FOOD: CHIEF ARTICLES OF DIET
We now come to food. Two questions, besides that of the amount of money
to be spent, bear upon food. What are the chief articles of diet? Where
are they bought? Without doubt, the chief article of diet in a 20s.
budget is bread. A long way after bread come potatoes, meat, and fish.
Bread is bought from one of the abundance of bakers in the neighbourhood,
and is not as a rule very different in price and quality from bread in
other parts of London. Meat is generally bargained for on street stalls
on Saturday night or even Sunday morning. It may be cheaper than meat
purchased in the West End, but is as certainly worse in original quality
as well as less fresh and less clean in condition. Potatoes are generally
2 lbs. for 1d., unless they are “new” potatoes. Then they are dearer.
When, at certain seasons in the year, they are “old” potatoes, they are
cheaper; but then they do not “cut up” well, owing to the sprouting eyes.
They are usually bought from an itinerant barrow. Bread in Lambeth is
bought in the shop, because the baker is bound, when selling over the
counter, to give legal weight. In other words, when he is paid for a
quartern he must sell a quartern. He therefore weighs two “half-quartern”
loaves, and makes up with pieces of bread cut from loaves he keeps by
him for the purpose until the weight is correct. In different districts
bakers sell a quartern for slightly different prices. The price at one
moment south of Kennington Park may be 5d., while up in Lambeth proper it
may be 5½d. In Kensington at the same moment delivered bread is perhaps
being sold at 6d. a quartern. The difference in price, therefore, at a
given moment might amount to as much as 7d. a week in the case of a large
family, and 3d. in the case of a small family.
When a weekly income is decreased for any cause, the one item of food
which seldom varies—or at any rate is the last to vary—is bread. Meat
is affected at once. Meat may sink from 4s. a week to 6d. owing to a
fluctuation in income. But the amount of bread bought when the full
allowance was paid is, if possible, still bought when meat may have
almost decreased to nothing. The amount of bread eaten in an ordinary
middle-class, well-to-do, but economically managed household of thirteen
persons is 18 quarterns, or 36 loaves, a week—something not far short
of 3 loaves a head a week. This takes no heed of innumerable cakes and
sweet puddings consumed by these thirteen persons, who at the same time
are consuming an ample supply of meat, fish, bacon, fruit, vegetables,
butter, and milk.
In Lambeth, the amounts spent on bread and meat respectively by the wives
of four men in regular work are given below:
Mrs. D.: Allowance, 28s.; ten persons to feed; 10½ quartern at
5½d.; meat, 4s. 2d.
Mrs. C.: Allowance, 21s.; eight persons to feed; 8½ quartern at
5½d.; meat, 3s. 2½d.
Mrs. J.: Allowance, 22s.; five persons to feed; 7 quartern at
5½d.; meat, 2s. 11d.
Mrs. G.: Allowance, 19s. 6d.; five persons to feed; 5½ quartern
at 5½d.; meat, 2s. 2d.
It will be seen that a quartern a head a week is the least amount
taken in these four cases. On the whole, it would be a fairly correct
calculation to allow this quantity as the amount aimed at as a minimum in
most lower working-class families. The sum spent on meat may perhaps be
greater than the sum spent on bread. But meat goes by the board before
bread is seriously diminished, should the income suffer. This the three
cases given here will show:
Mrs. W.: Allowance, 23s.; eight persons to feed; 9½ quartern;
meat, 3s. 9½d.
Allowance reduced to 17s.; eight persons to feed;
8½ quartern; meat, 1s. 6d.
Allowance reduced to 10s. (rent unpaid); eight persons
to feed; 6 quartern; meat, 6d.
Mrs. S.: Allowance, 21s.; eight persons to feed; 7 quartern;
meat, 2s. 6d.
Allowance reduced to 18s.; eight persons to feed;
7 quartern; meat, 1s. 2d.
Mrs. M.: Allowance, 20s.; six persons to feed; 7 quartern;
meat, 2s. 10d.
Allowance reduced to 18s.; six persons to feed; 7
quartern; meat, 2s.
