Sucking Eggs: What your wartime granny could teach you about Diet, Thrift and Going Greenby Patricia Nicol

The impact of a 22-month high in wheat prices, up 50% since last June, made headlines this week. Food security is spoken of as a new spectre – how will we cope when the oil runs out? In fact food security has been a bedrock of any flourishing civilisation. We’re only three square meals away from Armageddon, the army apparently teaches its officer recruits. The Romans and the Victorians knew this. It is confidence in the logistics whereby food reaches us that has in a post-industrial age allowed our cities to flourish in a world that is now more urbanised than agrarian. And it is food insecurity that will bring those cities to chaos, shockingly quickly, if those logistics go wrong.

We’re in luck in Britain that we need not look back far in our own history for a relevant, comprehensive, far-reaching and systematic blueprint for stopping the nation’s cupboards from going bare. In 1940, Britain imported more than two thirds of its foods and raw materials. By 1943, it imported less than a third. The need to preserve fuel for the war effort and the threat to Allied shipping, had forced Britain to rethink how it produced and consumed its food.

In rural areas, the 'Ploughing Up Campaign' launched what was almost another agricultural revolution, transforming a countryside that had been predominantly given over to inefficient livestock farming into a supercharged, mechanised arable agriculture. The 'Dig for Victory' campaign, with its transformation of back gardens, booming allotments, even public spaces from railway sidings to the forecourt of the British Museum into fecund vegetable patches, did its bit too, to boost productivity.

Universal food rationing was introduced from January 1940. Following advice from nutritionists, the Ministry of Food introduced a Basal diet that curbed consumption of foodstuffs that had to be imported or were more inefficient to produce (meats, sugar, dairy, fats), but guaranteed a non-rationed supply of native starches like potatoes, vegetables and national bread. This diet might have been boring in the depths of winter, but noone went hungry or rioted. Indeed the dietary gap between rich and poor - last month reported to be at its widest since the 1930s - narrowed dramatically, in part because of the preferential treatment the ration gave to the neediest (subsidised school meals; free milk; extra rations for pregnant mothers). While life expectancy – now declining in the country’s areas of greatest deprivation - increased.

The experience of our grandparents in a previous age of Austerity could be vital in helping us prepare for an uncertain future.

Sucking Eggs: What your wartime granny could teach you about Diet, Thrift and Going Green is now available in Vintage paperback.