We all learned how to make do.

Dovey Sommers   b.  1936

I grew up in near Delmar, NY south of Albany.  We weren’t a poor village, but we weren’t well off.   My mother and the other women around spent a lot of time trying to keep food in the house using ration coupons and scrimping with what we had.  We shifted over to margarine or salted lard instead of butter sometimes and one neighbor’s son could get us powered eggs.

Most important was that we couldn’t waste anything.   It was a minister in town who heard about the idea of “pig clubs,” which were just like it sounds.   Three or four families would get together and buy a pig and fatten it up with everyone’s leftover scraps.  When the pig grew to size the families butchered it and shared the meat.

Our pig club would start a second pig just before the first one was grown.  Some people had “chicken clubs,” too.

It seems funny to talk about that now, but at the time it seemed like just something you had to do to help win the war.