Even poor people can have a full fruit bowl
Every now and then my mum will come out with a gem. One of her favourites is: “We were poor but we always had a full fruit bowl.” I thought of her this week as feathers were ruffled in the wake of Boris Johnson’s Covid obesity crackdown. My own hackles rose when one writer blamed coming from a poor family for being overweight as a child, as if the only option for those on low incomes is to mainline McDonald’s meal deals.
How perfectly patronising. I, too, was brought up “poor” with my brother and sister, raised on a Merseyside council estate by a single mother who worked in a factory. We didn’t do holidays, we didn’t do new clothes, but we did do healthy meals. My mum would drag me round the local fruit and veg market every Saturday, for the exact number of apples, carrots and spuds needed for a week’s worth of meals. She watched her pennies like a hawk and cooked up stews, pastas and shepherd’s pie in rotation. For “afters” it was whatever was in the fruit bowl. It kept us healthy and her budgeting frankly kept us out of the gutter.
A lot has changed since my Seventies childhood, when going to the chippy was a payday treat. We didn’t have fast-food chains or ready meals. Somewhere between then and now, the passing on of nutritious, low-cost recipes from parent to child has got lost in a sea of processed BOGOF deals that are literally cheaper than chips.
Britain is today the fattest nation in Western Europe. But being obese isn’t an inevitability for people on the breadline. Hand-wringers need to wake up to the fact that obesity, coronavirus and those who earn less are clamped together in a deathly dance. And unless you’re loading saffron and truffle oil into your basket or you have no home to live in, it is absolutely untrue that you can’t eat well on a tiny budget, as chefs like Jamie Oliver and food writer Jack Monroe have thanklessly proven.
My sister, a chef and herself a low earner, gives cookery classes to people on low incomes (sadly funded by sporadic lottery cash rather than central government, which is too busy handing out eat-out vouchers to people who don’t need them). Those who attend say the same thing – they want to cook, but they’ve never been taught and ingredients are too expensive. My sister will whip up fishcakes from tinned salmon, chilli with 50p cans of kidney beans, and chicken curry. She’ll discuss healthy portion sizes, the ease of batch cooking, and at the end announce to a chorus of “blimeys” that each meal she makes costs less than £1. After every six-week course her group leaves feeling confident and empowered. Many have told her they no longer feel the need to spend £9 on a takeaway curry or a ridiculous fortune on a Domino’s pizza, because her handful of dishes is seeing them through.
This misguided perception that healthy eating is solely for the turmeric latte classes should be taken off the menu right now. It is filtering down to the very demographic many of these chatterers are trying to help. And with a second Covid fatburger looming into view, that will have dire consequences for the beleaguered NHS and those with little money.