Studies of the diet of students at Edinburgh University.

Abstract

Sir John Boyd Orr (1937) demonstrated that in the social and economic conditions prevailing in Great Britain during the nineteen-thirties one-tenth of the population was consuming food which was both insufficient in quantity and unsatisfactory in quality when compared with accepted dietary standards. This underfeeding was associated with much ill health and poor physical development. The outbreak of the 1939-45 war stimulated the Government into a large number of measures designed to control the distribution of food equitably and thereby to raise the level of health and the martial efficiency of the people. In this the Government appeared to achieve a great success, and the consensus of public opinion was that the limited food resources available throughout the period of the war were shared out equitably in relation to human needs. Further, the majority of expert opinion agreed that not only had the general health of the people not deteriorated as a result of the food restrictions, but in certain respects, notably as regards infant and maternal health, an improvement had taken place. Rationing, with its inconveniences and irksome restrictions, was accepted as inevitable while hostilities lasted. Many persons had, however, fostered the false hope that, with the cessation of fighting in 1945, food restrictions, too, would soon cease. But few people had realized the precarious position of international agriculture, even before the outbreak of hostilities, and the serious blows it received during the war. The damage to world trading also precluded any possibilities of an immediate, plenteous supply of food capable of meeting all demands. Indeed, in 1946-47 and in early 1948 the food situation ih this country deteriorated. A " dollar crisis " in the autumn of 1947 and a partial failure of our potato crop combined to make that winter perhaps the worst from a food point of view since 1939. It has now indeed become clear to almost all of us that food shortages are likely to persist for a long period and that restrictions are a feature of peace as well as of war. Now, rationing is no longer a military emergency measure and a complex governmental food-controlling machine has become a recognized part of peacetime economy. It is therefore important to devise means to study the machinery and its effect on food consumption and food habits. Experiences of other countries have shown that a rationing scheme may be one thing on paper and a very different affair in practice. The present survey was undertaken to find out how a group of people were in fact faring during the winter 1947-48. University undergraduates enjoyed no special privileges as regards food. All the special rations for schoolchildren cease at the eighteenth birthday, before most of the students have entered the University and also before many of the men have completed their growth and reached full stature. Further, university students who live at home or in lodgings do not receive the benefits of the numerous industrial canteens available throughout the country to so many young people. The study, then, is of -a group of people with no special privileged source of food supply.