that  is. I assume country children fared better with sorties for pheasant eggs, field edge grain gleaning for garden chickens, bramble fruit, nutting for hazels and sweet chestnuts and of course, fishing. With brown beet sugar for jam  making everyone made jam. The matter of depression is interesting because there must have been less though many had good reason. I recall much good humour,  sharing and looking out for other people. This seems to have become clichéd yet it is how I recall life then. Only the very elderly showed fear   or anxiety during raids. One might say that children did not understand what was going on. Of course we did. The radio was on all day and the newspaper thoroughly read and going to the pictures at least once a week there were newsreels.

My grandparents usually kept a pig - the runt of the litter from a local farmer who was a specialist in the species (his son became "pig advisor" for The Archers). They were fed via a curved salt-glazed sewer bend fixed through the wall, until one (tamworth not usual large white) made a break up it.

Two things we collected for many years post-war - garlic mustard & ramsons. Apparently onions were in short supply in the war, so both were valued as flavourings. Most eggs had to go to the Packing Station in the early 50s, but they didn't want the bantam eggs, and duck eggs were always "off ration", supplies being too small to be worth collection & distributing. So were cream and butter from goats milk - the latter being pale and a little waxy in texture, but the taste was wonderful. BTW - water glass was a far better preservative for eggs than isinglass.

Just discovered that the influential cookery writer and broadcaster Ambrose Heath, who presented the BBC's wartime radio programme, 'The Kitchen Front' every morning, and who wrote numerous newspaper articles, books and pamphlets with the support of the Ministry of Food, certainly thought highly of nettles and dandelions (though of course it might have been faked praise). For example in, 'Kitchen Front Recipes and Hints' (1941) he wrote:

"A poached egg on a bed of dandelion or nettle purée covered with cheese sauce is an almost perfect meal, containing every one of the foods we are being told to eat, body-building, protective and energising." 

Drifting off topic a bit ..... from 'Flora Britannica' (1996) ... in WW1 when Germany ran critically short of cotton due to the RN blockade, it resorted to using nettles to produce fabric. Over two thousand tonnes were gathered from the wild, although it took 40kg to make a single shirt. During WW2 some work was done in Britain on the possibility of using nettles the same way, but in the end the plants were chiefly used for extracting chlorophyll as a cheap camoflage dye.

It's ironic of course that foraged ingredients are the must haves in the most expensive restaurants these days. 
I blame those Danes, £170 for umpteen tiny morsels of moss and ants etc.

Indeed ! ... Reading about dandelions it seems they were particularly popular in the 1880s, in summer as a spicy filling for sandwiches, and in winter as a salad since the varieties of lettuce then available were difficult to grow throughout the winter months. In the late 19th century seed merchants produced and sold many different varieties of cultivated dandelion to the great houses as well as to commercial market gardeners. But as a food, except in times of dearth, they were generally shunned for most of the 20th century. Only now is the humble dandelion once again a chic - and accordingly expensive - ingredient in British restaurants.

Personally I have enough self-sown wild ones popping up in the lawn without having to buy seed. I only have to cover them with something for a few days to blanch them and reduce their bitterness a bit .... and make sure the dog hasn't pissed on them!

MM wrote:

 .... and make sure the dog hasn't pissed on them!

Talking of which, don't you have to be very careful with dandelions? They are a potent diuretic - I believe the French give this plant the charming name of pis-en-lit? The roots especially should not be eaten if you are on blood pressure medication. Something to do with potassium/sodium balance in the body. I nearly killed myself (unintentionally) once, drinking too much dandelion coffee - I was trying to cut down on caffeine to be healthier.

Off-topic sorry. Oh, blast it - all this "off-topic" stuff is such nonsense - makes one so neurotic. Often off-topic ramblings are really interesting.

Well yes dandelions are a potent diuretic ... and for that reason there was actually money to be made from gathering them to sell, for pennies admittedly, to pharmacists who acted as collecting agents for the pharmaceutical companies. The monetary value was always small, but especially during the 1920s depression gathering wild dandelions for sale was apparently not uncommon.

Dandelion-root coffee eh? I thought that was something only from wartime, and I didn't think it was that common in England anyway, the nation at that time being mostly composed of tea-drinkers. Auntie Claudine from Belgium, still a predominantly coffee-drinking country, does however have several tales to tell about the dubious 'delights' of drinking home-made chicory and dandelion-root coffee, when under Nazi occupation and real coffee was completely unobtainable.

Essex parents called dandelion Piddle the bed but our church primary insisted it was Pedlars bed. Off topic, off hand, off the top of my head - choose and then carry On.

Priscilla wrote:

Long after the war there were also pig clubs with rotas of helpers and food providers given a share out.

