Joanna Blythman: Bad Food Britain. (Fourth Estate £7.99.)
Essentially this is an extended rant about the eating habits of the British, especially in contrast to countries with a proper food culture such as France and Italy. Recipe books and TV cookery programmes abound, yet fewer and fewer people actually cook food from scratch or sit down to eat with their family.
Instead more and more ready meals are consumed, mostly in front of the television rather than at a table. Less time is spent on food shopping and less money spent on food. Children are astonishingly ignorant about food, often being unable to identify common fruit and veg. The population are subject to food scare after food scare and gradually become desensitised to them. Junk food and snacks combine to make people fat, in what is apparently called an obesogenic environment.
The reaction at this point may be that Blythman doesn’t think much of the food consumed by people in Britain, but that people are after all free to eat what they want. Nothing forces people to eat a ready-made shepherds’ pie rather than peel and mash the potatoes, cook the mince, and so on. But of course this freedom is found in a particular context, and people often say they are too tired to do much in the evenings, especially cook. The pressures of capitalism are such that workers really do have insufficient energy (though maybe enough time) to cook properly.
We also have to look at the pressure exerted by the food industry. Snacks mean big profits (‘mini bites for maxi profits’, according to Proctor and Gamble), and fast food and ready meals are big profit-earners too, much more so than fresh fruit and vegetables. The food manufacturers also resist any government efforts to to rein them in a little, and are becoming increasingly involved with sports sponsorship in order to foster a healthy image.
Mind you, if living under capitalism is what makes the British diet so bad, one wonders how workers in other capitalist countries manage to fare rather better. Blythman’s final message is, ‘Eat as little processed food as possible and base your diet on home-cooked meals, made from scratch from raw ingredients.’ Advice to be borne in mind in Socialism, perhaps, when people really will be free to eat as they wish.
Paul Bennett
No comments:
Post a Comment