Problems of children nourishment organization in West-Siberian region during the Great Patriotic war (1941-1945)

All the years of theGreat Patriotic war the food supply was a very urgent topic. Organizing full nourishment for children was especially hard. Nevertheless,the government tried to solve the problem. Above all, better nourishment for pregnant women was organized at the expense of increasingthe limits of product distribution. As many orphan-babies appeared during the war; and parturient women often had no breast milkbecause of stress and bad nourishment, there was a necessity to introduce a new form of service for small children: they organized thecollecting of donor milk at specially made stations, extended the system of milk kitchens for 1-3-year-old children, which provided milkmixtures for needy people. Preschool children were fed in childrens canteens, where children of soldiers were registered. Schoolchildrenhad the scantiest ration, that is why farms were formed at childrens institutions to provide additional calories for children. Thelimits of product distribution were revised. During the war, great attention was paid to enrichment of childrens nourishment with vitamins,the source of which was wild plants. Special instructions and recipes of producing decoctions, stocking of medicinal plants andberries for winter were developed. Organizing children nourishment in West Siberia was hard, especially in the first period of the war:the great flow of evacuated people, the extreme lack of finance, products, and all other facts made the solving of problems difficult. Atthis hard time, not all the Soviet citizens acted like humanists and patriots. There were people who wanted to make good at state andchildrens expense. However, it is necessary to say that the state fought against the improper use of childrens fund products, theirsquandering and direct larceny. The system of punishment was rather severe then. Thereby, despite the great number of problems whichgovernment had to solve, children were not forgotten. The state Soviet institutions and society were involved in solving the problem ofchildrens nourishment. As a result, the main purpose, to improve the conditions for childrens survival in such hard time, was reached.

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