New season, new kitchen

Counts as 'cooker porn'?

If there was one thing – apart from seeing our cats again – that made the return from holiday worth while, it was coming back to a new kitchen, just in time for a new season.

In the last week, a number of people have commented, of our having been away while the work was done in our home, that we were very ‘trusting’.

The implication being that they would be reluctant to leave their own homes in the hands of “contractors”.

It’s difficult, though, to know how they’d continue to live in a home while a room such as a bathroom or kitchen is being gutted and completely re-fitted.

That Tardis carousel

Three weeks using a bucket instead of a loo – unless they get workmen to spend time refitting one every day at the end of the work? Take-away meals for the duration? Yuk!

We’re incredibly fortunate to have Ian, a local, old-fashioned tradesman, has done a wonderful job yet again. And it not only all looks great, but works so much better too.

We have, in the last week, been able to get pretty much everything sorted out and into its new place.

As explained previously, it was an excellent opportunity to cull and clear. Now, though, I have one cupboard that must be the Tardis in disguise – it’s so big, with a carousel inside, that it stores every single pan, casserole, oven dish, earthenware pot, tagine, jug and large serving bowl that I have!

One very deep drawer now takes all my bakeware – which used to take a whole cupboard and a drawer – while another substantial drawer takes ladles, serving spoons, most of which had been hung on the wall, and another cupboard easily hosts all the slightly less-used gadgets, such as the mandolin and the potato ricer.

Neat and tidy – and so much more work space!

Pull-out sections bookending the cooker hold all the tea and coffee-making kit on one side, and all my herbs, spices, salts, vinegars and oils on the other.

The crockery is now displayed in the shelf unit/dresser, while all the cups, mugs and glassware are in further cupboards.

The entire effect is one of far less clutter, while it’s all so much lighter, too.

The butler sink came into its own on the first day back, as it allowed us to soak and wash out the big, retro, enamel bread bin, that previously would not go in a sink.

And of course, although I’m still getting used to the cooker – it has had me purring since day one – while the splashback that we made of features tiles from Casa Latina in Collioure, and the drawer and cupboard handles from the same source, looks lovely.

After just a brace of hobs on this trip to France, the Rangemaster is a big step up!

I should add that the new fridge – the old one was dying on us and would have needed replacing anyway – is a piece of magnificent Bosch. We took account of width and nothing else when planning, but this is another massive step up.

And it provides far more fridge magnet space too – I had a joyous task at the weekend ‘curating’ our personal art gallery!

I had been told, in conversation with a friend, that when buying white goods, the best – and most simple – advice is: “Go to John Lewis and buy as much Bosch as you can afford!”

Our washing machine for the past two years has been Bosch and I can easily see the wisdom in that advice. The fridge-freezer merely confirms it.

But all of this has had me thinking about how our cooking areas and facilities have been reduced in the last three decades.

Not a posh cooker – just an old one

Back in the 1970s, it would hardly have been a luxury to have a cooker that had both an oven and a separate grill.

However, the years since, and the advent of built-in cookers, have seen this end as the norm.

More recently, we’ve moved to new homes being built with, in some cases, only enough room for a microwave.

As food journalist Joanna Blythman relates in one of her books, a developer who planned holiday homes with just a microwave found themselves having to re-do kitchens when Continental visitors complained at the lack of proper cooking equipment.

And as Blythman also uncovered, the UK accounts for more than half the European ready-meals market, while the figure for snack products is similar.

There’s an interweaving of things here, but as I’ve also said many times, there is also a poor culture when it comes to how we see food in the UK.

A few weeks ago, I happened to overhear a ‘conversation’ between a mother and child, the latter having only recently turned three.

“What do you want for your dinner?”

“Dippy chips.”

“You can’t have dippy chips every night!”

The conversation did not, you probably won’t be surprised to know, take place in France.

When and how did it become considered sensible or appropriate to ask a small child what they want to eat? When did it somehow become bad parenting to deploy the old ‘you eat what’s in front of you’ routine?

The glories of a Bosch fridge

For the record, the mother in question is not particularly young and is a working professional.

