The horsemeat scandal is one of those appalling stories from which nobody emerges well. Certainly not the suppliers, some of whom will surely face criminal charges. Not the Food Standards Agency, which has proved embarrassingly passive. Not the supermarkets, whose obsession with profit margins has seen them drive prices and standards into the gutter.
And not, I am sorry to say, the Great British public, whose love affair with cheap meat means we have effectively colluded in our own deception.
Oddly, though, the first person I thought of when I heard the news about Findus’s horsemeat lasagne and Tesco’s equine bolognese was a man who died more than 60 years ago: George Orwell.
A champion of British home cooking: George Orwell would not have been surprised by the horsemeat scandal, for he was an unsparing critic of ordinary British families' unhealthy indifference to what they ate for dinnerOrwell was not merely one of the most acute analysts of our national character, he was also one of the greatest champions of ordinary, decent British home cooking.
His splendid essay British Cookery, first published in 1946, is a hymn of praise to old-fashioned, home-cooked dishes such as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, toad in the hole, Welsh rarebit and, of course, our wealth of puddings — many of which are now, sadly, almost extinct.
But Orwell would not have been surprised by the horsemeat scandal, for he was an unsparing critic of ordinary British families’ unhealthy indifference to what they ate for dinner.
Staying in Wigan in the mid-1930s to gauge the impact of the Great Depression, he was horrified by what he found. In his lodging house, he reported, the food was ‘uniformly disgusting’. For dinner, for example, he was given ‘those threepenny steak puddings which are sold ready-made in tins’.
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In words that might well have been written in the 21st century, Orwell lamented that ‘the number of people who prefer tinned peas and tinned fish to real peas and real fish must be increasing every year, and plenty of people who could afford real milk in their tea would much sooner have tinned milk — even that dreadful tinned milk which is made of sugar and cornflour and has UNFIT FOR BABIES on the tin in huge letters’.
Of course things have changed since Orwell’s day. Unfortunately — as the horsemeat scandal suggests — they have changed for the worse.
So when did the rot set in? Historians often blame World War II, when the desperate demands of the crusade against Nazi Germany saw food rationing imposed on the British people.
Historians often blame World War II for the rot, when the demands of the crusade against Nazi Germany saw food rationing imposed on the British peopleFor years, fresh fruit such as lemons and bananas vanished from the shelves. Bacon, butter, sugar, meat, tea, jam, biscuits, eggs, milk and cheese were all tightly rationed. At one stage, families were allowed just 1oz of cheese and 2oz of butter a week.
An entire generation grew up on tinned food such as spam, imported from America, and snoek, a flavourless fish shipped from South Africa.
With staples so rare, many people simply forgot how to cook a proper meal, and when rationing was lifted in the 1950s, watery, tasteless food had become the norm.
For my money, though, the real turning point came with the next generation, who were bred amid unprecedented affluence but became slaves to the cheap food of Britain’s new supermarkets.
It is extraordinary now to think that in 1947 there were only ten self-service stores in the entire country. Most people automatically went to their local butcher’s and greengrocer’s. The fare might not have been lavish, but at least shoppers could be confident their beef was not coming from the knacker’s yard.
Twenty years later, there were already 24,000 supermarkets across the UK. Unfortunately, what they sold was not a very good advert for popular taste. For the shoppers of the Fifties and Sixties, convenience became the great god.
The shelves of the new supermarkets groaned not with seasonal British fruit and vegetables, but with tins of pineapple, frozen fish fingers, and that notorious powdered dessert of the post-war years, Angel Delight.
Before the war, Orwell had lamented that working-class families were reluctant to eat brown bread. But now the perfectly square — and almost perfectly tasteless — sliced white loaf had become the symbol of the age. In 1963, the magazine Good Housekeeping even gave its seal of approval to such unhappy innovations as Batchelors’ boil-in-the-bag curries, tinned steak and kidney pies, prepared meat in papier-mâché trays, and — most terrifying of all — the ‘pizza in a bag’.
Two things drove this culinary revolution. One was the supermarkets’ ruthless desire for profits, which meant they slashed prices to the bone and standards to the minimum.
But the other, I am sorry to say, was the sheer laziness and greed of the people who shopped in the supermarkets.
Bitter experience has taught me that it is never wise to criticise the baby-boomers, for never has there been a generation more sensitive to the slights of their successors.
It speaks volumes about our wretched relationship with food that as people got richer, their standards fell still further. In 1970, only four in a hundred British homes had a deep freezer; by 1980, more than 40 in 100 had oneBut it is an unarguable fact that the generation of the 1950s and 1960s, who came of age at a time of full employment, soaring living standards and dizzying technological change, became used to getting everything they wanted, whenever they wanted.
They scoffed at the slogans of Austerity Britain — ‘Waste not, want not’, ‘Make do and mend’. Instead, they worshipped at the altar of fast food — whether served under the golden arches of McDonald’s or sitting smugly on the shelves in their brand-new fridges.
It speaks volumes about our wretched relationship with food that as people got richer, so their standards fell still further. In 1970, only four in a hundred British homes had a deep freezer; by 1980, more than 40 in 100 had one.
During the 1970s, frozen-food cookbooks even advised people how to freeze sardine sandwiches, while Iceland set up shop in High Streets across the land.
