To think rationing should be brought back?

[Tortycat]

Lots of threads about Christmas over consumption at the moment, both food and present wise. People either feeling guilty about buying too much or financially feeling the strain. Climate change seems to be at near catastrophe levels and we have to stop consuming to have a chance - plastic, palm oil, meat etc.

So how about bringing back rationing? A definate limit in what you can 'consume ' ie clothes, food, stuff, airmiles. fuel etc. Ok I'm aware there may be economic problems, but hurtling towards environmental catastrophe just to keep people in jobs seems insane. Think of the plus points - no fast fashion, no 'keeping up with the Jones's, no having to keep buying things, more trade and jobs in repairing things, less waste etc. Its so easy to keep buying things. I 'need' new clothes, new bathroom suite etc, but i dont really. If everyone had to cut back it would be so mu ch easier. The excess and consumerism of xmas have depressed me and adverts are still on imploring us to buy more. Drastic times call for drastic measures??

You are a little bit out, it's 5 billion years before the sun is expected to turn into a red giant and reach the earth.

Right, well not exactly something to worry about then is it?

I understand what you're getting at OP, but it wouldn't work these days. Yes, we need to have everyone change their way of consuming, and while there is (finally) more awareness now about plastics, environmental concerns etc, it will take at least another generation or two for the majority to change their ways and for it to become the norm.

Even when rationining was on, it didn’t work. The black market was huge. My grandad was from a very well-to-do family and are fabulous meals during the war in black market restaurants. They ate tomatoes and cheese every day for breakfast and bananas once a week. He never knew where his father got all this stuff and his mother thought it better not to ask.

if you ration petrol, how do you expect anyone in rural areas to survive? Should we be using pony & trap again?

Well, yeah, why not? Or bicycles. Cargo bikes are brilliant and you can get electric ones. I grew up in a small village and there were a few people who travelled by horse and cart if they weren’t going far. I don’t drive so I used to walk for an hour to get to the nearest town. These things were standard for hundreds of years.

What would be more successful would be an import tax.
The problem with this is the way this affects people in other countries whose economies are far more dependent on agriculture than our own. We already have this in the form of a tax in imported secondary goods, meaning that many of the worlds poorest countries are unable to develop into secondary industries as importing their products abroad just isn't feasible.

There has been rationing by stealth since the Tories came to power in 2010. Many people have had to reduce consumption as wages have stagnated and prices rise. The worst affected, as always, are the poor, the sick and the disabled who have seen the real value if their income slashed. These are deliberate outcomes from the choice of austerity politics - protect the few at the expense of the many

I suggest, OP, you go and have a chat with your DM, ask her if she wants to return to rationing.

I agree with the thinking behind the suggestion, OP. We all (or almost all) eat too much, drink too much, buy and discard too much in general. It's not sustainable

It's thinking like this that has given us the stupid sugar tax.

I now can't buy many drinks because they have sweeteners in, which I choose not to eat.

It would lead to even bigger divisions in society between rich and poor and those in poverty as those with greater wealth are able to buy whatever they need on the black market whilst the poor and poverty stricken lead a more miserable or impossible existence.

people who travelled by horse and cart if they weren’t going far. I don’t drive so I used to walk for an hour to get to the nearest town.
My nearest supermarket is just over 50 miles away, that's going to be a fun walk

Things weren't that great when there were horses everywhere,
In busier places it juyst means horseshit all over the place. Can't imagine London was much fun!

Before we get killed by the sun exploding we will be long dead from the knock on effects of a huge solar flare, in part because we are now so dependant on satelite technology and electricity.

see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

There was a study on the effect of taxing sugary drinks. After an inital decrease in the consumption of sugary drinks it increased alcohol consumption in the longer term.

sugar tax is a disaster it's all fucking sweeteners now which are also really bad for you and taste like shit to boot

Oh and sweeteners make you eat more and put on weight...

What would be more successful would be an import tax.

