The Pittsburgh Press (September 10, 1942)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
LONDON – After an absence of a year and a half, I expected to find the food situation in Britain much tighter than when I left.
But actually, Britain seems to be eating as well as it was early in 1941. The only difference I can sense is an almost complete lack of eggs.
Choices are limited, but they give you huge portions of what you do select. Your average meal consists of soup, an entree of chicken, fish, roast beef or lamb, scads of potatoes and cabbage or spinach, and a dessert of berries or pudding.
It isn’t any lack of food, but the sameness of it, that sort of gets you. I’m eating more than I have in years, yet my stomach always has a sort of unsatisfied feeling.
Most of my friends over here have gained weight in the past year on their rationed diet. They attribute this to two things:
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They have to eat more starches and fattening substitutes, and have little fruit.
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Here in wartime you hate to send anything back uneaten and wasted, and consequently you stuff yourself fuller than you would ordinarily.
It’s even having its effect on me. The other night I stepped onto a penny weighing machine, and a little card popped out saying “eight stone and six.” Translated for you, that’s 118 pounds, which makes me practically obese.
Incidentally, on the back of the card it said, “You are naturally generous and affectionate.” Also brave and charming, it might have added.
England is full of jokes about its rationing restrictions and the sameness of its diet.
As you’ve no doubt heard, the English go in heavily for boiled potatoes. You finally get so the mere sight of a boiled potato enrages you. The English apparently feel the same way, and yet they just keep on boiling them. Recently the magazine Punch had the following quip:
“There are 101 ways of cooking potatoes, says a chef. The 102nd way is to fry them a golden brown and garnish with a large fillet steak!”
Oddly enough, the hated Brussels sprout has not reared its ugly head a single time since I arrived. Apparently they are saving them all to torture us with this winter.
There is a completely unexplainable difference – at least to me – in the quality and price of foods at various hotels. When I first came to London I went to my hotel. But I have moved to another one now, for the fantastic prices finally overcame me.
At the first hotel I got sugar for my oatmeal only twice in 16 days. And not once did I ever get even a powdered egg. Just sugarless oatmeal, sometimes prunes, two English sausages and tea. And the breakfast cost $1.30.
But where I am now, a modern but less flossy hotel, I get sugar every morning on my oatmeal, an extra lump for my coffee, and scrambled powdered eggs and sausages every day – and the cost is only 50 cents. The ways of innkeepers are too deep for me.
Some time ago the government set a 5-shilling limit on all meals, but put in a proviso allowing the restaurant or hotel to add a “house charge” up to 1 shilling sixpence.
The chain restaurants and the smaller hotels, many of them very good, do observe the rule. But lots of places get around it. For instance, I had a quite ordinary lunch the other day, and it cost 12 and 6 – or $2.50! On the bill it said “Luncheon – five shillings ($1). House charge – seven and six ($1.50).”
Being a meek man, I paid and slipped quietly out, instead of throwing off my coat and challenging the head waiter in person, as any legitimate hero should have done.
Yes, England still has plenty to eat, and the bombing lull has let a little relaxation into life, and yet living has steadily grown more complicated for Londoners.
My British friends say that one who lives in hotels as I do wouldn’t notice it so much, but that the average Englishman must ponder every little movement in his life.
They’ve grown to save every scrap of paper, every piece of string, to be on a constant alert against waste of the tiniest sort. Before buying a bite of food or a stitch of clothing you think and weigh and dole out your slim reservoir of coupons with the greatest reluctance. It’s hard to buy a comb, or cufflinks, or a hundred little things which don’t necessarily keep body and soul together but which seem important.
The same undoubtedly applies to all nations which have warred for three years, and will finally happen to us in America. Then maybe we lifelong string-savers will come into our own.