Politics of Food

They say the personal is political, (they being 1st generation feminists) and these days, it seems there is little in the UK more political than food. From the junk that we feed our kids to  the sleeping arrangement of the chickens we consume, there's a celebrity figure or a government spokesman waggling their finger at us.

Now Delia has weighed in contraversially, saying that plenty of people can't afford organically reared chicken and you shouldn't make pensioners or the low-paid feel guilty about buying the food they can afford. I have to say, I see her point.

This morning I was whipping round Tescos, in my usual whirlwind of efficiency, when I ruefully grinned at how bleddy lower middle-class the contents of my trolley were. From the natural, fat-free, bio-yoghurt to the type of bagged salad that doesn't contain iceberg lettuce. From the wholemeal bread to the branflakes. From the imported raspberries I agonised over due to the airmiles and carbon footprint they represented to the processed meat products that I walk straight past without a second glance. Even slim-line tonic for splashing over the gin. You'd think I'd been brainwashed by some Whitehall numpty telling me what's good for me.

Of course, it wasn't always like this. It used to be Aldi & Iceland - cheap white bread, fishfingers & oven chips. Yes, I fed my daughters that sort of crap - is there a support group I can join where we beat our breasts in guilt? Back then, I bought what was on special, haunted the BOGOFs, and concentrated on what I knew they'd eat, as opposed to what was good for them and might get wasted. Organically reared, corn-fed chicken didn't come into it.

What's more, food inflation is shooting up, so thank goodness the government were sensible enough to move away from the nasty old target of RPI at its current rate of 4.2% and concentrate on the much more benign CPI. Its current rate of 2.2% is drifting further and further away from the old-fashioned RPI but that's because we spend lots of money each month on cheap Chinese dvd players. Not food, energy, petrol, council tax.... you know, those tempting extras of life. As wage inflation tends to follow CPI rather than RPI, we're all getting poorer, so pretty soon, it won't just be pensioners living on tins of dog-food or single mothers with 5 kids on the breadline who will treat themselves to the occasional intensively reared clucker - it'll be me too & those like me.

Perhaps the subtext of Delia's comments are, or should be that we could do something about human overcrowding before we bleed over chickens that we're going to kill and eat anyway. In the UK, babies under 1 do not count at all. Officially, they require zero space. Anyone who has a baby is patently aware of how much space they and their stuff require, but according to government statistics, its not even a square inch. Children between the ages of 1 and 10 count as half a human. This is a national disgrace, not the social lives of chickens.

Irritating but partly right

The indefatigably irritating Jeremey Clarkson in his latest column rails against this governments growing war against the middle classes. He points out that

"They tell you not to go to Tuscany this summer, and they throw withering
looks at the Ryanair flights to Gascony"

and that they have declared war on the Chelsea tractor, but

"when Kentucky Fried Chicken starts advertising a bucket of supper with
disposable plates and nonbiodegradable plastic cutlery so you don’t have to get
your fat arse out of your DFS sofa and wash up, do we hear a murmur?"

Now personally, I neither have nor want a 4x4, nor can I afford flights to Tuscany nor do I have a second home in France. Nevertheless, I am aware that as a tax-paying, car-insuring citizen, I'm an easy target for the lazy, revenue-raising, target-obsessed, Chief Constables of our fair land, and that this is just a subset of a wider mentality.

If I were the chavvy type who was quite happy to hide behind the "no speak English" excuse, or merrily considered car tax and MoT as farty bits of paperwork of no concern, I could drive where and how I wanted with impunity, with nary a uniform to impede me. This is starting to sound like a BNP rant, which its not. This is not about colour, race, nationality or creed. Its about contributing as much or more to the society you live in than you withdraw.

As much as financial debt has become the norm, there is a growing acceptance that its okay to take and not to put back. The nonsense of taxing vast swathes of people in order to give it back to them in tax credits, thereby keeping full track of their earnings and movements just encourages this mindset. "We owe all we have to the state. Long live the state!" seems to be the message. Well bugger that.