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    Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder
    Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder
    Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder
    Ebook164 pages3 hours

    Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder

    By Rob Lyons

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    Food in Britain today is more plentiful, more nutritious, more varied, and much more affordable than ever in our history. This is something to celebrate, and Rob Lyons does exactly that. In a series of short up-beat chapters he challenges head on the fashionable critics of so-called junk food and the "wacky world" of organic and locally-sourced food campaigners. They have created needless panic and made our cheap and tasty food an object of shame and blame, when it should be a cause for rejoicing. "Panic on a Plate" draws on history, science, and official reports to show the fearmongers are wrong: the changing face of food is full of hope.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherImprint Academic
    Release dateOct 7, 2011
    ISBN9781845403003
    Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder

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      Panic on a Plate - Rob Lyons

      2010

      How has our food changed?

      One of the prejudices of the food debate today is that there was a Golden Age in which everyone ate well, with lots of locally produced meat, fruit and vegetables, lovingly prepared at home. All this could be purchased from the friendly, local greengrocer, butcher and baker, who would be ready with a smile and a little local gossip. Eating out was rare and convenience food non-existent.

      This idyll is presented in sharp contrast to a modern way of eating, built on ready meals, fast food and ‘junk’. Our children allegedly grow up on sweets and crisps, and wouldn’t recognise a real vegetable if it bit them. If only we could return to those home-cooked meals of yore, goes the misty-eyed argument, then all of our problems of obesity and ill-health would disappear.

      But both sides of this image are exaggerated. The working classes in Britain did not eat well until comparatively recently. Food was expensive relative to many people’s incomes and what they could afford was often monotonous and dull. It is only with rising living standards, falling food prices and the appearance of the much-maligned supermarket that a wide range of foods was available at affordable prices to the majority. Moreover, the ‘home-grown’ past was built on the hard labour of women, who stayed at home to raise families and were able to devote long periods of time to buying food and cooking it.

      A high-profile version of this idea is promoted by the American academic and food writer, Michael Pollan, in his bestselling In Defence of Food. Pollan presents us with some handy food rules, summed up in the seven-word motto: ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.’ And what does Pollan mean by food? ‘Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.’ As a note of explanation, he adds: ‘Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.’[1]

      It seems a little strange that we should be fretting about our eating habits when cookery books and shows are so ubiquitous. We are surrounded by Jamie Oliver, Delia Smith, Nigel Slater, Nigella Lawson, Gordon Ramsay, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Sophie Dahl, the Hairy Bikers, Rick Stein and many more. Jamie Oliver has become a one-man food industry. His most recent book, Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals, is the fastest selling non-fiction book in UK publishing history: only JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books have sold faster. BBC1 television gives over a great chunk of its Saturday mornings to Saturday Kitchen, while food-related shows like Masterchef (in no less than three different formats), Hell’s Kitchen, Ready Steady Cook, The Great British Bake-Off, The Great British Menu and many more would suggest that we are a nation in love with food and cooking.

      Others have called our modern obsession with cookery ‘food porn’: an apt description of an interest in food that is all about watching and not about doing. British food writer Joanna Blythman is, to a degree, right to be sceptical of the idea that the nation’s food culture has undergone a renaissance:

      Nowadays, Britain so desperately wants to be seen as a fully functioning, participatory food culture that it feeds this delusion by selectively ignoring the gaping discrepancies that don’t fit. Most glaringly, there’s our growing incompetence in the domestic kitchen and our increasing reluctance to cook - surely the most telling indicator of a nation’s culinary health? How many people do you know who still consider it a priority to cook from scratch a simple, home-made meal most days of the week?[2]

      As it happens, Blythman may be overly pessimistic. A survey on British eating habits conducted for the Food Standards Agency reported in March 2011 that ‘almost three-fifths (57 per cent) said they cooked or prepared food for themselves every day, and 37 per cent did so for others’. A majority of respondents agreed with the statements ‘I enjoy cooking and preparing food’ (68 per cent), and ‘I enjoy making new things to eat’ (65 per cent). The majority (65 per cent) disagreed with the statement ‘For me, food is just fuel to live’. Overall, 40 per cent agreed with ‘Cooking is like a hobby for me’.

      Jamie Oliver also laments the demise of ‘real food’, and illustrates this by showing how many children cannot recognise common vegetables. In his US television series Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, Oliver visits a class of six-year-olds in West Virginia and asks them to identify a variety of vegetables. He’s shocked to find that the children failed the task. (Though he really shouldn’t be - he performed precisely the same demonstration in his UK series Jamie’s School Dinners a few years earlier.) They knew what tomato ketchup was, but didn’t recognise tomatoes. They thought an eggplant might be a pear and guessed that a beet was celery. This seems dramatic, but what did Oliver’s stunt actually prove? Quite apart from the fact that such young children don’t know much about anything at all, one blogger pointed out that it was as much an indication that the children didn’t read. After all, the alphabet is often illustrated with vegetables for the letters - C is for Carrot, and so on. And if children don’t know how to name whole vegetables, it does not necessarily mean that they don’t, or won’t, eat

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