Having said that, on the subject of school meals, I’ve heard otherwise apparently intelligent adults arguing that choice is good for young children – precisely because it teaches them to choose.

Which is idiotic reasoning. You teach them about proper food – and then, when they’re a lot more grown up and they have some of the food skills required to make choices, they can start choosing.

Why would making choices – without experience and knowledge – be a positive thing? And especially when they are, in effect, up against companies, including big corporates, that are out to make a profit that may be increased by providing less-than-healthy options?

It’s like David v Goliath where people are suddenly rooting for the giant.

‘Choice’ can mean a salad over there and the lasagna and chips over here. How many six or seven-year olds do you know who won’t choose the latter, with all the sugars and salts and fats made to make it attractive?

I spent a day in a school canteen a couple of years ago – and it was far from being a bad canteen, with all food made from scratch by a dedicated team – but because they have to offer ‘choice’, there are children who happily (and apparently regularly) just choose a plate of stodge. And I heard the dinner ladies trying to encourage them to try something different.

The artiest Bosch fridge in town?

There’s a substantial part of the issue with that overheard mother, though, of sheer laziness.

Of course it’s difficult when both parents are working, but is copping out on what you actually feed your child really the only option?

Why does the myth persist that it is ‘difficult’ or too time consuming to cook a meal properly, from scratch, in the evening?

What you eat is one of the most important factors in your life – and if you’re nurturing a child, it should be even more important.

And you don’t need a double oven and a butler sink. But what the gradual reduction of kitchen spaces in homes does do is to shore up the attitudes that then lead to this kind of behavior.

They lead to the decline in sales of dining tables – and the seven-year-old who cannot use a knife and fork properly.

That’s another example where the parents were white-collar, full-time workers who couldn’t be arsed to feed their child properly after a day at work, so relied on finger food, takeaways and frozen pizzas while they concentrated on the important things in life, such as what’s on the telly.

It does beg the question of how much this syndrome is a question of both partners having to work or the ‘conveniencing’ of our diet.

I’d suggest it’s primarily the latter, since women in working-class communities have had to work for centuries. The textile mills didn’t run on unmarried, childless female labour, for instance.

The difference now is the vast development, in the last 40 years, of ready-meals, microwaves and the takeaway culture.

It has denuded our collective culinary skill level and the result is a culture where increasing numbers of people feed themselves – and their children – badly.

And when you see food as fuel, and all fuel as having the same value, then you’re well on the way down this route.

The examples I’ve given are far from unique. This morning, the BBC online included a report that 12% of UK three-year-olds have tooth decay.

It came a day after I saw a mother on a bus with three small children, explaining to her partner that one of them had had chocolate, a sausage roll and crisps to eat that day – and was still hungry.

And it was only last Friday that I happened to see another small child in a pushchair complaining to his mother that he’d finished the large tube of Pringles and wanted something else.

Laziness, ignorance – and, of course, lack of money, all feed into this, along with the (partly mythical) cheapness of ultra-processed junk food.

A big tube of Pringles is well over £2. You can buy a 500g bag of pasta for comfortably under 50p, a 400g of tinned tomatoes for well under 40p, an onion and some garlic for next to nowt.

Even allowing for a little oil and seasonings that you’ll need from the cupboard, that will create a simple meal that’ll take 30 minutes at most, in one pan on one hob, and will be infinitely cheaper and better for up to four people eating it than that single tube of Pringles for one small child.

So, irrespective of the cooker – let’s take autumn as the opportunity to get cooking proper, real food for ourselves and our families!

A wonderland of ideas

It could be read as a sign of the times that, when the news of the demise of Richard Griffiths broke a couple of days ago, the headlines read, over and again, that the “Harry Potter actor” had died.

It is highly doubtful that, no matter how lucrative were those films personally, Griffiths himself would have viewed them as his best or most important work.

That probably wouldn’t have been last year’s West End revival of Neil Simon’s bitter comedy, The Sunshine Boys, in which he starred to great effect opposite the bundle of combustible energy that is (Batman Returns actor!) Danny DeVito.

More likely, one might think, would be the cult classic Withnail and I, and both stage and film versions of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, both of which have been seen by large audiences, not simply a certain, limited class of theatregoer.

