2021 Fashion On The Ration Challenge

OWD_nana

A spend to notify.  green long sleeved blouse. A sale bargain from Next. 5 coupons. Not that i've anywhere to wear it . Loving the wedding dress stories.

PipneyJane

maryb said:

I have just spent most of today catching up on the thread, I had no idea it had moved so fast!!  Trouble is, not buying anything doesn’t give you much to talk about so I haven’t checked in for a while

However, I do have a spend to report.  My ‘uniform’ in winter is Rohan jeans, a long sleeved white tee shirt and a cashmere v necked jumper.  I bought another pair of jeans and another jumper, since my old one was going into holes under the arms.  I can just about get two winters’ wear out of a cashmere jumper, never more.  Laura Elsewhere’s post on short cheap fibres was very interesting and made a lot of sense.  Rohan jeans because they are generous around the waist and last forever

So that is 11 coupons out of my 66.  No more planned spends for the foreseeable

I have been thinking a lot recently about how I can live more sustainably in general.  There’s a lot of pressure to cut down on meat and dairy but I could not go vegan.  Also I don’t think generalised conclusions about how wasteful livestock farming is compared with using land for growing food for humans are applicable to a country with a lot of land that’s only suitable for grazing.  Anyway, I was reading a sustainable living blog which referenced an international medical commission which had come up with recommendations for a healthy and sustainable diet.  I looked at their recommendations and thought ‘ Hang on!  I recognise these’. Sure enough, they were almost identical to rationing amounts from 1940

So being a glutton for punishment, in addition to trying to stick to clothing coupon limits, I’m aiming at a more 1940s diet in terms of meat and dairy.  Eggs are supposed to be limited to one a week but I’m going to assume I keep backyard chickens.  And I’ll also allow myself things like bananas and lemons which come by sea so are not too bad for the environment.  Thinking about it, it stands to reason that the wartime diet was sustainable for the UK

Good luck, @maryb.  I shall watch with interest, having toyed with the idea in the past.  (Never did it, though.)  You should check out Thriftlady's Wartime Experiment here on MSE. https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/481412/thriftladys-wartime-experiment/p1   

- Pip

ETA:  I totally agree with you about sustainability of the wartime diet.  

PollyWollyDoodle

That's very interesting @maryb.  I agree about the generalised conclusions about livestock; don't get me started on the 'cost' of some of the milk substitutes so popular these days!  

I try and buy local produce where I can, and buy seasonal vegetables.  I also try and buy free-range, ethically produced meat and I eat meat only a couple of times a week.  I do have backyard chickens so eggs are always available!  I think I'd struggle with the fats ration, and also the sugar because I love baking but perhaps I'll look at it again.  It was a very healthy diet although probably not much fun at times, I'll have to look up the what the rations were, and see how it would match up against my current grocery shopping. Not sure I would go all the way, life is for living and at the moment food is a really significant pleasure! 

maryb

Minestrone soup tonight as I have some cabbage, a leek and a bit of celery plus some carrots that need using.  My tinned tomatoes would have been bottled during the summer and I am using one rasher of bacon per person from the ration of three per week.   I can spare some cheese from the ration to grate over the top

Laura_Elsewhere

Gosh, my meat and fat and cheese ration would have been a dreadful struggle... I think I might have a stab at a kind of halfway-house and see how I can manage with Only Things Plausibly Locally Sourced Seasonally or With Reasonable Storage Methods... so the veg I buy, chop, blanche and freeze I would reclassify as bottled or dried, but I couldn't get away any more with the bags of leafy salads I guiltily buy in midwinter imported from Spain or Italy... but I could go out to the garden and pick red chard and lambs lettuce for fresh salads all winter if only I bloomin' well organise myself this September to sow it! I did it one year, and just haven' got round to it the other years... I only have one area of proper cultivated ground, about 3m x 2m iirc, a raised bed with about 8-10" of growing-depth, and I really do want to Dig For Victory this year a bit better! 

