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 percent 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.[49] 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."[50][51]