The surprising benefits of food rationing | Letters

An interesting juxtaposition: (While British children go hungry, we waste 1.1bn meals a year. Bring on the redistribution revolution, 6 October); and (The generation raised on sugar rations – and what their health reveals 70 years later, 7 October). Shocking that the average family throws away 156 meals a year, but this knowledge allows us war babies, who still scrape our bowls clean and only throw away items where the mould is too developed to scrape off, to be very smug. And next we’re told that we will probably live longer as a result of our parsimonious cheeseparing. My cup of smugness overflows.
Roger Wilkinson (born 1944)
Leasgill, Cumbria

My 98-year-old aunt, who along with my mother and family lived in Rotterdam during the German occupation and “hunger winter”, is remarkably healthy. She lives independently, does her own shopping and cooking, and cycled to the local care home to “help out” until she was 80.

She hasn’t eaten a potato since the liberation, because by then the Dutch were forced to eat raw potato skin (there was no fuel for cooking). She has left her body to medical science as they are interested in finding out how someone who now lives on peanut butter and chocolate has lived so long.
Helen Keats
Brighstone, Isle of Wight

So, join the club (The butter boom – how the world fell back in love with the glorious golden spread, 6 October). I have had a freezer full of different salted, unsalted, European and American butters for cooking, baking or eating all my life (I am 78), and have been bringing butter back from Europe in my luggage since the 1970s.

I always have an imported French or Irish salted butter on my counter for slathering on bread and pastry (yes, pastry gets extra butter); it sits next to the sea salt and is never refrigerated. I grew up in a house where margarine was forbidden, and where two types of butter – hard and soft – were both on the table every day. Butter is real food and a joy in life.
Jane Robbins
Saunderstown, Rhode Island, US