*When I find a passage from a book or an article online that speaks to our movement, I will share it here…tho’ not too many or too often. Too much information is that bane of modern life and can hinder actually getting to the Making Do…*

FROM THE SHELL SEEKERS

“Keeping Nancy and the boys clothed and the household fed took up almost every moment of her and Doris’ time. Rations had shrunk to laughable proportions. Every week, she walked down the steep streets to the town and Mr. Ridley’s grocer’s shop. She was “registered” with Mr. Ridley. There, she handed over the family ration books and was sold, in return, minute quantities of sugar, butter, margarine, lard, cheese, and bacon. The meat ration was even worse, because you had to queue down the pavement for hours, without any idea of what you were queueing for, and when you bought vegetables or fruit at the greengrocer’s, they were all tipped into your string bag, just the way they were, earth and all, because there was no paper for paper bags and it was considered unpatriotic to ask for one.

Strange recipes, dreamed up by the Ministry of Food, appeared in the papers, purporting to be not only economical but nourishing and delicious as well. Mr. Woolton’s sausage pie, made with nigh-fatless pastry and a chunk of corned beef. A certain cake, rendered moist with the help of grated carrot, and a casserole dish that consisted almost entirely of potato. GO EASY ON BREAD, EAT POTATOES INSTEAD, they were exhorted by poster, just as they were exhorted to DIG FOR VICTORY, and warned that CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES. Bread was wheat, which had to be imported, at immense peril to ships and lives, from the other side of the Atlantic. White bread had long since disappeared from the shelves of the bakers’ shops, and its place taken by something called a National Loaf, which was greyish-brown and had husky shreds in it. Tweed bread, Penelope called it, and pretended to like it, but Papa pointed out that it was exactly the same colour and texture as the new utility lavatory paper, and decided that the Minister of Food and the Minister of Supply-the two gentlemen presumably responsible for such necessities of life-had somehow got their lines crossed.

It was all very difficult, and yet, at Cam Cottage, they were better off than most. They still had Sophie’s ducks and hens, and made full use of the copious eggs that these obliging creatures produced, and they had Ernie Penberth…”

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The Life Changing Magic of Making Do

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