The British Food Journal Volume 62 Issue 7 1960

Sections of the world's population have always been short of food, the menace of famine ever present. Among primitive peoples, the search for food is their greatest preoccupation. In the years before the first Great War, in the civilised countries of the west, including our own, the persistent poverty of the casual and unskilled workers, helped and held to a permanent state in so many cases by improvidence, was often stretched to near‐starvation, and with few agencies really capable of affording adequate relief. Families went short of food for fairly long periods, especially in the industrial areas and towns and this during times when a dozen stale loaves could be bought for a shilling and a pint of skimmed milk for a halfpenny. In the rural areas, nature helped a little and the country folk could talk of the pleasurable flavour of a rook pie and comb the hedgerows for edible roots, but here too were the cruel flashes when men went to prison for snaring a rabbit on private land or stealing a few swedes from a farmer's clamp.