Stop invoking the plucky Blitz spirit and growing your own beans: the halcyon days of make do and mend were just a myth
Not to exaggerate, but barely a day seems to go by now without some BBC reporter heading to a provincial town where, iceberg lettuce in hand, he or she talks to local shoppers about what might happen in the event of a no-deal Brexit. How, the reporter wants to know, are people going to feel when they cannot easily get their hands on, say, some nice, fat, Dutch tomatoes? Will they miss them? Will their hearts ache for all that lost colour, for all those vitamins gone astray in wintertime?
Each time, I wait and wait for someone to shout: please don’t make me eat turnips every day for a month! Oddly, though, this never happens. From the grey expanses of the pedestrian precinct, the answer comes back: no, we won’t miss these things. “It’ll do people good to go without,” someone will say, with a shrug.“We used to manage perfectly well, after all.”
You get a better sense of the misery of rationing from what people missed
Related: Food and Brexit: will our cupboards be bare?
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