Pen Vogler is a food historian. Her latest book is Stuffed: A History of Good Food and Hard Times in Britain (Link, Amazon). Her previous books include work on food in the life and works of Dickens and Jane Austen - Dinner with Dickens: and Dinner with Mr Darcy. Her Twitter.
In the podcast, Ben and Pen discuss various aspects of British culture and history we can learn from the British relationship with food. The discussion delves into several fascinating topics surrounding the transition from hunting-gathering societies to agricultural ones, the phenomenon of the commons and enclosures, the historical regulation of bread prices, and the impact of government intervention in food systems. The podcast also touches on the personal experiences of Pen in Czechoslovakia.
Throughout the conversation, the overarching theme was how food, from its production to its consumption, is deeply entwined with historical, cultural, and social factors, and how understanding these dynamics can offer insights into present-day food-related challenges and culture.
Here are some highlights:
Transition to Agriculture: The transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture, known as the Neolithic Revolution around 4200 BC, was gradual. Although humans began farming, hunting aided by dogs continued. Interestingly, there seemed to be a decrease in fish consumption even among communities near water, which may be tied to a new identity as agriculturalists.
Strawberries: are they feminine and how have supermarkets made the strawberry market. The notion of strawberries being considered feminine was discussed, with a historical perspective of fruit consumption differing between genders. Supermarkets have popularized strawberries, making them a significant seasonal item.
Queuing and Supermarkets: The change from traditional queuing at shops to self-service in supermarkets was discussed. This shift was initially due to labor shortages post-World War and was supported by the government.
Sugar's Historical Significance: The historical transformation of sugar from a flavor enhancer to a replacement food was discussed. The early introduction of sugar into children’s diets, driven in part by companies like Nestle, and its long-term health implications were also highlighted.
Yorkshire Pudding and Meat Consumption: The tradition of Yorkshire pudding being used to fill up family members so the male head could consume more meat was discussed. This tradition reflects the historical gender and age hierarchies in food distribution within a family.
Fish and Class Distinction: The class distinction between consuming different types of fish, such as salmon being associated with aristocracy while carp being considered a working-class fish, was discussed. The historical roots of these distinctions date back hundreds of years, and are intertwined with the broader themes of commons, enclosure, and social status. The discussion explores how fishing evolved with societal changes, particularly during the industrial era.
Food Security and Import Dependency: The discussion touched on the UK's food security and its dependency on imports, which has fluctuated over centuries based on various social, economic, and political factors.
Industrialization and Food: The transition from a farming to an industrial nation impacted the UK's food self-sufficiency, and the conversation touched on how industrialization shaped food consumption and distribution.
Commons and Enclosures: The commons, shared land resources, were crucial for the livelihood of many. The enclosures, which involved fencing off common lands for private use, disrupted this system and forced many people into cities, contributing to the industrial revolution. This transition to urban living and the loss of common land rights had profound societal effects.
Historical Bread Regulation: The Assize of Bread, established around 1256, was a piece of legislation that controlled bread prices by adjusting loaf sizes based on grain prices, lasting nearly 600 years. It reflects an early form of government intervention in food pricing to ensure affordability, a topic that resurfaces in modern discussions, particularly post-pandemic.
Government Intervention in Food Systems: Reflecting on her time in Czechoslovakia, Pen notes the balance required between government intervention and market freedom in ensuring food security and diversity. Over-regulation can lead to limited dietary variety, as seen in Czechoslovakia, compared to neighboring Poland.
Historical Eating Habits: Pen sheds light on the eating habits of historical figures and mentions records from a reeve in the 11th century that detail the distribution of food items like cheese and beans to shepherds and slaves respectively. They discuss the perception of foraged food in history and how it was often seen as a last resort for those who couldn’t afford to buy food. The conversation transitions to how foods like nettles, which were once seen as food for the desperate, are now romanticized. The discussion around what Shakespeare and his crew might have eaten highlights how the lack of references to vegetables in historical texts leaves room for speculation.
Pen's Writing Process: Pen, working part-time at Penguin Books, allocates weekends and her sabbatical time for writing. Her process involves extensive research, particularly at the British Library, followed by drafting, editing, and structuring her findings into coherent chapters.
Food Etiquette: touch on traditional etiquette like the "posh" way of eating peas with a fork and how certain eating habits signify a person's social status.
Overrated/Underrated Foods: Pen and Ben briefly discuss the perceived value of certain foods like tripe, gin, goose, and herring, and how these perceptions have evolved over time.
Current and Future Projects: Pen mentions a potential project exploring religious festivals, fasting, and feasting, and how they tie into communal and physical health.
