Food on the Points System

 

While you were assured of your basic rationed foods each week, the standard butter, cheese, eggs, milk etc, the foods that were imported into our country at great risk to our Merchant Navy ships, or grown here and at risk through fluctuations of weather and therefore could not always be guaranteed to be available, were put onto the Points System.  This way the government could reduce the amount of points required for something that was plentiful or raise them if things were scarcer.  Controlling supply and demand in a sensible, if very confusing way.

At the launch of the points system, to give housewives a real sense of being able to choose foods for their families again and raise morale, the shops were filled with canned and dried foods that had been stockpiled in national warehouses on orders from the Government in the previous months.  It must have made for a glorious first couple of months as you spent your points on things you hadn't seen for a while.

Below is the page that remain at the top of the blog for future reference.

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Foods on the Points System

During the war years the points values of foods changed on an almost weekly basis and over the course of the years the points per person varied from 16 - 24.  I have decided to take the average of 20 as my points allowance each month.  It is hard to do as a single person, for instance if you were a family of four you would have had 80 points to shop with.  This would obviously make it slightly easier to buy additional things that I have not listed here ... tinned fish, meat etc. as they were usually up to 20 points per tin.

Points may be spent over the course of the month, they don't have to be spent all at once, but no points may be carried forward, if you don't use them you lose them.  This was how it was for housewives during the war years and this is how it will remain for me.

These are the amounts that I am working from, these were the points at one stage during 1942 in a couple of my books.  

Finding out and deciding upon the points of various foodstuffs is possibly the hardest thing to do when you are researching the Home Front during the second world war, and replicating it in a fair way has to be decided upon and stuck to unless you are doing the challenge on a year by year basis following the war years ... for simplicities sake and so that I can get used to it more easily, I am sticking in a time warp of 1942.

Below - weighing out the first months points shopping.

1lb Rice

1lb Red Lentils

I need a bigger jar!!

A total of 1lb Pasta 

Yes this was available during the war years but usually in the form of Macaroni.  I will be using up my rather large stash of all different shapes, colours and forms of pasta.

4oz Dried Fruit

Too many points for me as a single person to be able to afford a whole pound.  But luckily grocers back in the 1940s regularly sold things by the ounce as well as the pound.

1lb Porridge Oats

The research I have done has led me to believe that while Porridge Oats were usually on the points system, Oatmeal was available off any sort of ration if and when it was available.  

In various parts of the UK and the US, oatmeal, porridge oats, steel cut oats etc etc are a minefield of different names.  I am calling (as we have always called it) my porridge oats oats and my little gritty used for biscuits and crackers oatmeal oatmeal.

As a point of reference my first months shopping on Points looks like this.

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I hope I have explained all that reasonably well, it's very confusing.  

I can just imagine the housewives during the war years getting to the shops and finding all the values having changed since the week before, as they did regularly due to supply and demand problems.  Shopping and cooking for your family, no matter what it's size really was a full time job back then, and one that so many of them had to do alongside a real full time job.  I am full of admiration for how they coped.

Sue xx