The problem with this is the way this affects people in other countries whose economies are far more dependent on agriculture than our own. We already have this in the form of a tax in imported secondary goods, meaning that many of the worlds poorest countries are unable to develop into secondary industries as importing their products abroad just isn't feasible.

I was more thinking about clothing, electronic and plastic goods rather than food. When I suggested import tax, no reason these couldn't be produced in the UK instead of made in the Far East where wages are lower. Make these things here, provide UK work, have goods repairable, so it's more feasible to get spare parts etc.

We currently export bits of food we don't eat, to places where different cuts are more popular - like offal for example or certain types of fish.

The problem with imposing import taxes, is that these are also recipocated by those we export to.

Thus, we would sell less of the stuff we have an excess of in addition to potentially importing less. Which is only a potential anyway.

As a nation we don't produce enough food to feed ourselves. We import 40% of the food we eat, but at certain times of the year the percentage is much higher. We import 70% of what we eat in March.

So if we put import taxes on food, it'd realistically cost everyone more to feed ourselves, and we'd make less money from exporting and we'd potentially have seasonal shortages.

This might make us consider changing our habits of what we eat and eat more local and seasonal stuff, but this would require to change our expectations and the more likely scenario is that the demand for these products to not really decline in a short time frame. Partly because we lack the knowledge of what to cook and how to cook it at those times.

As it is the government are apparently planning to tell us to change our habits in the event of no deal Brexit, because we'd have much less fruit and veg from Holland and Spain who are huge suppliers at present. (See www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6519795/Brits-told-change-EAT-no-deal-Brexit.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=1490&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter which was originally reported in The Times but the article is paywalled).

I do think we need changes to the way we eat, but its not going to be an easy process and isn't just about our tastes; its also about the way in which we farm. I find it interesting that large scale farmers have struggled with poor harvests this year, but our local small scale producer has said they have had a real bumper year this year because they produce a wide crop range which they rotate in a way that large scale farmers just don't.

I don't like Brexit and I don't agree with and think it will harm us, but I do think it might force changes in food which are needed in the long term. I do think the way that it will be forced will be deeply unpleasant and potentially catastrophic to a great many and thats a very bad thing especially as the planning and thought to enable a smooth change is totally absent. Particularly because our harvesting and farming capacity requires labour - including skilled labour - from abroad. Its not just fruit pickers but also vets who oversee animal slaughter and welfare that come from the EU in large numbers.

One item that we'd have particular problems with is milk, simply because we do not produce enough as a nation to match demand and we get huge amounts from the EU. We've seen the closure of dairy farms in the UK over a long period of time. We no longer have enough skilled farmers to be able to rebuild the domestic industry any time soon and not enough people interested in becoming dairy farmers to train up.

The whole thing is a mess. And it requires a whole lot more thought that either rationing or simply leaving the EU in the fashion that seems to be the increasingly prefered and most likely option by the government.

Redtothbrush yes re studies showign people who drink diet drinks put on more weight than those on the sugar

It's really backfired IMO as so many of these initiavtives do >unintended consequences.

AFAIK the idea was the drinks woudl get more expensive to discourage people from having so much.
Actual result is almost all drinks have entirely replaced sugar with sweeteners which is a totally diferent result

"Rationing will go down well with the people visiting foodbanks and living week to week."

Given that what rationing did was guarantee that every individual got enough of everything to have a healthy diet that was the point, to make sure everyone got their share of what was in short supply it very well might, if it were done the way it was during the war and in the decade after it.

People who bought on the black market were buying things that were extra to the very carefully worked out nutritional requirements. If everyone, rich and poor, had the same number of points/coupons/whatever for the things they needed (so much meat, so much veg, so much milk, so much sugar, and so on) and was guaranteed to be able to get it, then even if the ones with more money wanted to buy things that were not on the ration, the ones who at the moment go hungry would still be better off than they are.

