Why foraging was so important during the second world war

Between 1939 and 1945, Europe was engaged in the largest war that the human race has ever fought, and it affected every single part of life for the countries involved. Up until this point, the countries of Europe relied heavily on imports to provide the things they couldn’t produce themselves, but when the oceans were full of sea mines and warships, it made transporting cargo very dangerous to the point where most of it completely stopped.

(People would have to deal with huge queues to get their rations, but it was the only way to obtain food)

To get around this shortage of food and other goods, a rationing system came into effect that would only allow people to buy certain amounts of the things they needed. To the credit of the British government, the rationing system applied to all, and letting the poor starve while the rich ate was simply not an option, so even the wealthiest of people would be able to buy the same amount of meat as the poorest of people. Because of this, food shortages affected everyone and often left families hungry and lacking in food variety with only two ways to get around it, either obtain food illegally or go foraging.

With most of the men being expected to either work or fight, this left many women at home to look after the children or work local “safe” jobs. Since it was almost always down to the women to organize the feeding of the family, this put a heavy burden on them and the rationing often left them short of food if they could afford it or not. This led to many women becoming skilled foragers and making regular trips into the countryside to look for ingredients to supplement or flavor the limited supplies they could buy.

Here are a few of the most commonly foraged foods people collected during the war and what they did with them.

Nettles

Today this pest plant is looked on as nothing more than an annoying weed, but in terms of nutritional value, they are very similar to spinach. Nettles aren’t exactly hard to find and since it’s nothing more than just another green-leaf vegetable it can be put into almost anything. The leaves would be stripped off and washed, with the plant sometimes being waved through some flames to wilt the tiny stinging needles, depending on what it was going to be used for. Nettles can be added to any kind of soup, stew, or anything you would possibly use spinach in today, and because the plant grows so quickly and in such large amounts, it would provide a huge boost with decent nutritional value, and all for the low cost of a few stings while gathering it.

Rose hips

I can personally assure you that eating rose hips directly is very unpleasant, and the seeds in the middle have to be removed first so the small thick hairs don’t cause you to choke, but during the war, they weren’t gathered for their taste. Tropical fruits were obviously one of the things that had massive restrictions on them and were very hard to find during the war, which in turn led to a lack of foods with good vitamin C content. Rose hips filled this void in vitamins as 100 grams of rosehip flesh contains about 7 days worth of your recommended daily allowance of vitamin C, which is about 8 times higher than what oranges can provide. The rosehips would normally be made into syrup and mixed into drinks or put into some kind of sweet dish to hide the sharp and bitter taste they have.

Blackberries and elderberries

These two have been put together because they were the only fruits that grew wild in the country in huge amounts. Sure you might be able to find the occasional plum or cherry tree, but blackberries and elderberries are the only fruit-bearing plants you rely on to find in huge amounts. As soon as the berries were ready, a small army of housewives and children would hit the hedgerows and strip the plants clean of any berries they could find. Without these two plants there would be no fruits to make into jam to last the rest of the year and their sugar content was also very welcomed. Foraging these berries put pies on the table and provided nutrients they would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.

Wild Nuts

Things like walnuts and sweet chestnuts would be gathered whenever available, but the most common and least thought of was actually the most popular. Today most people think acorns aren’t even edible, but during the war, they were just as sought after as anything else. A fully grown acorn tree can easily drop 50 kg of acorns each year, and they aren’t usually hard to find. When the tannins have been washed out and the nut has been dried, the taste is quite pleasant and works well baked into bread and cakes or simply just eaten on their own. Nuts also have a high fat content and the other fat-bearing foods you could buy were very limited, making acorns a priority target for a forager.

Burdock

Very easy to identify and the only wild food that would provide a decent-sized root, making it the perfect alternative for potatoes. Britain has a very good climate for growing spuds, and they were one of the most mass-produced foods during the war and almost always available when it came to rations, but having a few extra root vegetables never hurt anyone. The problem with burdock is that the edible part is the root, which means you have to kill the plant to be able to eat it. During the later years of the war, Burdock became dangerously over-foraged leading to it becoming completely wiped out in populated areas, with it only slowly creeping back into the common category over the last couple of decades.

There were very few edible foods that grew in the wild that people didn’t take to supplement their diets, with the more desperate people got the more they would be willing to eat. The creativity of some of the foods they came up with was quite impressive, with people creating alternative versions for everything from icing to Christmas turkey dinners. One of the most popular of these inventive dishes was an alternative for orange juice called Carotene, a drink made from carrot juice with added sugar and normally a secondary vegetable juice to change the flavor a little. After the war ended, the need for foraging began to decline and after all rationing ended in 1954, it had turned into nothing more than collecting berries during the summer.