This chapter surveys consumer experience in an economy with a shrinking supply of consumer goods, explaining how consumers responded to the shortages, price controls and rationing. It explains social experience with queues and the motivations and rationale for food protests by ‘housewives’ to obtain more food, and the family strategies to exploit opportunities for getting food from relatives and connections in rural areas. It also examines how consumer hardship was represented in the daily press and the use of humour in cartoons about the black market, queues, and restaurants.

Chapter 7 provides a detailed account of social self-organisation at the local level, the constitution of the main NGO during the famine, local child-feeding initiatives, as well as women’s food protests. This chapter demonstrates that the final months of war presented a period of declining legitimacy of state authority in the food system, which led to the rise of new types of organisations: local self-organised relief and self-help entities. Emerging from existing networks, these civil society organisations occupied a central position between the household and state levels and effectively took over care and relief responsibilities. These community efforts can be qualified as a great success and are crucial to explaining why certain groups – children in particular – fared better during the famine than others.