And yet another agreeing here about difficulty in generalisations - my vegan niece seems to live entirely on pretend-meat made from soya and very often imported from the far side of the planet by air, and in many cases the products she eats are made by companies directly linked to destruction of rainforest and orangutan killing, plus she uses masses more fuel than anyone else in the family because she's freezing cold all the time because she won't wear wool or silk and doesn't know anything about keeping warm with linen or viscose so just adds more and more petrochemical by-product microfleece and turns the heating up further (but has to have windows in every room open for her cats), argh, and she drives absolutely everywhere because she has no proper shoes or jacket for being out in any kind of cold or wet weather... yet she says she's "saving the animals"... 
I try very hard to know about the conditions of the UK meat I buy, local where possible, always as ethically-farmed as we can manage, only buy dairy from the supermarkets that pay a fair wage to British farmers and never buy dairy from Asda or Morrisons, we do nearly all our shopping on foot, recycle to the utmost (inc a load of things we take to our local uber-recycling woman, crisp packets and sweet-wrappers and all those things which CAN be recycled but not by Councils) and I find it very hard to believe she really has a lower carbon footprint than we do... 

maryb

Thanks for the link Pip.  I remember the thread and I was going to do a search for it.  Just to be clear, I'm not going the whole way with rations, just cutting down on the meat and dairy bit of it plus trying to eat seasonally and (relatively) local - but even in wartime, some food was imported by sea

And now I'll stop hijacking a thread about fashion!

PipneyJane

maryb said:

Thanks for the link Pip.  I remember the thread and I was going to do a search for it.  Just to be clear, I'm not going the whole way with rations, just cutting down on the meat and dairy bit of it plus trying to eat seasonally and (relatively) local - but even in wartime, some food was imported by sea

And now I'll stop hijacking a thread about fashion!

Feel free to continue talking about gardening, food and life on ration.  We are in 1942, after all.

Before Lockdown, my eggs and most of my veg came from the farm shop at a local National Trust property.  With the exception of eggs, everything they sold was grown on the property.  (Eggs came from a chicken farm nearby.)  The shop was run by the farmer’s parents during the week, selling surplus produce.  I remember chatting to the farmer, a week before Lockdown, when he was saying they were considering closing to protect his folks.    When Lockdown struck, the National Trust closed everything down, preventing access to the shop, even if they had wanted to keep trading.  They didn’t reopen when things eased up over the summer.

Meatwise, I buy from a local butcher.  I know that not everything they sell is British - the lamb shanks in my freezer came from Australia via their freezer - but they are very good at answering questions about where they’ve sourced their meat.  We don’t eat a huge amount of meat.  I’m expert at stretching a chicken breast to feed four.

Reading Laura’s post about her garden made me realise that I need to start planning my veg patch.  I have three raised beds - each a metre by a metre - and have the wood set aside to make a longer raised bed down the bottom of the garden.  I had tried planting that area up a few years ago, but we have really heavy clay soil and things didn’t thrive.  I normally grow broad beans but I’d like to grow a bed of the “three sisters” this year:  in my case,  sweetcorn, mangetout and butternut squash.  Time to order seeds.

- Pip

maryb

I get my meat from a farm shop where they are very into grass fed livestock and regenerative agriculture.  Properly done, that apparently means pasture can be a carbon sink.  What I don’t know is whether that is net of the carbon equivalent of the methane from all the cows and sheep burping and farting

Rah

Bit late to the party but I feel the need to add my wedding dress story, £75 from eBay (Monsoon brand) supposedly second hand but good as new, not sure if it had actually been worn before or not. Never went in any bridal shops which were just far too scary and bear no resemblance to a normal clothes shopping experience!

Rah

Whilst we're on to sustainable food, I did Veganuary this year. I've been vegetarian for nearly 30 years now so it was quite an easy change. I missed real cheese and milk chocolate the most. Just wanted to do it to give myself the challenge because I'm convinced that a vegan diet is the most sustainable. I'm not going to go vegan permanently though but will always stay vegetarian and definitely be keeping some of the swaps and cutting down on my dairy intake. 
I do agree with others that small amounts of suitably-sourced meat and fish can be sustainable, but unfortunately the vast majority that most people eat is not. 

I should perhaps say that I spend a lot of time doing carbon footprinting for my work so I have a fairly good understanding of the maths of it.
Hope all the above doesn't sound too preachy! But just wanted to join in the conversation and share my view.