Why is rationing bad

Patient Advocate Foundation. Filing a Formulary Exception. Department of Health and Human Services. Health Resources and Services Administration.

Organ Donation Statistics. October 8, Norris, Louise. March 18, Palin vs. Obama: Death Panels. August 14, Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for VerywellHealth.

At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data.

We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification. I Accept Show Purposes. Was this page helpful? Thanks for your feedback! Sign Up. What are your concerns? Verywell Health uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.

Related Articles. Berries were of course a much cherished ingredient in jam and desserts, and the home economics institutions took part in a larger effort to promote the use of this natural resource. There is plenty in the forests! By , the authorities had introduced a limit for when one was allowed to start picking different sorts of berries, and there are accounts of masses of consumers spending the night in the forests waiting for the official start date for when the berries were ripe.

But also the rationing system was experienced as an essentially social form of consumption, by which the scarce goods were distributed according to accepted norms of social justice. With the exception of certain consumption categories dictated by the new political realities, such as some special arrangements which were made for the families of Norwegian soldiers doing service for Nazi Germany, the rationing system was clearly designed to cater to the needs of the different segments of the population according to recognized definitions of age, gender and medical conditions.

Moreover, the system was accepted as a necessary instrument for dividing the supplies between the Norwegian civilians sharing the unwelcome destiny of living under German rule. However, an additional motivation was found in the observation that as long as goods were distributed on the open market, the sizeable German occupying force was best equipped with cash to buy the goods.

Placing food-stuffs under rationing thus provided the local authorities with a means to distribute the food to the local population. The illegal Norwegian trade union newspaper Fri Fagbevegelse warned in that the Germans were trying to buy workers with extra tobacco and alcohol rations, and asked the workers to stand firm defending the current rationing system, as the apparent offers by the Germans were in reality only stolen from other Norwegians. It is now a common opinion that the black market is a curse because it only benefits a small group of society.

However, a substantial amount of the production also found its way onto the black market, where the farmers could fetch prices far above the maximum set by the authorities. An underground medical report from Oslo in argued that the food situation was acceptable for households with small children, because of the comparable generosity of the rations for this age group, while the situation for families with older children was more difficult.

However, it is worth noting that despite of the obvious drawbacks of this arrangement, there appeared to be few complaints against the rationing system itself during the war-time crisis. Of course, consumers protested against the difficulties in getting hold of the rations and the poor quality of the food, but such grievances did not amount to any protests against the system as such.

The many letters of complaint from individual consumers to the provisions office in Oslo, for instance, were most commonly complaints that the system did not function good enough and thus called for the authorities to intervene to improve rather than abandon rationing. However, their responses to the shortages were perhaps not so exceptional.

The crisis fostered new levels of thrift among the consumers, but, as Daniel Miller notably has argued, this has been a central virtue of shopping since the rise of the modern household in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The political message to consumers today is ambivalent, in contrast to the clear message of their duties to consume less during the war.

Moreover, the link between consumption and the climate crisis has not been established with the same strength as the link between consumption and the war effort during the Second World War. Based on the experiences of rationing during World War II, Roodhouse suggested that if rationing was to be reintroduced today, consumers would need to be convinced that 1 rationing would help alleviate the climate crisis and 2 it would be a temporary measure with a defined goal.

But the war was fought against a real enemy. Among these is the social justice aspect. Rationing is tailored to distribute goods according to needs, rather than to financial capacity. The trust in the fairness of the system might help explain why there were surprisingly few consumer protests against it, even though the rationing in Norway as in several other countries continued well into the post-war era.

They used the scarce food resources as carefully as possible, preventing anything from going to waste which could be used for human nutrition. Their thrift was not only guided by the concern for their own families, but also for the societies to which they belonged. The discourse on sustainable consumption could be seen as a similar call to consumers to step up as citizens and take responsibility for the climate.

Based on the experiences from the Second World War, it is however difficult to imagine such a reconnection between consumption and citizenship without the active involvement of governments. COLE A. FOSS, J. Oslo University Master thesis, Norge i krig, bind 5, Aschehoug, Oslo. Oslo bys historie bind 4, [The divided town.

History of city of Oslo] Cappelen, Oslo. International and comparative perspectives, Routledge, London. Perspectives on radical changes to sustainable consumption and production, Greenleaf, Wiltshire.

Rationing, controls, and consumption , OUP, Oxford. See Alvarez J. Dulsrud, , , pp. Rationing, controls, and consumption , OUP, Oxford, p. Phillips eds. B The social history of rationing has been most fully treated by Hjeltnes G, , The bureaucratic organisation of rationing has most notably been treated in a master thesis in history from Oslo University by FOSS J. Holm December , signed Anders Eng.

In Britain, rationing created the best-nourished generation of pregnant women in history, as poor people received enough nutrients to maintain their health. According to Professor John Ashton, president of the Faculty of Public Health, modern Britons are actually at a greater risk of malnutrition than they were under rationing.

What we have now is malnutrition of a different kind than we have ever experienced before, except from the wealthy who used to sometimes suffer from the sin of gluttony, which is a form of malnutrition.

We have mass gluttonous malnutrition. It was during the war that the popular myth that carrots made you see in the dark was created, with posters claiming that they would help in the blackout. But not everyone played by the rules. A large black market developed for food, as noted by The Spectator , on 16 February Everyone understands perfectly well that the Government has introduced rationing for excellent reasons.

It should be a point of honour to keep within the ration — which in point of fact is absolutely adequate - and not find means of supplementing it irregularly. Wrongdoers, found to be smuggling goods and selling them for inflated prices, were hauled in front of the courts. In June , a gang of seven men, including a company director, a grocer, a salmon curer, and a merchant, came in front of the central criminal court, and were found guilty of stealing.

The recorder, Sir Gerald Dodson, criticised the men for their selfishness. But, being Britain, fish and chips were never rationed. Historians can sometimes be a bit snooty about these things but fish and chips played a big part in bringing contentment and staving off disaffection.

After the war had finished, the pain continued.