7 - Nations Out of Nurseries, Empires into Bottles

Summary

The Welfare Foods Service, which supplied free and subsidized concentrated orange juice, milk, and cod liver oil to all expectant mothers and young children from 1942 to 1971, is the subject of Chapter 7. This benefits program began in the midst of World War II when fresh fruit was limited and anxieties about vitamin deficiencies mounted. In the postwar period, it was integrated into the Welfare State. Unlike milk and cod liver oil, orange juice could not be produced in sun-starved Britain. The government thus jump-started an orange-growing industry and juice concentrating plants in the British West Indies as part of a colonial development initiative. But once the industry for this highly specialized product had been established, the British state attempted to withdraw from its contractual agreements because it sought to reduce the number of welfare beneficiaries. This chapter traces the ways in which debates over entitlements to welfare orange juice pitted the needs of domestic British citizens who consumed the product against those of colonial British subjects who produced it. It reveals that domestic welfare policies were intimately bound up in the imperial politics of both colonial development and decolonization.