by Mark Easton
As Western explorers returned from their adventures, new exotic vegetables were introduced to Britain; the tomato from Mexico and the potato from Peru in the sixteenth century. While other European cultures embraced and adopted the new arrivals, Britain’s suspicion of strange alien produce delayed their introduction into the nation’s diet. Potatoes were said to cause leprosy and flatulence. Tomatoes, a relative of the deadly nightshade, were thought to be poisonous. In March 1669, the diarist Samuel Pepys reflected the caution with which foreign fruit and veg were met in Britain, when presented with a glass of fresh orange juice. ‘I was doubtful whether it might not do me hurt,’ he wrote.
Vegetables won an improved status in the rural economy when it was realised that including legumes like beans and peas in crop rotation dramatically improved soil fertility and yields. During the British agricultural revolution in the eighteenth century, the Whig Parliamentarian Lord Charles Townshend became convinced of the central role for the turnip in this new agricultural system, earning both the inevitable nickname Turnip Townshend and a reputation for boring the pants off anyone who engaged with him on the subject.
The British have always tended to regard vegetables as objects of ridicule, particularly root crops. The very words mangelwurzel and turnip are used to mock unsophisticated rural life. The peasant Baldrick in the comedy series Blackadder is asked by Lord Edmund: ‘Tell me, Baldrick, do your life’s ambitions go anywhere beyond the acquisition of turnips?’
‘Er, no,’ Baldrick replies simply.
TV consumer champion Esther Rantzen may be best remembered for the section on her show devoted to misshapen vegetables resembling genitalia, national mirth derived from our slightly dysfunctional relationship with root crops and sex organs.
While the Germans venerated the cabbage and the Italians gave the tomato a place of honour in their national cuisine, the British treated vegetables as lowly ingredients, fit for livestock and rabbits. The potato did win popularity right across the Western world, chiefly because it provided shovel-loads of energy from small amounts of land and could be stored for long periods or left underground. It proved a wonderfully versatile crop and became so central to the working-class diet in the United Kingdom that it replaced almost everything else. It certainly had greater appeal than yet another bowl of pottage.
But our love affair with spuds aside, the British relationship with vegetables remained unconsummated. In the nineteenth century, as workers migrated from farms to the factories, the industrial revolution helped bring food prices down. Suddenly people had a choice, and for the population setting up home in the new towns and cities, the opportunity to reject the unfashionable elements of the rural diet — the reviled vegetables. In what became known as the nutrition transition, Britain’s working class shunned their carrots, cabbage, watercress and beetroot (extolled as superfoods today, of course) in favour of aspiration foods: white bread, the ubiquitous potato, meat and dripping. Vegetables were unloved and unappreciated, their value placed so low that even those catering for patients in many hospitals served none at all.
When the social reformer Seebohm Rowntree investigated the diet of the urban poor in York in 1901, his report revealed a class prejudice against fruit and vegetables. The British Medical Journal asked: ‘Who is responsible for the conditions which lead to the state of poverty and the bad nutrition disclosed by this report? Lies the fault with the poor themselves — is it because they are thriftless, because they lack training in cooking and in the economical spending of such income as they possess? Or is it that the actual wages which they can command are so low that it is impossible for them to purchase the actual necessities of life?’ Britain’s professional elite had initiated a critique of working-class diet that continues to this day. Vegetables, it was being discovered, were key to the nation’s security and so it was that, just as the urban working classes were giving up on veg, British officialdom was offering a lingering glance to the greengrocer’s barrow.
The government and the military had been shocked by the poor physical health of young men they wanted to recruit for the Boer War, and suddenly nutrition became a national concern. A parliamentary committee was assembled and experts recruited to try to explain what was missing from the diet of the working classes. An answer was discovered in a laboratory at Cambridge University by biochemist Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins: vitamins. In what became known as the Golden Age of Nutrition, scientists across the developed world were demonstrating that there was much more to food than a source of energy and flavour. Fresh fruit and vegetables, it was realised, were a vital part of a balanced diet and consumption rose dramatically, particularly among the educated and better off. Britain’s working class, however, did not share the newfound respect and enthusiasm for carrots and beans.
