Sucking Eggs: What Your Wartime Granny Could Teach You about Diet, Thrift and Going Green (Paperback)

Patricia Nicol (author)

£12.99

Paperback 320 Pages / Published: 05/08/2010

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Synopsis

Recycling, buying locally-sourced food and vintage clothing, checking air miles and carbon footprints - our ever-growing obsessions with saving money and preserving the planet is beginning to affect the way many of us shop, travel and eat every day. After decades of plenty, we now face the credit crunch and climate change but the good news is that we don't have to look far back in our history for a handy lesson in making seismic lifestyle changes. Our grannies can show us the way. They wasted almost nothing, bought locally, recycled, grew their own veg and 'dug for victory' and, with the aid of Patricia Nicol's colourful, comparative history, so can we.

Publisher: Vintage Publishing
ISBN: 9780099521129
Number of pages: 320
Weight: 307 g
Dimensions: 198 x 127 x 23 mm

MEDIA REVIEWS

Ambitious and systematic... she has made a serious study of government-imposed austerity in the Forties -- David Sexton * Evening Standard *
Charming and perceptive romp through the ration books... Much of the book's fun is in the deft way Nicol weaves together examples of can-do thrifty propaganda. She has trawled the Imperial War Museum and the National Archives and come up with some gems -- Bee Wilson * Sunday Times *
Fascinating slice of social history... With painstaking research, a good helping of north-east commonsense and glorious illustrations taken from Ministry of Information posters from the 1930s and '40s, she demonstrates how this generation could learn a lot from the self-sacrifice and austerity of the war years * Aberdeen Press and Journal *
A fascinating book * Big Issue *
A comparative history of rationing, 'making do' and the environmentally-friendly lessons we can learn from those post-war years * Choice Magazine *