For about fifteen years in Britain, and for the duration of the Second World War in the United States, a household's dinner was partly decided by a small book of coupons.
In the United States, food rationing was run by the Office of Price Administration. Families registered in the spring of 1942, and the registration was often done through local schools, which meant the paperwork came home in a child's hands. Around nine million people in the U.S. were involved in the first round of registration, according to the wartime records of the time. Sugar was the first food rationed nationwide, beginning in May 1942. Coffee followed. Meat, butter, cheese and fats came later, as supply allowed.
The mechanics were the interesting part. You needed money and you needed stamps. Having cash was not sufficient, and having stamps was not sufficient either. The books were colour-coded by category: blue coupons covered processed goods, the canned, bottled, dried and frozen things; red coupons covered meat, fish, dairy, fats, butter and cheese. Each stamp carried a letter showing the rationing period in which it was valid, and a number showing how many points it was worth. The point values changed as supply changed, and the current values were posted in the shop. Stamps had to be torn out of the book in front of the grocer, which meant the book was present at every purchase and visible to everyone in the queue.
Because the values shifted with supply, the book itself became a small instrument of news. When a point value dropped, it told a family something about ships and harvests that they would otherwise have had to read about. By 1944, one-point red and blue tokens had been introduced, mainly so that change could be given. Later books used green stamps for processed foods. Sugar stamps were identified precisely: Sugar Stamp Number 29, in War Ration Book Four, was good for a stated amount of sugar and nothing else.
Sugar was the strictest item. A family could generally buy one pound per person every two weeks, with extra quantities available by application for home canning, because the harvest had to be put up whether or not there was a war on. Unlike the British system, the American sugar plan did not tie a household to a particular shop. A shopper could use the book at any retailer.
Britain ran a longer and more thorough version. National registration and identity cards came in September 1939, and food rationing began in January 1940. British ration books came in several colours for different groups: buff for adults, green for pregnant women, blue for children. A points system arrived in December 1941, at first for canned meat, canned fish and canned vegetables, and later extended to other goods, with each person given a monthly allowance. British food rationing lasted fourteen years. Sugar came off ration in September 1953, and all food rationing ended on the fourth of July, 1954, more than nine years after the war it was introduced for had finished.
The two countries ended rationing on very different schedules, and the difference is instructive. American wartime rationing did not last long after the fighting stopped; the controls were lifted and the country moved quickly back to ordinary shopping. Britain kept going for years, and food rationing outlasted the war by more than nine years, not ending until the summer of 1954. The fourteen-year span means that a British child could be born after the war and grow up entirely inside the system, never knowing a shop where you could simply buy what you wanted. For that generation, the ration book was not a wartime memory. It was the ordinary furniture of childhood.
The colour-coding also reveals what the government thought mattered. Adults received buff books. Pregnant women received green. Children received blue. Those distinctions were not administrative conveniences; they were decisions about who got more, made by people who had to allocate a limited supply and chose to allocate it towards pregnancy and growth. A ration book is therefore a record of policy as well as of diet, and reading a stack of them together shows the shape of a government's priorities more clearly than a speech does.
The books themselves are now modest museum objects. They are printed on cheap paper, they are filled in with pencil, and they are almost illegible without explanation. What makes them worth keeping is not their design. It is that they record, in the most concrete form imaginable, what a particular family was able to eat in a particular month, and how they managed. A historian reading a single ration book can reconstruct a diet.
Most households threw theirs away the moment rationing ended, which is exactly why they are now scarce. Nobody keeps the paperwork of a restriction once the restriction is gone. The ordinary record of how people actually lived in those years went into the bin along with the coupons.
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