FOOD PROBLEMS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 76, Issue 6481, 23 February 1948, Page 3

FOOD PROBLEMS

POSITION IN ENGLAND STATEMENT BY PROSPECTIVE FATHER A prospective father’s views on living conditions in England as they affect him. and his wife are given in a letter received recently from Mr R. W. Holland, 19 Christchurch Avenue, Kenton. Middlesex. He wrote:“If ; my wife has both our milk rations (two pints a week) and her extra milk which she gets during pregnhncy, she will only get 11 pints a week. By the time she has had a cereal in the morning and a cup of cocoa at night, a pint is gone. She gets an extra egg every allocation, which works out at about two eggs a week. She is allowed an extra 6d worth of meat a week, so in all she gets for heTself meat to the value of Is 6d a week. She can also buy three bottles of orange juice a month, and she is given by the local clinic a little bag of vitamin pills with instructions to take one pill a day. Apart from that, she gets nothing extra. Of course she gets the normal ration of 31b of potatoes, one ounce of cooking fat and three ounces of .butter a week. She may get currants and sultanas if she is lucky.

“I am happy at the thought of having junior, but I’m getting rather worried about how it will leave the wife, for I know she is not getting enough good food to feed two people successfully. One of them must suffer, and I know which one it will be. “Don’t get the mistaken idea that I’m grousing, because I’m not. We both came through the war unscathed, and we both have something that money cannot buy—a sense of humour; but in spite of all .this, the same thing is running through our minds as is running through everyone’s mind in England to-day: “Will I be able to ?”

The women’s greatest worry was about food, and the second greatest worry, perhaps, was clothes. For men it was a worry about money and somewhere to live, said the writer, who is himself living in furnished rooms.