It is difficult to arrive at the quantity of meat, as it is often
bargained for and sold by the piece without weighing. The experienced
housewife offers so much, while the ticket on the meat is offering it for
so much more. A compromise is arrived at and the commodity changes hands.
“Pieces” are sold by weight, but are of various qualities and prices.
Good “pieces” may be 6d. per lb., fair “pieces” are sold for 4½d., which
is the most common price paid for them, but inferior “pieces” can be had
for 3d. on occasions. They are usually gristle and sinew at that price.
Meat is bought for the men, and the chief expenditure is made in
preparation for Sunday’s dinner, when the man is at home. It is eaten
cold by him the next day. The children get a pound of pieces stewed for
them during the week, and with plenty of potatoes they make great show
with the gravy.
Bread, however, is their chief food. It is cheap; they like it; it comes
into the house ready cooked; it is always at hand, and needs no plate and
spoon. Spread with a scraping of butter, jam, or margarine, according to
the length of purse of the mother, they never tire of it as long as they
are in their ordinary state of health. They receive it into their hands,
and can please themselves as to where and how they eat it. It makes the
sole article in the menu for two meals in the day. Dinner may consist of
anything, from the joint on Sunday to boiled rice on Friday. Potatoes
will play a great part, as a rule, at dinner, but breakfast and tea will
be bread.
Potatoes are not an expensive item in the 20s. budget. They may cost
1s. 3d. a week in a family of ten persons, and 4d. a week in a family
of three. But they are an invariable item. Greens may go, butter may
go, meat may diminish almost to the vanishing-point, before potatoes
are affected. When potatoes do not appear for dinner, their place will
be taken by suet pudding, which will mean that there is no gravy or
dripping to eat with them. Treacle, or—as the shop round the corner calls
it—“golden syrup,” will probably be eaten with the pudding, and the two
together will form a midday meal for the mother and children in a working
man’s family. All these are good—bread, potatoes, suet pudding; but
children need other food as well.
First and foremost children need milk. All children need milk, not only
infants in arms. When a mother weans her child, she ought to be able to
give it plenty of milk or food made with milk. The writer well remembers
a course of eloquent and striking lectures delivered by an able medical
man to an audience of West-End charitable ladies. He ended his course by
telling his audience that, if they wished to do good to the children of
the poor, they would do more towards effecting their purpose if they were
to walk through East End streets with placards bearing the legend “MILK
is the proper food for infants,” than by taking any other action he
could think of. His audience was deeply interested and utterly believing.
The fact that the children of the poor never taste milk once they cease
to be nursed by their mothers was well known to the lecturer through his
hospital experience, and hence his earnest appeal to have the mothers
of those children taught what was the proper food to give them. He was,
however, wrong in his idea that poor women do not realize that milk is
the proper food for infants. The reason why the infants do not get milk
is the reason why they do not get good housing or comfortable clothing—it
is too expensive. Milk costs the same, 4d. a quart, in Lambeth that it
costs in Mayfair. A healthy child ought to be able to use a quart of milk
a day, which means a weekly milk bill for that child of 2s. 4d.—quite
an impossible amount when the food of the whole family may have to be
supplied out of 8s. or 9s. a week. Even a pint a day means 1s. 2d. a
week, so that is out of the question, though a pint a day would not
suffice for a child of a year old, who would need his or her full share
of potatoes and gravy and bread as well. As it is, the only milk the
children of the labourer get is the separated tinned milk, sold in 1d.,
2d., 3d., and 4d. tins, according to size. These tins bear upon them in
large red letters the legend, “This milk is not recommended as food for
infants.” The children do not get too much even of such milk. Families of
ten persons would take two tins at 3½d. in the week. Families of five,
six, or seven, would probably take one such tin. It is used to put in
tea, which, as it is extremely sweet, it furnishes with sugar as well as
with milk. Sometimes it is spread on the breakfast slice of bread instead
of butter or jam. An inexperienced visitor probably suggests that it
would make a good milk pudding, but is silenced by hearing that it would
take half a tin to make one pudding, and then there is no richness in it.