Advice for Aspiring Writers: Pen advises exploring non-fiction writing as a viable and fulfilling avenue, sharing how her accidental discovery of food history transformed her writing career.
Their conversation offers a rich tapestry of insights on how food, history, and culture are intricately woven together, and how exploring these connections can yield engaging narratives and a deeper understanding of societal norms and practices.
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PODCAST INFO
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Transcript (only lightly edited)
Ben
Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Pen Vogler. Pen is a food historian and writer. Her previous work includes Scoff: A History of Food and Class in Britain, Dinner with Mr. Darcy, Dinner with Dickens, Tea with Jane Austen, and her latest work out in the UK in early November, 2023 is Stuffed: A History of Good Food and Hard Times in Britain. Pen, welcome.
Pen
Thank you so much.
Ben (00:00:27):
Let's start with strawberries. I have a trio of questions on strawberries. Is it feminine to eat strawberries? Why do we eat strawberries with cream? And do you think the British consider strawberries a very British fruit and maybe the most British fruit we have?
Pen (00:00:45):
Strawberries is such a good question to start with. So is it feminine to eat strawberries? This comes from a post I saw on Reddit when the young man said, "I love strawberries, but my dad keeps on telling me it's feminine." "It's girly," I think it was the word he used to eat strawberries. "Is it?" And so he was asking people for their opinion. And lots of people said, "Well, sure, it is slightly girly to eat strawberries, to eat fruit. And lots of people said, "That's completely nonsense." But I just found it really interesting that there was this perception that they were sort of feminine somehow. I think it fits into this broader discovery that kind of people who do lots of work on health and health diet and health in the community have this kind of underlying discovery that women eat more fruit than men. Nobody knows really why it is.
Is it because they like it more? Is it because they want to be healthy? There's a perception in some communities of men that fruit just isn't what you eat. And I found this fascinating. One of the other things that had really interested me about strawberries is how supermarkets have completely kind of owned them. They've come to have this massive strawberry season. And when you have strawberry season, you get newspaper articles saying, "Which are the best strawberries? Are they Sainsbury's or Little or Tesco?" which is ridiculous because strawberries are not made by supermarkets. Strawberries come-- their in El Santa or some kind of variety. But supermarkets have done this very clever job of kind of identifying themselves very closely with strawberries from them being quite a small kind of niche treat.
They now in summertime outsell bread, for example, sometimes. And I found those two pieces of information really interesting. I think that supermarkets, when they sort of emerged in this country in the 1950s, had to really sell themselves to women, had to really kind of say, "This is a new way of shopping." They had to explain how they worked because it wasn't obvious to everybody that you went into a supermarket, took a basket and helped yourself. Some people are outraged at that kind of DIY way of shopping. And I think strawberries and fruit were one of the ways that supermarkets began to kind of entice women shoppers. If you go into a supermarket now, fruit and veg always at the front; strawberries really close, you can see them. Whereas the meat, the stuff that women are not that keen on buying according to the various kind of consumer surveys, slightly more kind of tucked away in the back.
Ben (00:03:46):
Yeah. And that touches on a couple of things. So one is this idea that meat is manly. So sort of strawberries are the opposite. And how we've come to associate things like the season, and obviously we have tennis and Wimbledon and all of that. I wanted to pick up something on what you said about how it was kind of enticing women into the shop, as well as how varieties and things like that work. Because when I was reading that section, the way you described the pre-supermarket era, or when it was that, that you used to queue at places like your butcher and your green grocer. And then in rationing times-- and I had the sense maybe before, the queue became a kind of social construct.
So one is the conversations you had around the queue, particularly rationing, and then the intersection with class and who queues and how you queue and all of that. There is a sentiment that Britts talk about weather, we talk about tea, and we talk about queuing a lot much to kind of the laughter of a lot of other cultures. And it occurred to me that actually has deep roots about why we queue and how we queue and this entry into it. Is that how you read some of our queuing? And do you think part of that dismantling of the queue and getting them into supermarkets really wraps up into supermarkets and how they use strawberries?
Pen (00:05:10):
I think that's absolutely right. I mean, you could still queue in a supermarket, but the idea about supermarkets is that you don't queue. But I think yes, you are absolutely right. In the Second World War, for example, people had to be registered to get their coupons in a particular shop. And interestingly, most people were registered with a co-op. So the co-op was a huge part of people's social lives and kind of consumer lives at that time. But you'd have to queue particularly in rationing time. And as you say, people would-- There was a lovely-- in one of the kind of surveys-- an academic surveys, somebody quoted; this Scottish lady who said, "If it wasn't for the queue, I wouldn't get a laugh all week." Clearly that queue was a sort of social occasion for people, particularly for women.
