ExclusiveRecipes of the Great Depression and World War 2 offer creative egg substitutes

Welcome to Epoch Insights with Tiffany. My name is Tiffany Brannon. In the home section of the Epoch Times, there's an article called Egg Substitutes That Actually Work. And it starts with a bit of humor. So the bank turned down your financing application for a dozen eggs, but you're craving pancakes and you promised you'd make brownies for that work party. What do you do? All joking aside, the article goes on to mention statistics that reflect the fact anyone who goes to the grocery store knows egg prices have increased ridiculously, especially in the last few months. And this is beyond just the normal inflation we're seeing everywhere. And this is largely because of the bird flu. Sadly, a lot of egg layers have been killed because of this. Now, when I looked at this article, it immediately made me think of two other times in history when eggs weren't that easy or affordable to get. The Great Depression and World War II. But it was really just that people couldn't afford to buy things. So they had to find creative ways to use substances that didn't cost as much. So that would mean not eggs or milk, but cheaper things like flour and sugar. Some baked goods that came out of that are the Crazy Cake, which was later renamed the War Cake. It's a chocolate cake, but it basically involved flour, sugar, a little cocoa powder, some salt, but no eggs and no milk. Now, during World War II, nutrition became very important, as in 1940, as they were looking at the draft, they found that a quarter of young men were not physically fit for the draft because they were malnourished. Quite the opposite case now, where the majority of young people are unfit for service because they're obese. But it comes from the same problem, not having proper nutrition, which should make you be in good health. So they came up with a set called the Seven Basic Foods, and there are seven different types of foods that you should eat each day. Now, thankfully, in the United States, we didn't face the kind of hardships that they faced in England during that time. And eggs were never rationed that severely in the United States. Some things that were rationed a lot were, first off, sugar. That was the first thing to be greatly rationed because that wasn't something we grew by the majority here in the United States. That was something that had to be shipped in from South America. Goods from foreign countries was no longer the priority because those ships were needed for transporting military equipment and guns and soldiers. So sugar became one of the more precious commodities. Same thing with coffee. As the war grew on, they came up with the idea of the ration books. Each person would get different ration points. And when you wanted to buy something, you had to spend not only money, but your ration points because you could only have so much of certain items each week, to try to be fair for everybody. And meat was one of the more difficult things to get, especially beef. It needed a lot of ration points and it tended to be more expensive. Now, in a system or a climate like that, it would seem it could really happen that there'd be a lot of overpricing if you happen to have that item that everybody wants. But the government was prepared for that and they put a cost ceiling and a price ceiling so that they would issue, the government issued certain prices that were considered the ceiling for how much you could fairly charge. At the time, you'll find movies with references to gas rationing, ration points. In England, on the other hand, eggs were very badly rationed for a couple of reasons. Since England was right in the war zone, it was hard for them to continue having enough food. They couldn't really ship food in because the German U-boats were attacking all their ships and because so much of the workforce had to turn to the war. British citizens had an allowance of only one egg in a shell per week and an extra egg would be given to either mothers who were expectant or vegetarians because they didn't have any meat ration points. So what most people turned to doing was having chickens in their backyard. Now if you did that, you would forfeit your egg rations, but instead you'd get grain rations. Now these oftentimes weren't enough, so people would feed kitchen scraps to their chickens. But a lot of people didn't have that option, so what did they do? Potatoes were the number one replacement for eggs that were used. Now there are several things listed here as seven egg substitutes to try in this article. Unsweetened applesauce, mashed banana, ground flax seed, Greek yogurt, mayonnaise, aquafaba which is garbanzo bean water, and firm tofu. Now each of these is for different types of things. Now in addition to all these, the article mentions the engineered egg. These are intentional egg substitutes in packages. The two which are mentioned as being the most popular or the best are Judy's Vegan Egg Replacer Powder, which is the winner for baked goods, and Just Egg is best for a stand-alone egg option. As it mentions somewhere here in this article, these are turning to the laboratory, and all too often where you have the egg, people think it has cholesterol and fat and all these things which more and more studies are showing, as they used to think, it's nothing but good for you. Yet people don't want that, either because they're afraid of cholesterol and fat, or because they think it's inhumane to eat an egg. But they're turning to something that's full of chemicals, a lot of additives, food coloring, seed oils that are very inflammatory. I think perhaps we should look at what the most common substitute was in England during World War II, and that was the powdered egg. This was developed in 1942 by the United States and was shipped to England. In addition to your one egg a week, you could get one jar or box of egg powder every four weeks. And there were lots of ads, the proudly declared, showing the chicken, it's just my egg, nothing else. And that's true, it was just dried egg, both the white and the yolk. If you're going to be scrambling eggs or baking, it actually worked very well. And people found that it had almost the same health benefits, so it was an excellent example. So I decided to do a little research and see, are there egg products like that now, besides these vegan things, are there actual dried eggs? And the answer is yes, and they're mostly made by survival companies, for the people who are building their stockpile for when all the electricity goes out, or when we get invaded and go into World War III, or Doomsday, or whatever is the motivation. Many people believe it's important to have a large stock of food in case of a disaster. If you're interested in having some kind of an egg backup that isn't dependent on the bird flu and the fluctuating prices, I'd recommend looking up dried egg substitutes. Some of them are actually quite a good price. Some of them last for absolutely years, like 15-year shelf life. Those ones tend to be more expensive, but you'll find ones that are lower shelf life, they only last around a year, that are quite affordable, and if you break it down, less than buying fresh eggs, which if you're using a lot of eggs for baking or something like that, you might find it to be a beneficial thing to explore. Now a lot of these are creative ideas about different things you can use, but I have to say I think we should look to the past and see how they realized how important eggs are. So rather than substituting bananas or flax seeds or tofu, or even, more and more people are starting to have independent egg businesses here in California, and I'm sure many other places too, because of this situation, for around, some people charge around $8 per dozen. That used to be outlandish, now that's actually kind of a good price, because the national average I think is $11. But if you do that, you're supporting someone who has a small business and is trying to keep old-fashioned agriculture alive. And although there are many health benefits to all these things, nothing can really compare with the numerous health benefits of the egg, the miraculous little box that contains almost every essential nutrient you need for healthy survival. Thank you for spending this time with me, talking about the fascinating history of how people used creative means to get around the shortage of eggs during times of crisis. If you enjoyed this video, I hope you'll like it, subscribe to the channel, share it with your friends, and leave a comment letting me know what you think about egg substitutes. Thank you for watching!