With the Great Depression in the 1930s, millions were once again forced to swallow their greens and their pride. Some well-meaning authorities encouraged unemployed workers to grow-their-own in temporary allotments. Others set up soup kitchens where the hungry would stand in humiliating lines for a bowl of thin vegetable stock. In 1934, 68 million free school meals were doled out to poor pupils in elementary schools as the League of Nations published official guidelines suggesting children should consume at least 100g of green leafy vegetables every day. For a generation of working-class youngsters, the shame of being marked out as a classroom charity case would always be associated with the slop of overcooked veg hitting a dinner plate.
With the outbreak of war, among the few food items not rationed or in short supply were carrots, swede and potatoes, and so government hatched a plan to rehabilitate vegetables, to rid them of their lowly status. The maître-chef de cuisine at the Savoy, François Latry, and a peer of the realm, Food Minister Lord Woolton, joined forces to devise and promote Woolton Pie — basically carrots and swede (with other veg when available) topped with potatoes or pastry. An editorial in The Times noted that ‘when Woolton pie was being forced on somewhat reluctant tables, Lord Woolton performed a valuable service by submitting to the flashlight camera at public luncheons while eating, with every sign of enjoyment, the dish named after him.’
The King and Queen did their bit by being seen planting vegetables in the gardens of Windsor Castle and the Royal Parks. The flowers in Kensington Gardens were replaced with rows of cabbages. But attitudes proved hard to shift. As The New York Times reported in 1942: ‘England has a goodly store of carrots. But carrots are not the staple items of the average British diet. The problem is to sell the carrots to the English public.’ It was decided vegetables needed a Hollywood-style makeover, and so ministers approached Walt Disney to see if he could get the nation to go back to its roots. Disney accepted the challenge and devised a family of cartoon carrots including Carroty George, Clara Carrot, Pop Carrot and Dr Carrot. The characters were reproduced in newspaper and poster campaigns, with Carroty George promising to ‘tell you what to do with me’.
Another wheeze was to convince the general public that vegetables had magic properties. The Ministry of Food suggested the success of the RAF’s most celebrated night-time fighter pilot, John ‘Cats Eyes’ Cunningham, was down to his love for carrots. Sales apparently improved as people consumed extra helpings following official advice that ‘carrots keep you healthy and help you see in the blackout’. But despite Carroty George’s help, the country couldn’t get to grips with cooking vegetables. Perhaps it was a relic of its pottage past, but Britain seemed hell-bent on boiling all fresh veg to the point of submission, and many consumers actually preferred the tinned variety.
In 1944, nutritionist Frederick (Bill) Le Gros Clark was commissioned by Hertfordshire County Council to investigate how to get local schoolchildren to eat their vegetables. The Jamie Oliver of his day, Clark was convinced that pupils could be taught to like the detested ‘slimy’ marrow. A letter to the British Medical Journal entitled ‘Children’s Food Fads’ summed up his conclusion:
We grow the best vegetables in the world and ruin them
in the pot. The bias against greens among these children might easily be accounted for by the sodden tasteless messes put before them, and the indifference to potatoes, especially when boiled, may derive from the same cause. The school canteen can do much to eradicate food dislikes in children, with great advantage to their nutrition, especially if the mothers at home pay more attention to the saucepan and less to the children’s whims.
Britain actually emerged from the war a better-fed and healthier nation, but as rationing was removed, a diet class divide emerged. In 1952 the government’s National Food Survey studied the effects of social class on food consumption and found that fresh vegetables were ‘purchased in decidedly greater amounts by Class A than by the lower income classes’. Poorer families tended to buy large amounts of potatoes, white bread and cheap foods rich in fats and sugar. The report concluded that ‘shortage of money induces the purchase of energy-producing foods as distinguished from “protective” foods’.
