In the early years of the twentieth century very few people were vegetarians. The figure given for the United Kingdom during World War 2 was 100,000 out of a population of some 50 million – around 0.2 per cent of the total. By the 1990s the figure was estimated as between 4.2 percent and 11 percent of the British population and rising rapidly. As Porritt and Winner observe, as recently as the 1960s and early '70s, "being a vegetarian was considered distinctively odd," but "it is now both respectable and common place."