Foreign News: Empty Cupboards

If you had two chops for lunch yesterday, you ate what was for most British civilians a week’s ration of meat. Britain’s larder is lower than it has been since the lean days of 1917, when food stocks fell within six weeks of exhaustion. For the first time since World War II began, Germans are eating better than are Britons.

These and other facts about Britain’s food shortage, unsuspected by most U.S. citizens, were picked up last week by observers in London. Details:

¶ The food consumption of civilians is 37% less than normal. Of this difference, 22% is diverted to the Army (which is well fed), the rest has been destroyed by bombs or could not be imported for lack of ships.

¶ The disparity, both in quantity and kind, between food the upper classes get and that which goes to the masses is serious. Poor and middle-class grocers’ shelves are nearly empty.

¶ British masses cannot buy shredded wheat, though it is made in Britain, be cause the entire stock is usually disposed of privately by profiteering wholesalers.

They have no salmon, few sardines, no canned fruit (not even unpopular plums), a dwindling store of canned vegetables, spaghetti, beans, soup.

¶ Citrus fruits have virtually disappeared.

The few that arrive from Spain—by way of Nova Scotia—are usually rotten.

¶ Soaring fish prices go under Government control next week, along with eggs, onions, cheese. Sole now sells for 4s 6d (90¢) a pound.

¶ No onions can be found in public mar kets. At an auction last week for London’s War Weapons fund, a basket of onions brought $137,532— about $12,000 an on ion.

¶ The weekly egg ration is two eggs per person.

¶ At swank, expensive Fortnum & Mason’s can be found a few tins of chicken breast, stews and curries, costly bottled fruits.

Fortnum’s lush vegetable department has fresh asparagus at $2.10 a bunch, fresh peaches at $1.50 a peach, strawberries at two guineas ($8.40) a box.

¶ In Soho’s restaurants you can order four strawberries for half a crown (50¢).

¶ The poor man’s national supper of fish & chips (French fried potatoes) at a stall is fast becoming fish and mashed potatoes.

Reason: no lard for frying.

¶ Crops in Britain are one month late this spring. Because of wet, cold weather, good crops are not expected.

Of the $500,000,000 worth of U.S. food allotted to Britain under the Lend-Lease Act, hardly any had been delivered last week. Piled up on U.S. piers was $70,000,000 worth, waiting for cargo space. For this serious situation Britain’s U.S. friends blamed the British themselves. The U.S.

Department of Agriculture last February found representatives of the Food Ministry amazingly unconcerned about food, almost had to force the food provisions in the Lend-Lease Act upon them.

If British morale ever crumbles, say U.S. observers in Britain, it will be because of dwindling food supplies. Warned one, who heard an ambulance driver complain that he had not had a decent meal in a month: “The British can take it from the bombers, but I doubt if they can stand empty bellies.” Foodleggers. One sinister development that aggravated the food situation was the rise in wartime Britain of a new kind of criminal: the food racketeer. Like gangsters who terrorized the U.S. under Prohibition, foodleggers have highjacked trucks, altered labels, threatened shopkeepers and cafe proprietors. In spite of 5,077 convictions in the first three months of 1941, fines ranging from $8 to $8,000 and a number of imprisonments, illegal traffic in food goes on. Chief difference between British and U.S. mobsters: in Britain so far there have been no gang killings.

From one recent food convoy speeding toward a bombed area in the north of England, said John Parker, secretary of the Labor Party’s Food Committee, “a large proportion” of the trucks were spirited away, never reached their destination. Farmers in Kent and other rural districts patrol their fields at night with shotguns to keep mobsters from slaughtering their pigs and sheep, roaring away in high-powered cars with the carcasses.

Merchants complain that they are blackmailed by a swarm of food speculators who sell them illegal supplies when normal stocks are gone, thereafter force them to go on doing business with them or be handed over to the police. Although retailers are licensed, wholesalers are not; as many as ten middlemen in some cases may pile up their profits in the dark. The London Daily Herald has unearthed a nest of “speakeasy” restaurants dealing in illicit food supplies.

To hunt down these racketeers Lord Woolton, Minister of Food, last week unleashed a flying squad of special food inspectors, appointed 13 notable businessmen in certain food trades to keep an eye on distribution. Promising a statement to Parliament soon on food prices, Lord Woolton announced that the Government had fitted out a fleet of traveling grocery vans to take the place of ruined shops in bombed areas.

If food was scarce, Britons did not intend to go without their pints of beer. The Daily Express calculated that Britons this year will consume enough beer to yield $588,000,000 in taxes, pay for 11⅓ days of Britain’s war.