The second half of the twentieth century saw a transformation in Britain’s relationship with food in general and vegetables in particular. Increasing affluence and new technology meant no one needed to go hungry. Diet became a lifestyle choice and for some that meant curries and burgers while for others it was lentils and beans. In 1961, the first Cranks vegetarian restaurant opened up in London’s swinging Carnaby Street, a sign that the parsnip might have a role to play in the social revolution. The 1960s hippy counter-culture, guided by the philosophies of the East, helped give vegetables a credibility that would feed the attitudes of generations to come. When Paul McCartney explained that he and his wife Linda ‘don’t eat anything that has to be killed for us’ he was implying that veg eaters occupied the moral high ground.
The carrot and the mung bean were symbols of an earthy alternative to the space-age grub that usually won pride of place on the supermarket shelves. This was the age of fast food — instant coffee, instant whip, instant mash. From boil-in-the-bag to microwave ready meal, domestic eating was increasingly about convenience and speed, enabled by new gadgets and appliances. Nutritionists, who had once enjoyed the ear of government, were sidelined despite increasing scientific evidence of the links between health and diet.
In 1983 Margaret Thatcher was asked ‘as leader of the nation and as a housewife’ what she intended to do about the assessment of the National Advisory Committee on Nutrition Education that Britain was eating its way to a public health crisis. The groundbreaking report, commissioned by her government, argued it was the job of the state to encourage citizens to eat more vegetables and fruit while cutting down on sugar, fat and alcohol. ‘I do not think that those people need advice from me, and I think that it would be presumptuous of me to give it,’ the Prime Minister told the House of Commons.
Mrs Thatcher was accused of burying the research to protect her friends in business, but it became increasingly hard to disguise the evidence of a nation with an eating disorder. The administrative arteries of the National Health Service were becoming clogged by consequences of poor diet. The Royal College of Physicians said that so many people were overweight in Britain that a change in the dietary pattern of the whole country was warranted. Health officials warned of a nation indulging in a mock-Tudor diet, consuming far too much red meat and not nearly enough green vegetables. This time, though, it wasn’t the wealthiest who were suffering most. It was the poorest.
Researchers working in Norfolk found they were able to predict how many vegetables someone consumed by their job and their postcode. ‘Being in a manual occupational social class, having no educational qualifications, and living in a deprived area all independently predicted significantly lower consumption of fruit and vegetables,’ they reported.
The Department of Health was bombarded with evidence that Britain needed to consume more veg, particularly those in the poorest neighbourhoods. If only the working class could be persuaded to eat their greens, ministers were advised, the health costs from heart problems, stroke and cancer could be dramatically reduced. The UK had one of the lowest vegetable intakes in Europe and one of the worst heart disease records in the world, but many developed nations were growing anxious about the same problems. Selling fruit and vegetables to the masses became a global crusade, with the World Health Organization encouraging governments to find ways to convince the citizenry of the merits of broccoli and spinach.
Britain eventually adopted the five-a-day message, suggesting people eat at least five portions of fruit and vegetables every twenty-four hours. Teams of officials were hired to count how much veg the nation was consuming and regularly report progress to ministers. Supermarkets and chefs were recruited to encourage greater consumption and books appeared on ‘the art of hiding vegetables’ and ‘sneaky ways’ to get your children eating them.
Nutritionists and marketing teams were invited into primary schools to try and make veg cool. Instead of Carroty George, twenty-first-century pupils in England and Wales were introduced to the Food Dudes — cartoon kids who supposedly acted as influential role models. After watching an ‘exciting adventure’ about healthy eating, children were then given a portion of fruit and a portion of vegetable. Those who succeeded in swallowing both won a prize. Experts hoped such programmes might completely transform the way Britons eat in the future, a prospect that did not enjoy universal support. Some libertarians argued that ‘public health toffs’ were waging war on working-class culture and sought to defend the working man’s fondness for a Big Mac. At one political meeting held in Westminster in 2010 it was suggested that ‘health paternalism is committed to using the mechanisms of social engineering to ease the pleasures of working-class life gradually out of existence.’ Shortly afterwards the new Conservative Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, suggested the Jamie Oliver approach was counter-productive and government should refrain from ‘constantly lecturing people and trying to tell them what to do’.