Indeed, though they weren't always legal:

ferval wrote:

It's ironic of course that foraged ingredients are the must haves in the most expensive restaurants these days. 
I blame those Danes, £170 for umpteen tiny morsels of moss and ants etc.

It’s not just the Danes. Foraging tourism is becoming increasingly popular all over. To my mind the concepts of ‘foraging’ and ‘tourism’ are polar opposites of each other. When I’m on holiday I want someone else to do the cooking. Anyway, I came across this website offering tours looking at the flora and fauna of the Dingli cliffs of Malta. It’s interesting to note its mention of carob pods, the fruit of the carob tree, being used to supplement the local diet during the Second World War:

Dingli Cliffs

In normal times carobs are used in the making of medicinal syrup for the treating of coffs and sore throats etc.

Before the US had supplied large quantities of .300 Enfield rifles, many Home Guard units had a mix of .303 Canadian Ross rifles and shotguns, with ball ammunition being issued for the latter alongside conventional shotshells (which the Germans considered to be banned as they used lead pellets, not jacketed ones). Apparently, when the time came to hand the shotgun ammunition in, very little was forthcoming, having been "accidentally" discharged to the detriment of the local rabbit population. Ball ammunition was also used (or so older members of the family asserted) in some cases. Children of the New Forest ring a bell?
A couple of other wild foods were also frequently to be found on tables as "spinach", Fat Hen and Bishop's Weed (aka Ground Elder).

Vizzer wrote:

Anyway, I came across this website offering tours looking at the flora and fauna of the Dingli cliffs of Malta. It’s interesting to note its mention of carob pods, the fruit of the carob tree, being used to supplement the local diet during the Second World War ... In normal times carobs are used in the making of medicinal syrup for the treating of coffs and sore throats etc.

Carob seeds can be ground into a very creditable substitute for cocoa/chocolate which is particularly desirable, not just in trendy restaurants, but also by those who need to avoid the caffeine contained in regular cocoa. 

Incidentally ripe carob seeds generally all have a very uniform weight, both within the pod but also from tree to tree and even from widely differing locations. This feature seems to have led to their once being used as an international standard measure of weight around the Mediterranean. Most importantly the use of carob seeds provided a convenient and readily verifiable standard weight which buyers and sellers in local markets all around the ancient world could readily use without having to refer back to any of the national 'standard' reference weights held in Rome, Athens, Alexandria, Damascus, Palmyra or wherever. For example a Roman solidus gold coin was specified as containing ​1⁄72 of a libra (a Roman pound) of gold and also to be equal to the mass of 24 siliquae, where each siliqua conveniently weighed roughly the same as a single carob seed. The concept of a carob seed as a measure of weight persists in the term 'carat' as a measure of fineness of gold, such that 24 carat gold is 100% purity and 12 carat is 50% purity etc, while for jewellers a carat is a unit of a gemstone's mass, now defined as equal to 0.2g which is still about the weight of a typical dry carob seed. The word carat derives from the Arabic qīrāṭ meaning "fruit of the carob tree" which in turn originated from the Greek kerátion (κεράτιον) again referring to the tree's fruit, although it literally means "small horn", presumably reflecting the seed pod's toughness and long, slightly-curved, pointed shape. That said, I rather doubt that carob seeds were ever actually used to weigh precious metals or gemstones because, although remarkably uniform in weight, the variations between seeds would still be too much to risk for such valuable commodities. However carob seeds may well have served as convenient measures for selling small quantities of ground spices, dyes and cosmetic or medicinal preparations.

Green George wrote:

A couple of other wild foods were also frequently to be found on tables as "spinach", Fat Hen and Bishop's Weed (aka Ground Elder).

Another plant, similar to ground-elder/goutweed/bishop's weed, and one that was once widely eaten in England although it has now fallen from favour other than in rather niche foraged-food/chic restaurant circles, is the humble pignut - also known as kippernut, cipernut, arnut, jarnut, hawknut, earth chestnut, groundnut, earthnut, hognut, and Saint Anthony's nut (presumably after St Anthony of Padua who was the patron saint of swineherds). This is the nutty-tasting tuber of Conopodium Majus, a perennial plant a bit like wild parsely or wild carrot, which is commonly found growing in long-established grassland and mature deciduous woodland. The underground 'nuts' can be eaten raw or cooked, and look and taste rather like sweet chestnuts ... so they're both versatile and very yummy.

Pignuts were clearly a well-known and popular food resource in 17th century England because Nicholas Culpepper in his 'Complete Herbal' of 1653 says; "Pignuts: A description of them [is] needless, for every child knows them." Although they might not be entirely suitable for young children as he then goes on to say; "They are something hot and dry in quality, under the dominion of Venus; they provoke lust exceedingly, and stir up those sports she is mistress of..." 
 