Not, I hasten to note, that there is anything wrong with Harry Potter – books and films alike are thoroughly delightful.

To be fair, this is hardly new. When John Gielgud departed life’s stage in 2000, the Daily Star marked his passing with headline: ‘Butler in Arthur dies’.

But it was akin to reading that the West End production of John Logan’s new play, Peter and Alice, was really just a big Bond reunion, since the author had written Skyfall (amongst many big screen hits), and the stars were M and Q.

It could hardly have been further from 007.

In the introduction to the script, Logan writes that, “many years ago”, in a biography of Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the model for Lewis Carroll’s Alice, he’d read that: “On June 26 1932 Alice opened the Lewis Carroll exhibition at Bumpus, the London bookshop. Beside her was Peter [Llewellyn] Davies, the original Peter Pan.”

And that is where Logan begins, wondering what they might have said to each other.

Having inspired Rev Charles Dodgson (Carroll) and JM Barrie to pen their classic children’s tales, both went on to face tragedy in their adult lives.

Having lost both parents to cancer, Peter lost a brother and any remaining childhood innocence in the mud of Flanders, with another brother apparently ending his own life a few years later.

For Alice, her own lost boys were two of three sons dying on the Western Front.

From icons of childhood to pained adulthood.

Logan’s play explore the legacy of being the models for those icons; the pressures it might bring, unable to escape that.

For Alice, it’s a blessing; a distraction from the tragedy. For Peter, a dreadful reminder of innocence lost; of the pain of growing up.

When the shallow set of a dusty storeroom in a bookshop rises to reveal a vast version of a toy theatre, with proscenium arch decorated by illustrations from the two books, Alice and Peter are joined not only by Dodgson and Barrie, but also by the characters that they gave their names to, and Logan can embark on a journey of memory.

Challenged by their muses, we explore the two authors; possessive and both sad and bitter in unhappy adult lives.

The question of whether Dodgson had paedophilic inclinations is not a new one. Logan deals with it carefully – it cannot be ignored when seen through today’s sensibilities.

If one wishes to see it through the prism of pop culture, it could perhaps be suggested that Dodgson here is reminiscent of Michael Jackson – a desperately unhappy adult who spends time with children in order to claim or reclaim the joy of childhood.

However, he also has Alice ask Peter whether Barrie “molested” him or his four brothers.

And here we have one of Logan’s ideas. ‘No’, responds Peter. Not physically.

But how much can what these authors did, using children as unwitting templates for something from which they could never escape, a form of abuse?

It’s worth noting here that there are vastly differing views of Dodgson’s apparent fondness for photographing young girls, which is touched on in the play.

While just over 50% of his surviving photographic work is of young girls, 60% of his portfolio is missing or destroyed, so it’s not possible to say with certainty what the rest contained – and his sketches show a much more varied subject matter.

It has also been said that, at that time, child nudes were a popular and mainstream Victorian art form – part of the ‘Victorian child cult’ and even appearing on Christmas cards, so there is a danger of seeing Dodgson through 21^st-century eyes.

What is equally interesting, though, is that at around the same time as he invented the stories of Alice, his diaries became full of the rather Calvinistic view of himself as a “vile and worthless” sinner, which may possibly be reflected in his desire for ‘innocent’ companionship.

Anyway, that’s one of the questions that Logan doesn’t pretend to be able to answer.

The performances are superb. Ben Wishaw as Peter is awkward and angular and painfully vulnerable and angry.

At first stiff and of stiff upper lip, Judi Dench’s Alice succumbs eventually to a heart-rending sob as she remembers her lost sons. But her ability to also convey the Alice of childhood without it ever seeming cloying or false is an indicator of just why she is such a superb actor.

To be honest, I don’t know what I expected of the play. I bought tickets because Dench is on a list of actors that I have told The Other Half he must see.

The play itself turns out to be a challenging, intelligent and fascinating piece.

But back to that dumbing down.

The obsessive need to popularise everything is an infantilisation of thought. It’s at the heart of what has happened to the country’s public discourse over the last few decades, which is a major reason why it matters.

While there can be genuine benefits if it means, for instance, that someone decides to go and see the play because of that Bond connection, it also brings with it a concomitant infantilisation of thought.

