Diet – is it really linked to class and income?

I seriously doubt it.

(Apologies if this is a bit uneven in parts – I’m not at my best today.)

In today’s Observer Food Monthly, there is a debate about food and class/income, and like most such debates is inconclusive. Now class and education – that might make more sense – though personally, I think class has bugger all to do with it.

One thing struck me, though – a family of four, including a 15-year-old veggie (so she’s relatively cheap to feed – no fish or flesh), spend £178 a week on food, which strikes me as a tad excessive as it’s all home cooked.

At the weekend they have two of the cheapest cuts of meat, shin beef on Saturday (as a stew, presumably), and pork belly on Sunday. Those two meals cost an absolutely staggering £65, and passed pretty much without comment (though the next family in line – a couple with 5 kids has a food budget of £60 a week. And that was to feed three – presumably the veggie daughter’s meal wasn’t included in the cost; all the indications are that it wasn’t.

The father, who considers himself working class (not at that price, sunshine!), is prone to splashing out on oysters (not working class since Queen Victoria was a lad) – whether any were included in that £65 isn’t mentioned.

He does all the cooking, his wife being firmly in the “why the hell should I cook when others will do it” camp, and has reached the age of 51 without acquiring even the most basic of cooking skills. Most people learn the basics pretty much by watching their parents – it must take a determined effort to learn bugger all.

I would dearly love to see – and I reckon it would make good television – those two families swap budgets for a week. The extravagant quartet could eat on £60 a week**, though they’d have to abandon their farmers’ market, organic everything, habits and move down-market somewhat, but they certainly wouldn’t starve and might even come to realise what spendthrifts they are. Wouldn’t put money on it though, but it might be fun watching them run out of money by Tuesday morning!

**I’m not convinced that the family of 7 can, not adequately.

But is a knowledge of food, and what to do with it, entirely (or at all), linked to class and education? I’m not convinced.

Take my family. My mother lived, as a child, in a tiny cottage with no running water in Knotty Ash, Liverpool, along with half a dozen siblings  (still to be found in the A-Z – the cottage, not the siblings – now, as then, called Mill Cottages). I was born into the slums of Ardwick, Manchester. I’m not sure about my father’s background – he never talked about it.

Anyway, my background is remorselessly working class, my education secondary school (though as I lost about a third of my schooling to illness, that’s probably not a fair reflection of my academic abilities, not with an IQ of 143 – not a boast, just an indicator of what might have been), and I’ve pretty much always wanted to cook. Ill health kept me from taking it up as a career though.

In 1954, my father bought my mother a Good Housekeeping Institute cookery book (cost a small fortune in those days, and still produced, as far as a know, and an ideal introduction to the fundamentals of cooking). My mother never willingly opened it, but I did, and read it from cover to cover. I still have it.

Then, as now – I have a collection of cookery books spanning a century – I didn’t use the recipes, I used the book to learn the techniques of cooking. After my father died when I was 12, I pretty much took over the cooking. My mother wasn’t a bad cook but, like most of her generation, was a firm believer in boiling the bejesus out of vegetables – it came as a revelation to her to find that cabbage need not be green sludge, and that sprouts could be bright green, firm, not mushy, and actually tasty, not boiled until they were khaki! And that using stock, not water, massively improved a humble stew, like scouse. The real reason I took over, though, was that she went out to work, and it was cook or go hungry – so I cooked.

And I continued to cook throughout my life until, of late, illness has put a crimp in it.

As is turned out, years down the line, my wife** had no idea how to cook either and, to make matters worse, loathed olive oil and garlic. She was, however, willing to learn, until we both realised she had absolutely no aptitude.

**University education, taught English to A level – another crimp in the idea that education matters when it comes to food.

I showed her how to cook lambs’ liver – sliced thinly, lightly dusted with seasoned flour and fried in a little oil, hot and fast, leaving it pink, as it would continue to cook on the plate. Cooked until it was brown all the way through,  it would be tough and leathery. No problem.

So, getting home from work one day, I was met with a flat full of smoke and, in the kitchen, my wife, presiding over what appeared to be a frying pan full of cinders. “What are you doing?”

“Cooking liver the way you showed me – hot and fast.”

“Ah, but you’ve forgotten one vital step.”

“What?”

“Taking it out of the pan…!”