Nevertheless, government-funded campaigning to encourage Britain to the greengrocer’s barrow continues. In 2011, ministers instructed the Fruit and Vegetable Taskforce to increase average portions of veg eaten by low-income families and vulnerable older people, with specific targets to increase ‘positive potato messages’ and ‘gardens growing their own’. But the legacy of pottage, soup kitchens and inedible school cabbage means that vegetables remain at the centre of a class battle which slices through British society like Jamie Oliver’s cleaver through a turnip.
W is for www
One day in 1997, just round the corner from where I lived in north London, the occupants of twenty-six houses on one leafy residential road each took delivery of an identical item: a large cardboard box bearing the black and white markings of a Holstein cow. Inside was a personal computer, the bovine branding a pointer to the parcels’ provenance — US technology firm Gateway 2000 (which liked to emphasise its rural Iowa roots). But the cow theme might also have been a clue to the motivation of the sender: the PCs were a gift from Microsoft, which wanted to test whether connecting neighbours to the World Wide Web would see people herd together or drift apart.
The experiment, conducted on what was dubbed ‘Internet Street’ in Islington, was an early attempt to answer a fundamental question of our age: will computer technology prove to be a force for good in strengthening our communities or will it undermine social ties? It is an issue that still preoccupies British policy advisors.
Back in the late 1990s, the jury was deeply divided on the issue. One research paper on the subject, entitled ‘Internet paradox: a social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being?’, cannot have made happy reading for the people who funded it, many of Microsoft’s Silicon Valley rivals and neighbours. The analysis concluded:
Greater use of the Internet was associated with small, but statistically significant declines in social involvement as measured by communication within the family and the size of people’s local social networks, and with increases in loneliness, a psychological state associated with social invol
vement. Greater use of the Internet was also associated with increases in depression.
Imagine the executives at Apple, Intel, Hewlett Packard, Bell and others reacting to the news that their own research suggested their products were likely to turn people into sad, stressed loners. The only saving grace was the question mark the researchers had placed at the end of the paper’s title. Small wonder that the psychologists were asked to go back and do some follow-ups which, more helpfully, showed that within three years of using the web the negative effects had been replaced by positive results on social relationships and psychological well-being — especially for the highly extroverted. Phew!
The experiment in the Islington district of Barnsbury was part of the same enterprise: the search for scientific evidence that the Internet is good for us. In selecting a side street full of affluent media types and lawyers, Microsoft must have been hoping that north London would come up with the right answer.
After just a fortnight, one national newspaper article suggested that the resident’s free access to ‘the global Internet, with its 15,000 “newsgroups” and millions of pages of data on the World Wide Web, where they can make airline and hotel reservations and order goods’ was already making a difference.
‘Maya, a 35-year-old advertising executive who lives at number thirty-six, said: “Now, the first thing I do when I get home is turn on the computer to see if I have been sent any e-mail. I’m almost despondent if there isn’t anything there.”’ (It is a remark from another age: twenty-first-century despondency is not discovering too few emails but far too many.)
A full year after the cow boxes had been unpacked, the BBC popped around to see how the neighbourhood was faring. ‘Microsoft’s grand experiment at creating a “cyber-street” in north London could, it appears, pull the plug on claims that the Internet makes people antisocial,’ it concluded. ‘Neighbours have used e-mail and a local electronic bulletin board to co-ordinate opposition to a parking scheme, to try to stop burglars, and just arranging to meet each other at the local pub. Pearson Phillips, a semi-retired journalist and resident of the street, has even started the Barnsbury Bugle, a monthly e-mailed newsletter.’ Bill Gates must have smiled at Mr Phillips’ encouraging testimony. ‘The day I saw somebody put a notice up saying, “We’ll be in the pub at eight o’clock — if anyone would like a drink, please come along,” I realised that this was going to work.’