Additional to Mike's posting above
Food rationing continued for some years after the end of WW11. Those of us born at that time were valuable replacement stock for the many men and women killed during that war.....and every effort was made to make sure we grew strong and healthy.
As well as free milk and a plentiful supply of tongue tingling cheese to build strong bones, we also had free concentrated orange juice in square bottles, just like the ones containing chicory essence...Camp coffee.
Huge jars of free malt extract, soon replaced with "Virol" (lovely stuff). Free cod-liver oil (yuk).
Sugar was rationed, so sweets were replaced with some strange "sticks", which when chewed tasted of licorice. Plenty of pomegranates available, and some strange shriveled ground-nuts..."Tiger Nuts" I think they were called.
On the day I was born, my father brought home a Manchester terrier pup. "Bill" and I grew up together, and he remained my constant companion for the first eleven years of my life. Bill was an excellent rat-catcher, and frequently commissioned to clear the rats out of the local abattoir and the bakery next door. Needless to say, his efforts were always rewarded in kind, huge slabs of butter and bags of sugar from the bakery, and offal from the slaughter house. Old bill was a great asset to the family, and always received his fare share of his earnings.
Meat was strictly rationed, just a very small joint of Argentinian beef for five shillings. By the time the old lady had crucified it, just one little slice the size of half a crown for each of us...we needed more meat. Saturday afternoons, my Father and I would walk to an old dis-used railway line and set snares for rabbits (sorry about that, but times were hard). The following Sunday morning we returned to collect the free protein, and a grand feast would be on the table at lunchtime...dear old bill had the chiddlins.
I could go on for ever about those truly austere years, in modern parlance it would be described as living in abstract poverty.
Like the saying goes, "It never did me any harm"