Reviewed: Sucking Eggs [Book]

Points for the catchy title, Patricia. With avid WWII interest and West Coast green-leaning – I couldn’t wait to begin Sucking Eggs: What Your Wartime Granny Could Teach You About Diet, Thrift and Going Green by Patricia Nicol (2010).

It champions frugality in all areas – eat less, waste less, buy less, grow & mend more – and outlines how & why such living would benefit our health and the environment. A then & now comparison examines why we just might be doomed.

“From some point in the late 1990s… great numbers of us started buying for no better reason than that the stuff was there to be bought”. [Unlike Wartime Granny], many of “us weren’t buying out of need or with purpose, but out of desire” (page 126).

The author, a Sunday Times writer, assumes we’re already on her side (why else read such a book), so it’s no vehement oration. In fact, the ‘tips’ seem an inconvenient afterthought – a marketing ploy. Presumably the green living audience is larger than the WWII civilian history buffs? You’re not going to choose this book if it suddenly occurs to you one day “maybe I should turn the water off while I brush my teeth”. As such, the ‘how-to’ pages are a slightly tedious session in choir-preaching. Patricia, I worm-compost for god’s sake. The facts, though?

Some shockers:

• “The average British woman spends 8 years of her life shopping” (page 125). (I wonder how much Mrs. Beckham skews the data?)
• “[The] average temperature of our homes rose between 1991 and 2002 from 15.5 degrees to 19 degrees” (page 205). *Americans: 60F – 66F.

What I thought I’d learn: Actual tips for the already-converted. How to be self-sufficient in potatoes, how to save fuel without being a total martyr, how to darn a sock? No such detail – though 1940s fuel, food and ration charts make for an easy comparison to your own consumption. I’d be the one behind the bacon black market, that’s for sure.

The meat of this book: Instead, the real fascination is how rationing worked in Britain during WWII. It’s really, really interesting. I knew fuel was short, I knew baths were an unknown luxury – I knew nothing.

“By 1943… hot water bottles were on prescription and blankets on special licence” (page 219).

 Covers Canada? UK history with more universal tips.

1 reason to read it? An interest in social history.

Conclusion: Filled an ignorant void with fascinating history. Wouldn’t and didn’t make me any more green or frugal – the book rightly belongs in the history section.