That saw senior theatre critic Michael Billington of the Guardian not only try out a rather patronising joke at the expense of those he imagines to be thus mired in the pop culture world – “Anyone hoping to see Q and M will find themselves constantly confronted by Q and A” – as though people really cannot differentiate between actors playing different roles, but then himself complained at the lack of easy gratification by asserting that Logan’s play neither offers any “revelations” nor “shocks or startles by its insights”, as though this were actually the latest installment in the Bond franchise and such things were the necessary intellectual equivalents of all the pyrotechnics and car chases.

For Billington, the performances are the pleasure: perhaps it was he who had turned up expecting merely to see “Q and M”.

The performances are very much a pleasure, but so is seeing question after question, theme after theme, idea after idea revealed, like the layers of an onion being peeled back. And all ready for the audience to take away with them and mull at greater length.

Peter and Alice might be short at just a single, 90-minute act, but is far from flimsy.

There is nothing wrong with popular culture – a cultural diet can include Carry On films as well as Shakespeare, but that doesn’t mean that we get all relativist about it, any more than trying to compare Abba and Beethoven.

It all seems to say: ‘we can’t do grown-up culture by itself any more: it’s too difficult.’ Or perhaps it’s simply that the easier something is, the more it sells.

In true chicken and egg fashion, it’s hard to know which came first – media reporting in this way or the public demanding it.

That production of The Sunshine Boys was met with some reviews that saw eyes rolled metaphorical at the physical contrast between the leads, decrying it as rather passé.

Well indeed. Simon’s piece is about a faded Vaudeville double act – so the physical contrast was precisely the sort of ‘obvious’ comic device that would have been around at the time.

The casting was done with this in mind – not as a pretence that, ‘oh, ha ha, we’ve thought of something new’.

The lack of understanding of something as simple as basic context was irritating and frustrating. It was an attempt at ‘clever’ reviewing without the understanding to be so.

At it seems to be part of a circle that include the ‘Harry Potter actor’ headlines, the desire for answers instead of the questions that provoke at least an effort at mental aerobics.

You never find yourself thinking like this in childhood.

• Peter and Alice is on at the Noël Coward Theatre, St Martin’s Lane, London until 1 June. A limited number of tickets are available on the day for £10.

The script will be published shortly by Oberon Books.

Traffic light chaos as everyone ducks the issues

In the last week, there has been a flurry of discussion over a new system of food labelling.

Many shoppers are, apparently, confused by packets and want advice on what’s healthy and what’s not.

And so we have the new ‘traffic light’ system, which an increasing number of supermarkets have agreed to use.

A number of writers have already explained how it works – or more to the point, why it’s dismal. There’s an excellent and detailed explanation here from Zöe Harcombe  and another here from Joanna Blythman.

To précis, the system intends to use traffic light-style graphics to warn people whether a food is ‘healthy’ in terms of how much fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt it contains, based on certain guidelines.

So, because every one of those for, say, diet Coke, Shredded Wheat and white flour comes in low, those foods get green ‘lights’ across the board.

Yet using this same method of labelling, olives would be in the orange on two counts, in the red once (salt) and in the green only once (sugar).

A rump steak sees two green (salt and sugar), one orange (fat) and one red (saturated fat).

A whole mackerel gets an orange for both fat in total and saturated fat, but green for salt and sugar.

And pasta is green on all counts.

So in other words, if this system is correct, you can eat pretty much unlimited amounts of cereals and pasta (with artificially-sweetened drinks on the side), but need to be more careful about consumption of oily fish and even more careful about meat and olives.

I suspect that most readers here already know that that is, frankly, errant nonsense.

For starters, it falls into the trap of providing information on fat that is surely out of date – and even the standard mantra of recent years understands that some fats, such as those you get in oily fish, are essential to continued good health.

So along comes a scheme that is saying all the wrong things – the only wonder is that the supermarkets have taken so long to agree to implement it. Because it is going to lend a false health badge to at least some processed foods.

On assorted forums, people have been commenting that this illustrates the problem of government interfering in a matter such as health.

But while it would be nice to see a world in which no state intervention was required in food (or many other things), the reality needs something different.

