Apropos of the Food Stamp Diet:

In early 1936, George Orwell travelled around the North of England talking to unemployed miners; in 1937, his account was published as The Road To Wigan Pier. In chapter 6, part of which is reproduced below, he deals with budgeting among the unemployed in general, and particularly with expenditures on food.

So perhaps the really important thing about the unemployed, the really basic thing if you look to the future, is the diet they are living on. As I said earlier, the average unemployed family lives on an income of round about thirty shillings a week, of which at least a quarter goes in rent. It is worth considering in some detail how the remaining money is spent. I have here a budget which was made out for me by an unemployed miner and his wife. I asked them to make a list which represented as exactly as possible their expenditure in a typical week. This man’s allowance was thirty-two shillings a week, and besides his wife he had two children, one aged two years and five months and the other ten months. Here is the list:

		s.	d.
Rent		9	½
Clothing Club		3	0
Coal		2	0
Gas		1	3
Milk		10	½
Union Fees		0	3
Insurance (on the children)		0	2
Meat		2	6
Flour (2 stone)		3	4
Yeast		0	4
Potatoes		1	0
Dripping		0	10
Margarine		0	10
Bacon		1	2
Sugar		1	9
Tea		1	0
Jam		7	½
Peas and cabbage		0	6
Carrots and onions		0	4
Quaker oats		4	½
Soap, powders, blue, etc.			10
Total	£1	12	0

In addition to this, three packets of dried milk were sup-plied weekly for the baby by the Infants’ Welfare Clinic. One or two comments are needed here. To begin with the list leaves out a great deal — blacking, pepper, salt, vinegar, matches, kindling-wood, raeor blades, replacements of utensils, and wear and tear of furniture and bedding, to name the first few that come to mind. Any money spent on these would mean reduction on some other item. A more serious charge is tobacco. This man happened to be a small smoker, but even so his tobacco would hardly cost less than a shilling a week, meaning a further reduction on food. The ‘clothing clubs’ into which unemployed people pay so much a week are run by big drapers in all the industrial towns. Without them it would be impossible for unemployed people to buy new clothes at all. I don’t know whether or not they buy bedding through these clubs. This particular family, as I happen to know, possessed next to no bedding.

In the above list, if you allow a shilling for tobacco and deduct this and the other non-food items, you are left with sixteen and fivepence halfpenny. Call it sixteen shillings and leave the baby out of account — for the baby was getting its weekly packets of milk from the Welfare Clinic. This sixteen shillings has got to provide the entire nourishment, including fuel, of three persons, two of them adult. The first question is whether it is even theoretically possible for three persons to be properly nourished on sixteen shillings a week. When the dispute over the Means Test was in progress there was a disgusting public wrangle about the minimum weekly sum on which a human being could keep alive. So far as I remember, one school of dietitians worked it out at five and ninepence, while another school, more generous, put it at five and ninepence halfpenny. After this there were letters to the papers from a number of people who claimed to be feeding themselves on four shillings a week. Here is a weekly budget (it was printed in the New Statesman and also in the News of the World) which I picked out from among a number of others:

	s.	d.
3 wholemeal loaves	1	0
½ lb. margarine		2 ½
½ lb. dripping	0	3
1 lb. cheese	0	7
1 lb. onions		1 ½
1 lb. carrots		1 ½
1 lb. broken biscuits	0	4
2 lb. dates	0	6
1 tin evaporated milk	0	5
10 oranges	0	5
Total	3	11 ½

Please notice that this budget contains nothing for fuel. In fact, the writer explicitly stated that he could not afford to buy fuel and ate all his food raw. Whether the letter was genuine or a hoax does not matter at the moment. What I think will be admitted is that this list represents about as wise an expenditure as could be contrived; if you had to live on three and elevenpence halfpenny a week, you could hardly extract more food- value from it than that. So perhaps it is possible to feed yourself adequately on the P.A.C. allowance if you concentrate on essential foodstuffs; but not otherwise.

[...] In some districts efforts are now being made to teach the unemployed more about food-values and more about the intelligent spending of money. When you hear of a thing like this you feel yourself torn both ways. I have heard a Communist speaker on the platform grow very angry about it. In London, he said, parties of Society dames now have the cheek to walk into East End houses and give shopping- lessons to the wives of the unemployed. He gave this as an instance of the mentality of the English governing class. First you condemn a family to live on thirty shillings a week, and then you have the damned impertinence to tell them how they are to spend their money. He was quite right — I agree heartily. Yet all the same it is a pity that, merely for the lack of a proper tradition, people should pour muck like tinned milk down their throats and not even know that it is inferior to the product of the cow.

[Financial Note. It is very difficult to compare prices from 1937 to prices today. Using the calculator at measuringworth.com, the £1 12s in the first table could be equivalent to £68.76 according to the retail price index, or £266.94 if we compare the amounts using average earnings. A good argument can be made for either, but the retail index is probably more accurate for this purpose. The 3/11½ comes to £8.51 now.]