Food
Food was by necessity, until recently, a far more local affair than it is today. Most people, apart from the wealthiest, would have grown some of their own fruit and vegetables, and would have had a far deeper connection with where their food came from than our supermarket-focused generation of today. This arose, in the main, from necessity. Rationing was, after all, still in place the mid 1950s. Val Price recalls in the late 1950s the first time she became aware of the idea that food was something that could actually come from further afield than the local area, when she was asked to do a school project which involved collecting the paper sheets that oranges came wrapped in at that time and compile a list of where they had come from. Until that point, she told me, the idea had never occurred to her.
Mason's Butchers at the top of Totnes town, 1930s (© Totnes Image Bank and Rural Archive)
Attitudes to food were very different. Alan Langmaid describes the attitude of the generation who had lived through the war:
“My grandmother’s attitude to food was if it is put in front of you, you must eat it. You had no choice. You must not leave a crumb. Food was very precious and most of it was vegetables. It was a good healthy diet, proper, fresh food”
Similarly, Val Price remembers being made to stay at the table for long periods of time until she had finished eating all of her meal. “If you didn’t eat it”, she told me, “it was back again for the next meal. I was very envious of friends who had dogs, and could feed them bits under the table!”
The production and processing of food was also a far greater generator of employment than it is today. Three of the town’s main employers, Harris’s Bacon Factory, Tuckers Sweet Factory and the Milk Factory, were food producers, and a far higher proportion of the town’s shops were food shops.
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