You do see these pictures, don't you, in the first world war when there wasn't rationing and there was huge problems with kind of dearth of food. And they introduce rationing probably much too late. But you see enormous pictures of people queuing, and sometimes men with their overcoats. And again, in the second world war in the fifties, sometimes men, but predominantly women. So the queue does have that social sort of status. But it also, for some people, young women-- particularly women entered the labor market they felt they didn't have time to do it, totally understandably. And some women also found that kind of being served quite intrusive. They'd feel that the shop assistants would kind of know a bit too much about their business.
And one lady that I quote said, "If I bought something unusual, it would get to the ears of my mom. My mother would be saying, 'Why are you spending through the person who served them?'" You get a bit judged. And obviously, we are very judgy in this country. So I think the queue had an interesting positive and negative kind of social role for people. And then the supermarkets come along and then they just decide to sort of do away with it. One of the things that the supermarket came in-- Like I say, most people in the war were registered with the co-op. The co-ops were really big part of our community. After the war and during the war, there was a labor shortage.
So the supermarkets, all those kind of early shops had to figure out ways of getting people to serve themselves because they couldn't recruit staff. And to their surprise, they discovered they sold more and that was revolutionary. The government in the fifties in trying to kind of find ways of coping with this labor shortage actually sponsored Sainsbury's manager’s directors to go to America to figure out how this kind of self-serve thing happened. And they came back sort of full of ideas of what self-service looked like. And this idea that actually you would sell more was key to the idea of the kind of supermarket. Although in some it was supported by the government because of the labor problems, but in fact, it has produced this massive overconsumption problem in our society. It feeds into this problem where you have to buy two, get one free or whatever it is. There is probably in supermarkets too much food, and so much of it goes to waste. But that I think has its roots in that kind of like, "How do we sell more from the kind of 1940s and 1950s?"
Ben (00:09:09):
That's really fascinating because that's a part of social change, and it's happened and you can think of other sort of really big social change movements like the end of slavery or women's votes and things. But if you think about the systemic problems what we have now, for instance; obesity or nutrition or potentially overeating or food waste, it would seem that we might need to have social change potentially the other way or in different ways. And it does happen. The roots of how understanding that happen are really fascinating. The other symbol that the strawberry struck me is-- and you mentioned it-- is that we have El Santa, people would even know that as a variety.
But if you go back in time when you think of all sorts of fruit and veg varieties-- we called them heritage and heirloom. They had shorter seasons, they had different properties. So if you are doing mass agriculture, you want everything to ripen at the same time in a certain sort of way. Whereas if you are doing it in a home garden, you would want it to ripen sort of slowly over the season so you can pick some. And our obsession with strawberries means that we have fewer varieties, which you can get almost year round of a certain kind of thing; very red, very sweet, I guess as well. And that seems to have been almost, I guess not quite an accident because it's intentional, but kind of giving consumers what they seem to want; sweetness and it all the way round, driven by that. And I think that seemed to be another symbol that I got from the strawberry, that although it's this symbol, it has all of these downsides with it. I'm interested in whether you think that is and to what extent that we might have to try and nudge away from that.
Pen (00:10:52):
I mean, having British grown strawberries through-- you don't actually get them British grains throughout the year. They're the sort of months where they just won't grow because of our climate. And so far, for example, no British grown strawberry has quite managed to crack the Valentine's Day market. So all those kind of Valentine's strawberries are flown in from Morocco or Egypt or whatever. I think that process that you just described, sort of underscores two things. One is how incredibly powerful the supermarkets have become. So they've adopted the strawberry as their fruit, and that means they've gone to the strawberry growers and said, "Okay, I want the impossible." Because as you were saying, different strawberries had different qualities. They might ripen early, they might ripen late, they might be sweet, they might be juicy, they might be long lasting. They might have a particular taste, they might be quite robust, able to sort of cope with travel.
But until fairly recently, you couldn't really get strawberries with all those things. And the supermarkets said sets the story goes, "That's what we want. We want you to just crack the strawberry code, do the impossible." And amazingly, they sort of more or less have. And so-- in Britain I'm talking about-- we now have strawberries probably sort of eight, nine months of the year, and then we fly them in when we don't have them. But going back, that's obviously an unusual thing. The strawberry-- a lot of fruit was very, very sort of... It was a special treat. It was quite elite. It was always very associated with Wimbledon. That association has been going on since the 19th century, just because Wimbledon happened at the time that the strawberry season was kind of at its peak.
