Wartime chickens...

In the Wartime Kitchen and Garden series, they showed neighbours taking kitchen scraps and peelings round to chicken keepers in exchange for the odd egg or two.

I'm not sure if that is what everyone did, but it would make sense.  I think being able to provide 'off ration' food would have made you a very popular neighbour 

I the early 50's, we had a big old cauldron that got all the potato peelings, cabbage stalks, in fact anything left over (not much in those days, granted) boiled up with poultry meal. One of my chores was feeding the 'mash' to the chickens.
I seem to remember that sometimes they had porridge, as well  during the war you could get the meal instead of the egg ration, I think.
AS soon as they stopped laying mum would pick them up by their head and swing them round to break their necks  I tried not to see that bit 

Like Mum, when I was little my Dad used to boil all the peelings etc up with poultry meal.  And they also had porridge.  I can still smell the warm meal smell sitting here thinking about it.  I used to huck it in the chicken run for them.

Also all the out leaves of cabbage, anything they would eat really!  Apparently, during the war, my Dad also kept pigs on his allotment.  He had 3 and an inspector used to come round when you wanted to kill one and you were supposed to give the government 50% of what you had.  My Dad used to give the inspector a nice leg or something, and he would turn a blind eye to exactly how many pigs my Dad kept!