SPEAKING OF FOOD: Jamie Oliver:

…Every so often, he apologises. He keeps saying, ‘Sorry–I’m ranting.’ He tells me not to quote him when he curses too much. He develops his theme, getting more and more animated. As he keeps saying, the problem of nutrition is very easily solved. But circumstances conspire against it. He tells me that, when he lived in east London, a lot of his neighbours were unemployed. And what was in their trolleys? Packets of processed food. Nothing fresh.

‘It’s cheaper to buy raw ingredients,’ he says. ‘And it’s tastier. And it’s better for you. But there’s one thing missing in this country, which is the knowledge to turn a beef shin and two carrots and an onion and water and a pinch of salt and pepper into an incredible glippy bastard of a stew that you just wanna mop up with some good bread that costs bugger all and will feed eight people.’

So why can’t we cook? One of the reasons is that children are taught very little about cooking in school. Jamie says, ‘Twenty years of governments don’t see a serious place for food. We’ve given up teaching kids how to cook at school. How can that be unimportant? How can looking after yourself and, most important, just prepping you in the bare essentials to be a young parent not be a part of it?’

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And Theodore Dalrymple on “the starving criminal”:

…Moreover, unlike the people who spoke so fluently of the food deserts, I had, in the course of my medical duties, visited many homes in the area. The only homes in which there were ever any signs of genuine cookery and of eating as a social activity, where families discussed the topics of daily life and affirmed their bonds to one another, were those of the Indian immigrants. In white and black homes, cookery meant (at its best) re-heating in a microwave oven, and there was no table round which people could sit together to eat the re-heated food. Meals here were solitary, poor, nasty, British, and short.

The Indian immigrants and their descendants inherited a far better and more elaborate cuisine than the native British, of course, but this is not a sufficient explanation of their willingness still to buy fresh food and to cook it: they continue to cook because they still live in families, and cookery is a socially motivated art. Even among Indian heroin addicts (principally Muslim), the kind of malnutrition I have described is rare, because they do not yet live in the solipsistic isolation of their white counterparts, who live alone, even when there are other people inhabiting the house or apartment in which they themselves live. Drug addiction is thus a necessary condition for much of the malnutrition that I see, but not sufficient.

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