World War II really fascinated me because it's the only time that everybody in this country sat down at the same table, because eating on rations was your patriotic duty.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I became a fanatic about healthy food in 1944.
I remember eating in school in the years after the Second World War. Most of my friends had miserable portions of Spam with an inedible, glutinous pudding served in containers we called 'coffins.' As a vegetarian, I had a lump of loathsome cheese and some bread.
Well, you know... I grew up in postwar Britain, when you were lucky to get anything to eat. People in America have absolutely no conception of how austere England was after the war. While you were all sort of eating butter and eggs, we were eating rabbit. That's what there was in the butcher shop.
I was born in London in England in 1934. I went through, as a child, the horrors of World War II, through a time when food was rationed and we learned to be very careful, and we never had more to eat than what we needed to eat. There was no waste. Everything was used.
I'm really still a child of the Forties. I still think about it a lot, about the repercussions of armed conflict. Until 1953 we had rationing. We couldn't buy meat, we couldn't buy pleasurable goods like cigarettes and sweets. I didn't starve - my family were lucky - but I knew what it was like standing in line waiting for foodstuffs.
When I took command in Vietnam, I gave great emphasis to food and medical care - and to the mail.
Oh yes, after the war, and we were all starving - we had no proper food or anything - no proper shoes.
I got a fascination with food.
For a country boy, poor as I was, whose constant worry was to be able to have enough to eat, the Army guaranteed one's survival.
I used to work for a catering company - I waitressed for Harry Winston events. I remember being so hungry, I would eat when I was supposed to be catering to other people.
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