So we had a takeaway that night, and I did the cooking ever after – no big deal, I liked cooking, and it was something I did exceedingly well. The first year I was married, at my sister-in law’s for Christmas lunch, I was dragooned into helping in the kitchen. Feeling, strongly, that there is only room for one cook in the kitchen, it very soon became my annual task to cook Christmas lunch for a whole bunch of in-laws, and I never missed a beat.

So, it would seem, in my case at least, and I’m quite sure it’s happened  in many others too, I broke the class and education rules to become a damn good cook.

Then, around 2004, I made the acquaintance of a family that could best be described, I suppose, as upper middle class, university educated, with daddy having been the county high sheriff (no, not that kind!). The daughter, through whom I met the family (and with whom I had an embryonic relationship that quickly fizzled), was fond of hunting, and daddy of shooting, with, by all accounts, a matched set of Purdey’s.

Daughter had become disabled, though it quickly became apparent that he problem wasn’t physical, but mental. They say the best place to learn a foreign language is in bed – it’s also a very good place to realise that someone is a whole lot fitter than you, and less disabled than they claim to be, too. Nevertheless, she firmly believed she was seriously ill – problem was that the illness, and the crackpot but horribly expensive therapy she wanted daddy to pay for, changed every few weeks!

In reality, she was a massive hypochondriac (which, of course, is an illness in itself, and not to be derided), and since the age of 21 (she was then 34), had seen, at her family’s expense, over 400 doctors (think about that for a moment – that’s an almost unbelievable average of one every 12 days**), all of whom had pronounced her physically sound.

**Her father told me that, and I have no reason not to believe him.

Anyway, enough about how I wound up there, it quickly became apparent than nobody in the family could cook worth a damn, the reason being that once the local people decided they no longer wanted to be servants, they were thrown back on their own resources, only to find they had none.

Mummy could roast a pheasant (badly), of which they had an endless supply, thanks to daddy’s guns, and geological strata of long-frozen birds in an archaic freezer, and daddy could manage a basic fry-up – that was it. They lived on Wiltshire Farm Foods frozen meals, except for daughter who insisted everything was freshly bought every day, and freshly (and badly!), cooked.

I showed her mother how to make a tray out of foil, to grill fish or meat. This retained any juices, to be poured over the cooked food, and could be thrown away, along with any mess – she thought I was some sort of genius! I thought it was common sense.

I was horrified. They lived in an area  which could supply them with the finest food they could wish for, and took no advantage of it.

Apart from game (they could have shot rabbits and wood pigeon in the garden, had they wished – air rifle, not shotgun!), the nearby village boasted a startlingly modern butcher that would have been lauded in a major city, a fishmonger with the best fish I’ve ever eaten (and I used to catch my own), and who opened according to the tides – their fish was fresh off the boats, plus a decent deli. And , about a mile away, an absolutely outstanding organic farm shop which grew much of its own produce – picked in the morning, on sale by 09.30 – it doesn’t get much better, or fresher (and – oh joy! – a wide range of organic beers, thoroughly sampled).

And within a 10-mile radius of home almost every variety of artisan food was available, from whole, organic, free-range pigs, cut up for the freezer, to organic cider (excellent stuff, too!).

So, there we have it, both ends of the social spectrum (more or less), each – according to “experts” – breaking their own class rules when it came to diet, and cooking (I don’t believe you can separate the two), and if one person can experience that, I’m damn sure it’s far more common  than  we’ve been led to believe.

My personal view is that no matter what “class” a person might belong to, if they have an interest in food, the willingness to learn to cook, and not object to getting dirty and occasionally bloody (sometimes their own), then, frankly, the musings of sociologists probably count for bugger all.

Income matters in terms of the food you can buy, not in terms – on the whole – of what you do with it

As for education, I don’t think that matters greatly either – obviously an ability to read well and count/calculate accurately are vital – everything else can be acquired as you go. If people have a passion for food, they’ll find a way to indulge it, even if it’s just buying good food and cooking for themselves or their family and friends.

So what, I hear you say, about the droves of people who get Jamie Oliver so worked up? Well, I’m going to hazard a guess that’s more to do with intelligence than education, or the lack thereof. Anyone who deems it necessary to shove fish and chips through the school railings, lest her kid waste away between 09.00 and 15.15, or who has a fridge filled with crisps, burgers, and assorted crap, clearly isn’t the sharpest knife in the kitchen drawer (hell, keeping crisps in the fridge is enough of a clue in itself!).