And by the early 1980s, Birds Eye was making huge profits from their frozen Oven Crispy Cod, Steakhouse Grills and Viennetta ice cream.
The person who really captured our love affair with cheap food, though, was none other than Delia Smith.
Ice age: During the 1970s, frozen-food cookbooks soared and by the early 1980s, Birds Eye was making huge profits from their frozen Oven Crispy Cod, Steakhouse Grills and Viennetta ice creamToday Middle England’s favourite cook regularly sounds off against the culinary ignorance of her fellow shoppers. But when she first shot to fame in the 1970s, Delia was the high priestess of convenience. Her first cookbook, published in 1971 and aptly titled How to Cheat At Cooking, encouraged readers to ‘tart up’ their dinners with packet sauces and Smash.
Frozen Findus ratatouille or Birds Eye onions in cream sauce, Delia suggested, could be ‘poured over chops or steak to give them an edge’.
And she even advised busy hostesses to serve Baked Fish Fingers — a concoction of tinned tomatoes, mushrooms and grated cheese poured over fish fingers.
Somehow, I doubt even the least observant guests were fooled by that one.
All the time, Whitehall was handing out grants for farmers to rip down their woodlands and hedgerows and to churn out ever vaster quantities of peas and beans for the frozen-food suppliers, working all night under vast arc-lights to meet their quotas.
As early as 1971, one report explained, farmers had to produce ‘always the same width of pea, the same fat-content of pork meat, the same size of apple all over the country’.
All of this had a disastrously alienating effect. Generations of British consumers simply forgot that fruit and vegetables are seasonal foods, and that meat has to come from somewhere. They got used to having their favourite meals whenever they wanted, and they asked no questions about where they came from.
The high priestess of convenience: Delia Smith was the woman who captured our love affair with cheap foodWith women flooding into the workforce, the old image of the housewife toiling over the stove almost disappeared. And in 1979 — the year that Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first woman Prime Minister — Marks & Spencer introduced their first chilled ready meal, the Chicken Kiev, aimed at women who were too busy to cook.
In a sense, therefore, the horsemeat scandal has been coming for decades. Indeed, although the supermarkets will deny it, I would not be surprised if some people have been unwittingly eating horsemeat all their lives.
A glance at Iceland’s website — ostentatiously targeted at ‘busy mums’ — tells the whole story. Here is a Beef Roast Dinner for just £1.50, or an Ocean Pie for just £1. If you want a Chicken Biryani for not much more than the cost of a Mars Bar, you have come to the right place.
Some readers may protest that they cannot afford anything more expensive. I am afraid that is nonsense. If you buy seasonal vegetables from your local market and pick your meat carefully, you can eat perfectly well for very little.
The truth is that — encouraged by the supermarkets — we have become drunk on cheapness and convenience.
In many households, the family dinner is now almost extinct. We stuff ourselves in front of the television, never troubling to wonder where our meal actually came from.
Speaks volumes: When Jamie Oliver launched his campaign to improve school dinners, mothers were pictured shovelling crisps and takeaway burgers to their kids through the playground railingsNo wonder our children are now the fattest and unhealthiest youngsters in Europe.
Indeed, it speaks volumes that when Jamie Oliver launched his campaign to improve school dinners, mothers in Rotherham were pictured shovelling crisps and takeaway burgers to their little darlings through the playground railings when the headmaster introduced healthy meals.
It is a myth, incidentally, that this is merely a working-class issue. Only this week, the organisation Slow Food UK reported that British university students, who are overwhelmingly middle-class, spend twice as much money every week on alcohol as they do on food.
Current student favourites include such delights as pasta with vinegar and garlic cloves, baked beans on hula hoops, pasta with a mushy pea ‘jus’, and a ghastly sounding ‘supernoodles omelette’. No wonder the French think so little of us.
Indeed, you have only to visit a branch of Waitrose — that temple to middle-class values — to see mounds of pizzas and ready meals trundling down the conveyor belts.
It now emerges that some of Waitrose’s own-brand beef meatballs were actually partly pork. Well, this is what happens when you follow your rivals in a race to the bottom.
It is, of course, very tempting to blame the supermarkets for all this, and already Downing Street has been quick to point the finger of blame.
But those gigantic money-making machines are in the business of appeasing popular tastes — and ultimately, I am sorry to say, we have only ourselves to blame.
The solution, of course, is pretty obvious. Stop buying dodgy meat and air-freighted fruit from the supermarket. Go to your local butcher and greengrocer instead.
And don’t complain that local suppliers’ prices are ‘too high’. Their prices are actually perfectly reasonable: it is the supermarkets whose prices are unfairly low.
It is high time that we rediscovered the virtues of decent, seasonal British home cooking.
All of this takes us back to Orwell, that scourge of British tastes. For although the great man was quick to criticise his countrymen for their terrible eating habits, there was no greater admirer of our culinary traditions.
When it was done right, Orwell wrote in another famous essay, In Defence Of English Cooking, our food could stand comparison with any in the world.
‘It is not a law of nature,’ he insisted, ‘that every restaurant in England should be either foreign or bad, and the first step towards an improvement will be a less long-suffering attitude in the British public itself.’
He was right about that. Sadly, six decades on, we have yet to learn our lesson.
