At the point when rationing began to be eased, Dr Magnus Pyke reviewed the food of the British people – or at least the majority of them – in a book entitled Townsman's Food. After ten years of rationing, the townsman – or, more especially, the urban housewife – was thinking wistfully of times of former plenty. The countryside was an important part of this yearning, for it symbolized the source of good food to the urban population. However, Magnus Pyke was uncompromisingly dismissive of nostalgia and feelings of ‘romantic regret for the simple foods of earlier centuries’. Memories of prewar availability of food had been making the urban housewife with a tin-opener something of a figure of fun for cartoonists in the 1940s. However, from the pragmatic viewpoint as food scientist, Pyke applauded her search for variety in the diet. To do so, she needed a tin-opener, for few in 1950 could live without canned meat, fish or fruit. As a guide to the diet in the year 1950, Townsman's Food concerned itself largely with a description of the sources of food materials, i.e. bread and baked goods, vegetables, meat, dairy produce and so on, rather than processed food products. It was published in an age when confidence in science was much higher than it is today. Pyke, whose popular reputation rested upon his creed of bringing science to the people, saw the food industry as providing a ‘social service’; after all, he wrote: ‘the food industry has to keep the community alive and in tolerable health’. However, Townsman's Food was published at a time when many wartime regulations were still in place, so there is little on food marketing or presentation. Symbolic of the slowness by which controls were being relaxed was wrapped, sliced bread, which had only been permitted since 1949. Some food technology was important: Magnus Pyke referred to gas storage of fruit, and the use of sulphur dioxide as a preservative, but when he claimed that ‘Today, foods “in season” have been abolished. In the modern world, we expect all foods always to be “in season”’, it is clear that the effervescent optimism which endeared Pyke to radio and television audiences had carried him away. In fact, the reality was far less congenial. Restriction of food consumption was central to the ‘age of austerity’ during the late 1940s.