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A simple shepherd’s or cottage pie has achieved a sort of lapsed, iconic status, something you buy ready-made or eat in a pub. Too much trouble to take the meat off the bone from the Sunday roast (what Sunday roast?), chop it fine, add onions, celery, tinned tomatoes, a good squirt of tomato paste and the darkly gelled remains of yesterday’s home-made gravy; shake in a few drops of Worcester and Tabasco; simmer; cover with a mantle of buttery mash; crisp to bubbling, the meat juices seeping up into the browned spud. There’s as much comfort in the preparation, the turning of leftovers into the best home-made dishes, as there is in the eating. What comfort the ‘comfort food’ zapped in the ready-meal tray?
The rich now choose to eat the ‘peasant’ diet they would have once despised
They’re all in it together, the food conglomerates, the agri-businesses, the supermarkets, conspiring to de-skill us and make us cook what they want to sell us. And in a couple of decades they’ve scrambled the seasons and we’ve got what we deserve. We are subtly prevented from the pleasures of cooking and baking for our families, our friends. We don’t cook, we ‘cater’, we cheat, we are driven by novelty and immediacy and food fashion. Twenty-five years ago it was all about cooking, now it’s all about looking. And restaurants. It’s the democratisation of food. The croissants and pasta everyone first ate on holiday have gone baking-counter and chill-cabinet mainstream. The class structure of Britain has been levelled more by food than by anything else. Nowadays nearly everyone can afford to eat more or less the same food. There used to be no real restaurant culture in Britain, but in the short skip of a couple of decades, the luxury of dining out has become a national pastime, alongside ‘retail therapy’, easyJetting and going to the gym.
So has the democratisation and better knowledge of food made us all take more pleasure in what we eat? And has it made us healthier? This is something we began to concern ourselves with in the Sixties, when we started to question industrial food processes, but the word ‘organic’ hadn’t been invented. Well, it certainly hasn’t made us healthier. These days, mostly, the rich get thin and the poor get fat. I know there are plenty of affluent people who indulge and are overweight, but they are more likely to indulge in things less likely to be bad for them and to have a well-balanced diet in the main. They eat too much of a good thing rather than too much of a bad. And look how the wheel turns full circle. The rich now choose to eat the ‘peasant’ diet they would once have despised. They glug olive oil and chomp roast vegetables, cook with less meat, eat butter not hydrogen-ated fats. But here’s the rub – we have more malnourishment and morbid obesity than probably ever before. Malnourishment
used to be a Third World disease, but now it’s a First World one. There’s something obscene about that. How could these polar opposites co-exist? How could we worship the cult of thin and starve ourselves at one end of the scale, while at the other, ignorance, poverty, bloody-mindedness, junk-food, fast food and ready-made dinners have turned a huge section of the population into fat people? Fat, malnourished people. There is a very real danger of our children being the first generation to die younger than us as a result. I find that shocking and saddening and crazy.
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