ABSTRACT
There is a strange irony in the fact that the two crucial periods for the improvement of the diet of the majority of English people coincided with times of national crisis - the Great Depression of the 1880s and the wartime and post-war difficulties of the 1940s. In both cases the basic reason for improvement was the same -a rising standard of living resulting from an increase in the purchasing power of the population. But here the parallel ends. In the first period this increased spending power was due to external factors over which the government exercised no control - the emergence of great primary producing countries and developments in communications and technology which made possible the mass importation of cheap food; in the second, the state took a direct part by fixing prices, by rationing, and by deliberately pursuing a nutritional and social policy which succeeded in raising standards at a time of acute national peril. This was possibly the most remarkable, though least-publicized, achievement of wartime control.
