With Diane Purkiss - Sunday Papers Live - FOOD

I will be speaking about the ways that ordinary people chose to eat in England’s past, and the ways that food and food knowledge were taken from them. Most food history focuses on the food of the rich, the people wearing jewellery, furs, and velvet. By contrast, I will explore the way rural housewives in Lancashire used an acute knowledge of nose-to-tail eating to provide for large families, the rise of fish and chips as a convenience food, the displacement of treats like cow heel by the first ice cream, and the disappearance of home baking with the loss of access to woodlands. There is a hardy tradition, led by Elizabeth David, of assuming that English people do not care about food. I will show that these claims are false, and that English people who have never been rich have always cared passionately about what they ate, even when it was under threat from landowners and employers.