The British school dinner was invented by the army, after it tried to recruit for a war and found the country's young men too stunted to send. In 1899 Britain went to war in South Africa and called for volunteers. In Manchester 11,000 men came forward. The army doctors sent 8,000 of them home. They were too short, too thin, with bad chests, rotten teeth and legs bent by rickets. The minimum height had already been cut to five feet. A general wrote it up in a magazine under the title Where to Get Men. He put it plainly. Three out of five who offered themselves were unfit to carry a rifle. Parliament panicked. It set up a Committee on Physical Deterioration, which toured the slums and reported in 1904. Its finding was that the men had been ruined as children, by hunger, and that no amount of drill would fix at eighteen what had not been fed at eight. It recommended that the state give hungry children a hot meal at school. The Act passed in 1906. Within a generation there was a cooked dinner of meat and a pudding in nearly every school in the land. So the stew, the mince, the liver and the jam roly-poly were a defence measure. The Empire had looked at the children it would need in ten years and concluded it was cheaper to feed them now. Today the army is turning recruits away for being too heavy. Nobody has set up a committee.