In discussions of market economies, the relationship between the large company and the individual customer is treated as though it takes place on a level playing field.

It does not. This is David v Goliath.

Big businesses have huge resources to invest in all manner of methods for promoting their product. They have entire departments dedicated to working out what works as advertising and PR – and even the psychology of the customer, so that they can best exploit what they find (see here for a little more detail)

We know that big businesses such as supermarkets use all sorts of methods to confuse the customer. For instance, they’re supposed to provide the information to allow you to compare the relative prices of different products.

The most obvious way to do this is by giving a price per a set measurement – so for instance, if you’re selling carrots loose, bagged and prepared, you label each with the cost per 100g or per kilo, making the comparison quick and easy.

But there are sneaky ways to make this less clear.

Take this little example.

Online at Ocado the other week, two different jars of celery salt were available. They were different sizes – one was 80g and one 100g. The larger one was organic. The prices were listed – with the cost per 20g listed for one and the cost per 100g for the other.

Now the calculation is hardly difficult, but why not simply use the same for both?

And we’ve all read about how offers in supermarkets turn out to be nothing of the sort – the price having been whacked up for a period before it’s then put on ‘offer’, for example.

As a small businessman – and a Conservative councillor – told me a few weeks ago, regulation protects both businesses and the customer.

There are plenty of theories around about why the UK has seen such a massive rise in obesity (and related illnesses) in the last three decades. What is pretty much undisputed are the health ramifications and the costs that come with this, both in human and financial terms.

So there are serious reasons for any government – which is, after all, supposed to be a government of the people – to be concerned.

‘Get rid of regulation’, some say. ‘That’ll sort it all out.’

‘People should take responsibility for themselves,’ chime other voices.

Well, yes. But why is big business never expected to behave with any more responsibility than that for its shareholders?

Increasingly over the last 30 years, we’ve seen the onus for responsible behaviour in any transaction shifted to the customer alone. And with it, the onus for the customer to be more educated about a product than the seller.

We all have to be experts in finance now, so that we don’t get (miss) sold the wrong pension or mortgage, because companies are no longer in the business of taking pride in caring for their customers, but simply of maximising their profits.

If you’re as old as me, you may even remember the day when banks were trusted institutions.

Today, though, it’s assumed that you’ll research anything you’re considering buying – there’s a reason that Which? Has become so important.

Whatever happened to decent service, eh? How much of our time (outside work) are we now expected to invest in educating ourselves for life in this consumer paradise – because big retailers and big finance cannot, in essence, be trusted? And why should they – it’s our responsibility.

But those questions don’t just apply to financial products – they apply to food too. And there are many things that hinder people being able to cut through the sneakiness to make good choices:

• it’s a simple fact that meaningful choice itself has been reduced. In the last 30 years, the major supermarkets have gone from having 20% of the UK grocery retail trade to having 80% of it. There is a reason that such words and phrases as ‘Tescopoly’ and ‘Tesco Town’ have entered the lexicon;

• at the same time, skills have declined. Not only do we have far fewer proper fishmongers and butchers, but domestic cookery skills have declined too. Vast amounts of knowledge are being lost. Concomitantly, the amount of ready meals sold and eaten in the UK has risen. In 2005, the UK consumed more ready meals than the rest of Europe combined.

Only the other day, this blog highlighted adverts from fast food firms pushing the line that cooking is too difficult and you’d be better having a takeaway.

The point is that we do need regulation – but we need it to be sensible, to be meaningful and to be properly enforced.

The traffic light farce is indicative of how successive governments, for whatever reason, have failed to tackle the key problems, which in essence are the over-dominance of our food culture by processed food and the big supermarkets.

Planning rules need to be tightened or adjusted to help to protect small businesses from voracious, big competitors that simply have so much financial clout that they can bully their way to getting anything they want.

They could also be adjusted to make it more difficult to change the use of premises – so you can’t just buy out a bookshop, for instance, and turn it into yet another franchise of a fast food outlet or a coffee chain.

The state of local high streets in general is a cause for concern – councils have not helped by cutting parking, while supermarkets are able to offer free parking. Such things need addressing, because the situation at present is unbalanced and favours big businesses over small ones.

