Scoff: A History Of Food And Class In Britain
Pen Vogler
Atlantic £20
This is an encyclopaedia, sometimes a bit random but always entertaining, of the thousands of ways the British have used food and the rituals around it to declare who we are and to distance ourselves from those we consider our social inferiors.
We no longer have finger-bowl anxiety or fear we’ll use cutlery in the wrong order ( work from the outside in, my mum instructed when I first went out into the big eating world; now you’ll rarely come across mixed ranks of forks, knives and spoons), but the way we set our tables, or don’t, how we serve and eat our food and what the food actually is still allows us to read each other’s place in the pecking order of life. In 1959, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan announced that ‘ the class war is obsolete’. How wrong he was.
Pen Vogler documents centuries of condescension from the upper classes urging the poor to eat more nourishing foods – be more ‘rational’ in what they grew, bought, cooked and ate, when the issue then, as now, was inequality of opportunity and lack of money. The result in 2020, when our eating habits are shaped by the multi-billion-pound advertising budgets of global food companies and poverty is reaching levels not seen since Victorian times, is a widespread hostility to the idea that what we eat is making us very sick. And, at this moment, peculiarly vulnerable to Covid-19. If you’re obese or have type 2 diabetes (the disease that, at a cost of £5.5 billion a year, threatened to bankrupt the NHS before Covid-19 took over) you’re more likely to get Covid, and once you’ve got it, more likely to die. Same with cancer. Scoff shows how British people developed a very convoluted relationship to food. France has haute cuisine and is as riddled with snobbery as Britain, but, in spite of the inroads of fast food, the food French people value is much the same. Good bread, cheese, charcuterie, seasonal vegetables. Ditto Italy, Spain and Greece. Another peculiarity Vogler documents is our indifference to what she calls our own ‘peasant’ cuisine. We love a cassoulet or panzanella but t he dishes we developed to eke out expensive meat in tasty ways, such as pease pudding, pottage and hotpots, have fallen out of the mainstream. There’s a chef-driven move to bring those dishes back into daily life, but right now you’re more likely to find a Lancashire butter pie in an expensive restaurant than on your neighbour’s dinner table. I work on a radio programme that was launched in 1979 on the basis that good food is for everyone. That was a radical idea 41 years ago. Sadly, as Vogler shows, it’s even more radical now.