I had to study this in school in the early sixties, and Magnus Pyke and the others at the Ministry of Food were very careful to make sure that children in particular would get enough of each food to be healthy. And I remember being told by my mother that when my brother was refusing to drink milk as a toddler, his ration was altered to have extra cheese instead of extra milk in it so that he would get his calcium requirement each week.

I also have a feeling that the generation who grew up during and just after the war got the best general nutrition of any generation in this country ever, far better than that of the poor during the 1920s and 1930s. The average height of adults in the country went up in 1965 when those children started to become adults. (But I can't find the figures that I had in 1970!) Average height had been rising slowly for about a century, and did a sudden leap of about an inch -- which is a huge amount in an average like that, and it hasn't gone up as much at one time since.

It's a complicated issue

That doesn't mean I ever want to taste cod liver oil again as long as I live, though. It was probably very good for us and full of essential vitamins, but it was yick.

The point about China - yes, it’s true that China has an immense pollution problem. But it’s also making large efforts to reduce this pollution - they’ve closed huge numbers of coal mines and inefficient coal power station and installed colossal amounts of renewable energy. Also to note that a not insignificant proportion of the Chinese economic growth - and pollution - has been propelled by manufacturing goods for the western markets. I get that China is a massive contributor to emissions, but I think that refusing to act because “China” is a position that doesn’t really reflect the whole situation.

How do ration modern day food to ensure everyone gets a balanced amount of food?

In the 1940s and 1950s people pretty much all cooked from scratch. Since then we have developed the food processing industry. You can't unpick that without risking huge numbers of jobs and completely changing the way we all eat with other catastrophic consequences!

Yes, we SHOULD cook more from scratch, and I generally do cook a lot from basics so I know what I'm eating, but even I use the odd curry sauce etc. The idea that we could reverse all this, is utter fantasy and nonsense. Unless as previous posters have joked, we decide to become North Korea.

A lot also stems from us not knowing how much we should be eating; people think that a standard portion of meat should be at least twice what is actually recommended. Try and buy a steak in a resturant the size which is recommended. You'll struggle. Personally I'd like the option because I'm tiny and the size of portions is far to big for me, but for DH he'd just walk out hungry. He cycles to work and generally needs far higher than the recommended 2500 calories for a man, whereas I need a lot less than the recommended 2000 calories for a woman - I generally needs around 1300 - 1400 calories. Which makes cooking at home a bit of a challenge in itself! But it requires consciously thinking about it and a lot of self control on my part. DH needs the food to pursue a more active lifestyle - which also should be encouraged.

My point being these arbitary calorie numbers are utterly meaningless in 2018. The difference between DH and myself just illustrates it. What works for him doesn't work for me and vice versa. It works marginally better if you are cooking from scratch but its crap and doesn't solve anything when you are talking about rationing preportioned ready meals.

One of the best 'diet plans' which is proved as being pretty effective is simply reducing your plate size to 9 inch plate as it affects the psychology of how much you eat simply by affecting how much you put on your plate to begin with. You'll notice that if you eat out, you'll almost never get a plate this size.

Arguably we should ban the sale of larger plates as standard, instead either having a 9 inch (or smaller) or a much large obviously serving size plate rather than introducing rationing. And even this would have the problem of all the bigger plates already in circulation!

It comes down to people needing to make conscious and educated decisions about how and what they eat. And to take responsibility for it themselves rather than have the state impose meaningless nonsensical rules about it.

One of the biggest inhibitors to introducing rules about advertising the number of calories in meals for restuarants is how chains can afford to work this out but its utterly prohibitive and impossible for independantly owned restuarants particularly ones which might change their menus on a regular basis to reflect seasonality.

Honestly, you'd think that the people proposing these rules lived on a different planet or had no idea whatsoever what they were talking about.

I think that would be a great idea. I'm just about to try a year on Huel as it's low packagaing and vegan and I'm sick of shopping and cooking for one. There is one called soylent as well which made me laugh.

uk.huel.com/?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=HUEL_BRAND_UK_NEST&utm_term=huel&utm_content=Huel