Some people have suggested skim milk as a way round this very terrible
deprivation of the hard-working poor. But skim milk does not take the
place of whole milk as a food for infants. Parents who are comfortably
off would never dream of starving their infants upon it. Even supposing
that the children of the poor could magically flourish upon skim milk
alone, there is not enough of it on the market to allow its use to be
regarded as a universal panacea for hungry babies. In fact, it is worth
a moment’s speculation as to whether the whole milk-supply of England
is sufficient to insure a quart a day to each English child under five
years of age. It is more than likely that, unless the milk-supply were
enormously increased, adults would have to go entirely without milk
should the nation suddenly awake to its duty towards its children.
The purpose of this book is not to inquire as to whether this mother or
that mother might not do a little better than she does if she bought
some skim milk, or trained her children to enjoy burned porridge. It
is to inquire whether, under the same conditions and with the same
means at their command, any body of men or women could efficiently and
sufficiently lodge and feed the same number of children.
A boys’ home which maintains some thirty children between the ages of six
and fifteen feeds, clothes, and lodges, each boy on an average of 6s. a
week. This does not sound an extravagant sum. It is the outcome of much
study, great knowledge of the subject, and untiring zeal. The working
man’s wife whose husband out of a 22s. or 23s. wage allows her 20s., and
who has that convenient family of three children which is permitted by
experts on the subject to be a becoming number in a working-class family,
has only 4s. a head on which to feed, lodge, and clothe, the family.
Milk depots have been in existence in Lambeth for some years, and have
undoubtedly done splendid service to babies under one year of age whose
mothers cannot nurse them, but can afford to pay the growing amount of
9d. to 3s. a week for their children. The milk has to be called for,
which limits the area in which it can be supplied; but it is sent out in
sealed vessels, and is mixed in the exact proportions suitable to the age
of the infant. So, when it can be afforded, its results are excellent.
Unfortunately, the nursing mother is not helped by this, and it is she
who requires milk for the needs of the baby she is nursing. Moreover,
the price is, in the case of the 20s. budget, quite out of the question
should the children number more than one, or at the most two.
As things are, once weaned, the child of a labouring man gets its share
of the family diet. It gets its share of the 4d. tin of separated milk,
its share of gravy and potatoes, a sip of the cocoa on which 3d. or
4d. a week may be spent for the use of everyone, and, if its father be
particularly partial to it, a mouthful of fat bacon once or twice a week,
spared from the not too generous “relish to his tea.” Besides these
extras it gets bread.
Women in the poorer working-class districts nurse their babies, as a
rule, far longer than they should. It is not unusual for a mother to
say that she always nurses until they are a year old. In many cases
where a better-off mother would recognize that she is unable to satisfy
her child’s hunger, and would wean it at once, the poor mother goes
hopelessly on because it is cheaper to nurse. It is less trouble to
nurse, and it is held among them to be a safeguard against pregnancy. For
those three reasons it is difficult to persuade a Lambeth woman to wean
her child. In most of these cases milk or palatable food supplied to the
mother would save the situation, and contrive a double debt to pay—the
welfare of both mother and child. But the mother, who is by nature a poor
nurse, usually finds, when she “gets about again,” that her milk deserts
her, and the grave difficulty of rearing the baby is met by her with a
weekly 5d. tin of milk of a brand which has not been separated, but which
is a very inadequate quantity for an infant.
The articles of diet other than bread, meat, potatoes (with occasional
suet puddings and tinned milk), are fish, of which a shilling’s worth
may be bought a week, and of which quite half will go to provide the
bread-winner with “relishes,” while the other half may be eaten by the
mother and children; bacon, which will be entirely consumed by the man;
and an occasional egg. The tiny amounts of tea, dripping, butter, jam,
sugar, and greens, may be regarded rather in the light of condiments than
of food.
The diet where there are several children is obviously chosen for its
cheapness, and is of the filling, stodgy kind. There is not enough of
anything but bread. There is no variety. Nothing is considered but money.