They even get a mention in Shakespeare's 'Tempest' (II:2) - so clearly it was expected most people would know what they were - when Caliban offers to;
"let me bring thee where crabs [crab-apples] grow;
And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts."

Meles meles,

it is not about "wild" food, but more about food rationing in WW2 Belgium. My parents and grandmother as fish merchants had the distribution of the fish in our city, hence we have had always enough herring (while perhaps due to the restrictions in the North Sea the fish could proliferate, especially the herring). But vegetables were not available. I am even not sure if there were "rantsoeneringsbonnen" (rationing coupons?) for vegetables...I think only for milk, fish, bread, potatoes, oil, coffee (yes "ersatz coffee")...?
https://tweedewereldoorlog.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/66510_erfgoedcel_wo2_inkijkexemplaar.pdf
See page 50 to see pictures of this rationing...and I read now that one had to subscribe to a particular merchant ans that you was dependent on him for the rest of the war...
But as you see no vegetables...
As such my parents were allowed to cultivate vegetables on the other side of the road besides a general practician's house on a plot that he gave to my parents for the time being and they had to guard it for thieves during night. Our unmarried uncle always at house and recheiving as a tailor, many demands to turn old clothes completely inside outside to make them showing as new ones...and earning some money with that...

And they were very inventive as for the harvest for instance of wheat...the complete old fashioned mini operation including the blowing and seaving and from the grains making powder...and during that whole process, we had two German soldiers billeted in house...

Kind regards from Paul.

Meles meles wrote:

Another plant, similar to ground-elder/goutweed/bishop's weed, and one that was once widely eaten in England although it has now fallen from favour other than in rather niche foraged-food/chic restaurant circles, is the humble pignut - also known as kippernut, cipernut, arnut, jarnut, hawknut, earth chestnut, groundnut, earthnut, hognut, and Saint Anthony's nut (presumably after St Anthony of Padua who was the patron saint of swineherds).

Spurred on by the privations of wartime hunger and the ongoing post-war austerity, the government of Clement Attlee launched the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme in the late 1940s. This sought to use the tropical climate of the east African territory in order to grow groundnuts on a large scale for the production of vegetable oil:
 


That Pathe News clip puts a (very) fine gloss on the affair but even it hints at controversy. In reality the scheme was a calamitous litany of ineptitude in almost every single detail. The soil of the location chosen was too clay (i.e. thick) while groundnuts prefer well-drained (sandy) soil. The scrubland which needed to be cleared included plants and trees such as baobab with very tuff roots to cut. There were no suitable tractors or bulldozers available in the UK so American ones had to be bought and brought in. These were then promptly wrecked by poorly trained operators. The local wildlife including lions, crocodiles, elephants, rhinoceros, bees and scorpions would attack the workers. Drinking water had to be ferried in by lorry to the 150,000 acre site. Flash floods periodically washed away the railway and road connecting to the coast. The hot sun then baked the clay soil hard making harvesting of the nuts difficult.

With such incompetence displayed from the top down it’s understandable that the workers were also prone to strike. Despite all this and with paltry harvests the plan struggled on for 4 years before being abandoned in 1951.

The Tanganyika groundnut scheme was clearly subject to much British derision and ridicule. I see from the wiki entry for the project that 'The Eagle' comic of 29 September 1950, in the Dan Dare strip, 'reproduced' the front page of fictional 'Daily World Post' of 28 September 1995. The main item is the lack of the news from Dan Dare's expedition to Venus, but there is also a small item headed SUCCESS IN EAST AFRICA - PEANUT ARRIVES IN LONDON: "There was a touching ceremony in London yesterday when a whole unblemished peanut was handed to the Minister of Food by a delegation representing equally the native tribes in the groundnut area and the survivors of the Strachey scheme". John Strachey MP was Attlee's Minister of Food and he was also responsible for the UK government, already desperately short of cash, buying thousands of tons of canned snoek fish from South Africa, which the British, hungry though they were and still under rationing, steadfastly refused to eat. Most of it eventually ended up being made into catfood.

I had to read that Dan Dare line twice Meles before realising that 'peanut' is written in the singular. Brilliant!

Come to think of it, peanuts grown as a cash crop as part of an inter-continental enterprise initiated by a command economy government with attendant social dislocation, economic profligacy, human strife, extreme wastefulness and environmental degradation is the exact opposite of wild food. It's interesting to note, however, that since the groundnut scheme, people in east Africa have begun harvesting peanuts on a small, local scale often indeed as a foraged product.

I had no idea that Fat Hen was edible until Green George mentioned it. 

We have loads of it, and masses of nettles too, so we won't starve.

https://www.wildfooduk.com/edible-wild-plants/fat-hen/