time off from work to enjoy the pleasant weather,’ it read. One city dweller apparently decided to stay indoors and watch the rain through his window. ‘It’s beautiful weather and I was dying to get back home fast and curl up with a book and a cup of coffee while hearing the light pitter-patter of the rain on the roof,’ Rashmi Jain was quoted as saying.
The story suggests that it is not the type of weather that is as important for our mood as the change from one meteorological condition to another. While an English tourist in New Delhi might have cursed the damp, cloudy conditions so similar to what he’d left at home, locals who had endured weeks of dry heat were reportedly delighted by the break in the weather. In Britain in 1976, after weeks of boiling weather and drought conditions, the Prime Minister Harold Wilson instructed one of his ministers to do a rain dance. When the heavens did indeed open a few days later, the nation rejoiced.
There is evidence that people become habituated to the weather, that the thrill felt on the first beautiful summer’s day is less on the second and virtually non-existent after a month of such conditions. In 1998, David Schkade and Daniel Kahneman published a paper entitled, ‘Does Living in California Make People Happy?’ The two professors had noticed what they described as ‘a stereotyped perception that people are happier in California… anchored in the perceived superiority of the California climate’. Two interesting conclusions emerged from their research: firstly, tanned Californians were no happier than people from the Midwest, with its wind and rain; second, of all the factors that affected people’s life satisfaction, weather was listed at the bottom. Midwesterners moaned about the weather more than Californians, but that didn’t appear to make much difference to their overall contentment.
If change in the weather is more important than the weather itself, then perhaps (as Hippocrates suggested) it is the very unpredictability and variable nature of the British experience that shapes the national character. Tupperware skies are always promising or threatening something else. Our caution and conservatism may be the product of countless daily reactions to the cheery weather girl with her symbols, the newspaper weather map with its swirling isobars, or the view from the window at breakfast.
To put it another way, it is less the umbrella that defines us, as the fact that we feel the need to carry one.
V is for Vegetables
The Battle of Rawmarsh School was a skirmish in a feudal food fight that has been rumbling along for centuries. On one side, the professional classes — teachers and nutritionists led by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, determined to improve the quality of school meals eaten by pupils at a Rotherham comp. On the other, working- class mothers equally determined that their children should not be forced to eat rabbit food, the salads and vegetables which had replaced burgers and, famously, deep-fried turkey twizzlers on the menu.
The press chronicled how, one afternoon in 2006, three mums posted buns and chips to their children through the school railings ‘like day trippers feeding animals at the zoo’. The story encapsulated the ancient link between class and diet in Britain — more particularly on this occasion, the changing standing of vegetables. From peasant fodder to superfood, from working-class staple to middle-class statement, from the humble turnip to the flowering baby courgette, our relationship with veg has been turned on its head.
For King Henry VIII to have been seen eating a carrot stick would have been to betray England’s social order; as shocking today as a YouTube clip of the Queen secretly guzzling a monster chicken bargain bucket. Vegetables were the food of the poor and their place at the Tudor top table was restricted to a few small ‘sallets’ and garnishes surrounded by colossal quantities of expensive meat. If a vegetable did make an appearance at the feast, it was presented in an almost ironic way, like mini fish ’n’ chip canapes at a corporate networking function. One recipe for ‘an Excellent Sallet… usual at great Feasts, and upon Princes’ Tables’ consisted of a spoonful of herbs, fruit and nuts smothered in sugar.
The French penchant for fresh green vegetables was regarded with suspicion in Britain where, from the Middle Ages, the veggie option had consisted largely of onions, leeks, turnips and garlic, the occasional cucumber and a handful of dried peas or beans.
For peasants, food was fuel. The daily challenge was to consume enough calories to survive a life of toil and poverty. The question ‘what’s for dinner?’ would almost invariably be answered the same way: pottage. A glamorous definition of the dish might be a rustic stew of meat or fish with grains, herbs and vegetables. In reality it was oats and water with the odd turnip, a bone or two, apple cores and some dandelion leaves chucked in for flavour. The cooking process — boil for hours over a fire until all ingredients have been absorbed into a homogenous gloop — was designed to minimise the significant health risk from the fertiliser often spread on the fields: human excrement. Vegetables were consumed because they were available, not as a good source of sustenance. For a landless rural worker and his family, they might be a last resort as hunger closed in; gathered from the wild, rustled from private gardens or pilfered from stores of animal feed.
The nobility, meanwhile, used the dining table to display their social status, measured by the range and sheer quantity of dead birds and animals on offer. So unhealthy was this carnivorous bingeing that the wealthiest Tudors were the first group to suffer the obesity and other health problems associated these days with poverty and deprivation. A refusal to eat their greens meant noblemen were prone to mild forms of scurvy, bladder and kidney problems. Gout, a painful arthritic condition often caused by too much meat and drink, was regarded as the disease of kings.
As Western explorers returned from their adventures, new exotic vegetables were introduced to Britain; the tomato from Mexico and the potato from Peru in the sixteenth century. While other European cultures embraced and adopted the new arrivals, Britain’s suspicion of strange alien produce delayed their introduction into the nation’s diet. Potatoes were said to cause leprosy and flatulence. Tomatoes, a relative of the deadly nightshade, were thought to be poisonous. In March 1669, the diarist Samuel Pepys reflected the caution with which foreign fruit and veg were met in Britain, when presented with a glass of fresh orange juice. ‘I was doubtful whether it might not do me hurt,’ he wrote.
Vegetables won an improved status in the rural economy when it was realised that including legumes like beans and peas in crop rotation dramatically improved soil fertility and yields. During the British agricultural revolution in the eighteenth century, the Whig Parliamentarian Lord Charles Townshend became convinced of the central role for the turnip in this new agricultural system, earning both the inevitable nickname Turnip Townshend and a reputation for boring the pants off anyone who engaged with him on the subject.
The British have always tended to regard vegetables as objects of ridicule, particularly root crops. The very words mangelwurzel and turnip are used to mock unsophisticated rural life. The peasant Baldrick in the comedy series
‘Er, no,’ Baldrick replies simply.
TV consumer champion Esther Rantzen may be best remembered for the section on her show devoted to misshapen vegetables resembling genitalia, national mirth derived from our slightly dysfunctional relationship with root crops and sex organs.
While the Germans venerated the cabbage and the Italians gave the tomato a place of honour in their national cuisine, the British treated vegetables as lowly ingredients, fit for livestock and rabbits. The potato did win popularity right across the Western world, chiefly because it provided shovel-loads of energy from small amounts of land and could be stored for long periods or left underground. It proved a wonderfully versatile crop and became so central to the working-class diet in the United Kingdom that it replaced almost everything else. It certainly had greater appeal than yet another bowl of pottage.
But our love affair with spuds aside, the British relationship with vegetables remained unconsummated. In the nineteenth century, as workers migrated from farms to the factories, the industrial revolution helped bring food prices down. Suddenly people had a choice, and for the population setting up home in the new towns and cities, the opportunity to reject the unfashionable elements of the rural diet — the reviled vegetables. In what became known as the nutrition transition, Britain’s working class shunned their carrots, cabbage, watercress and beetroot (extolled as superfoods today, of course) in favour of aspiration foods: white bread, the ubiquitous potato, meat and dripping. Vegetables were unloved and unappreciated, their value placed so low that even those catering for patients in many