Talk of a ‘fat tax’ (discussed recently by the Fabian Society as a possible approach to the problems by a future Labour government) is as flawed as the traffic light system and for similar reasons – it would be sending a simplistic and nutritionally unsound statement that all fat is bad. This is wrong, and the problem is not simply fat (and/or sugar) but processed food in general.

Government needs to remember its role and take on big business for the protection of the individual – and the community that is made up of those individuals.

We need to start educating children and young people – not with GCSE lessons telling them how a factory makes processed food, but about how they can learn to cook and bake something that’s then worth eating.

School dinners are currently being reviewed after the sheer debacle produced by the privatisation of the service in the 1980s led to the abomination of the ‘turkey twizzler’. Things were improved by the previous government after much campaigning by Jamie Oliver and organisations such as trade union UNISON – but there is some way to go.

Ban any vending machines from schools. There is absolutely no need for them. Snacking is another problem – and, of course, another big money spinner for very large businesses.

Let’s have a discussion about just how much ‘choice’ children should have at meal times in schools.

We don’t expect young children to choose what subjects they’re going to study in the classroom – why should there be an almost gushing belief that they must have choice when they sit down to lunch?

The lack of a choice in schools elsewhere around the world is not seen as some dismal assault on children’s rights. Yet exploiting children’s lack of knowledge, experience and susceptibility to potentially addictive sugary and salty tastes in the drive for increased profits is an assault on their rights.

And don’t forget that, even when catering companies boast about the healthy options that make available, they’re clever about how they market the least healthy/cheapest options to children.

Nothing that I’ve fleetingly touched on here is particularly radical or even original – and much of it works rather well in other countries, including but not limited to France.

If it does seem radical, that’s simply rather a sad indicator of how far we have gone along the path of believing that profit for big business is the most important factor in a great many decisions.

It seems odd to remember that Conservatives used to be conservative, championing small business as well as big, and stressing the importance of concepts such as heritage and tradition.

Now, in the case of the Parliamentary Conservative party at least, together with it’s mouthpieces in the media (traditional and social), these things seem to have been foresworn in favour of a belief that only profit matters and big is beautiful – so that, if a small business cannot compete with a transnational behemoth, then it’s its own fault and it deserves to go under.

Nothing else matters – and in the kind of attitude exemplified by the US Tea Party idiots, we're seeing increasing pretence that any regulation is pretty much communism.

Indeed, the shattering of our culinary heritage is just one of the root causes/problems of the present situation.

In the meantime, Labour has offered little by way of contrast, with the governments of 1997-2010 continuing the path of deregulation that had been started in the 1980s, and which helped lead to 2008 and the financial crisis.

It also accepted money from big business – thus inevitably limiting its ability to regulate the worst excesses of those businesses. And now it seems to be perpetually running around, like headless (GM, factory-farmed) chicken, without much of a clue what to do.

So whether from ideology or fear or a belief that there’s no alternative – or a mix of all three – governments are allowing the drive for ever-increasing profits to come before the health of the nation as a whole.

The traffic light system is a bad joke – but it shouldn’t be taken as a red light for regulation. It should be a green light for creating regulation that actually works.

• For further reading on a range of issues touched on here:

Shopped: The shocking power of Britain’s supermarkets and Bad Food Britain by Joanna Blythman are essential reading for anyone concerned about the issues.

The Wal-Mart Effect by Charles Fishman adds to an understanding of the impact of the biggest supermarket chains on communities and jobs in the drive for ever cheaper prices.

A Taste of My Life by Raymond Blanc is part autobiography, part food science and part food philosophy – with recipes. It’s very good on the impact of the destruction of our food heritage – and what food heritage means in real terms. It’s also a delightful read.

Escape the Diet Trap by Dr John Briffa explains, scientifically but in an understandable way, why ‘all fat is bad’ is cobblers and why it’s utterly counterproductive in terms of weight issues.

Fat: An appreciation of a misunderstood ingredient with recipes by Jennifer McLagan does some of the same as Briffa, but from a chef’s perspective and with recipes.

You can also get involved with the latest review of school meals here.