And although the strawberry season now is much, much longer, we've kept that association, which is great, which is nice. And people have news items about how many tons of strawberries they're eating at Wimbledon, and it's massive. But that kind of deliberate sort of growing of the strawberry to try and sort of keep pace with the consumer has quite a long history. Initially, the French were the masters or the mistresses of it; mostly actually the masters. And they managed to get what we now think was a modern strawberry by getting the Chilean strawberry, which was quite sweet, and the European or kind of the wild strawberry that was kind of much tinier and sort of bring them together in what's now kind of the modern strawberry cult of ours which tastes quite kind of pineapple and really, really delicious. That I think was interrupted in France by the French Revolution, picked up again by British strawberry growers. And the French are kind enough to call the British the kind of masters of the strawberry growing or whatever it is. So there was a very sort of strong British pride in these kind of new cultivars that they've managed to make.
Ben (00:14:18):
I guess some people though would argue that that's just been a great thing. You get it all in one and consumers like it and they just eat lots of it. But I think one of your points is that perhaps the more subtle problems with that lack of diversity within that and what it represents in the food system has more pitfalls than people might expect.
Pen (00:14:40):
I think it falls into sort of a couple of different camps. It falls into the sustainability camp; this idea that we are pushing our soil and our earth to produce and produce and produce strawberries, crops, any kind of food. And also then flying them. The idea of flying strawberries from Egypt is a little bit crazy, but that's now the world economy, isn't it? Egypt or Kenya or whatever, Morocco depends on that for their income. But it also fits into this idea of sort of security, I suppose. We haven't been at war since the Second World War on British soil. And in the First World War and the Second World War, we discovered that we had huge problems with national food insecurity.
We imported so much food. Because we were an industrializing nation, we switched our attention from growing food to growing industrial stuff; to making cutlery or fabrics or machines or whatever it was from the 19th century. We've moved our attention away from producing food. And it meant that we were very vulnerable in times of kind of food dearth, particularly when it was kind of international. We've seen this again. We saw this in the pandemic. We've seen this in the kind of post Brexit kind of wobble about when you have suddenly introduce new legislation and restrictions and forms and things that you got to fill in. And we've seen that our shelves empty much more quickly than we expect them to; much more quickly than Europe has done. So one of the questions that our government should be thinking about-- and probably doesn't very much, is how food secure are we. That question of how much you import food is very much part of the kind of green transition. It's very important and it's one that our governments are not terribly good at dealing with, but they should be. Also, it's the job of the government to defend the country, and that boringly includes to feed the country.
Ben (00:17:03):
Yeah.
Pen (00:17:03):
And that's something that kind of has got a bit lost.
Ben (00:17:06):
And is symbolized by the challenges of the strawberry. I think if I remember the stats correctly and around about 1950, having come out of that, 60 to 70% of food was grown in the UK for the UK after going to that. And now it's down to maybe 20 to 30%. So it has dropped; something like that.
Pen (00:17:26):
I think now we probably import about half.
Ben (00:17:29):
Okay.
Pen (00:17:29):
It depends on where you get your stats from. Before the First World War, it was higher, it was about 60%, and there was a definite decision between the wars to try and do something about that. There was this understanding in the thirties particularly that British agriculture was on its needs and it needed support. And things like the Milk Marketing Board come out of that acknowledgement that actually maybe it is the government's role to not let farmers go completely to the wall because maybe we do need to feed our kids with milk and cheese, and we do need in agricultural to feed the whole of us. And since the kind of second half of the 20th century, it varies around 50%.
Ben (00:18:18):
Well, that's quite a good segue for me into thinking about sugar. So that's another element. And perhaps I'm quite lucky coming from the Chinese diaspora, Malaysia and Singapore roots. We really don't have puddings. It's not part of what we eat. Maybe we'd actually have a little bit of fresh fruit at the end of the meal. But our family never really had them. If we had puddings or dessert, they were very, what I consider English; those kind of puddings and that which are always really sweet. And even in Asian food today, we have sugar within dishes, and we think about the four flavors and balancing them. But apart from kind of small niches, we don't really. So I thought that was quite interesting and that history of sugar that I was reading in your book also intertwined with the way that fruits earlier were kind of considered a little bit evil or like be aware of them.
Pen (00:19:15):
Yes.
Ben (00:19:16):
So this is this whole, "Should you let your children eat fruit?" And then this resurgence of sugar and how it has been used through history. Were you surprised when you were researching into that? And what do you think has maybe been most misunderstood or what's understood about how sugar has been used through history, particularly within the British food history?
Pen (00:19:39):
Yes. It's such a good question. It's interesting because I was in Hong Kong in June, and we went to have tea in a Hong Kong tea house. I love afternoon tea. It's a thing. I kind of love cake and I love sugar in its place. But I was really delighted that the dim sum that comes with the tea in the tea house is all savory. It may be a tiny bit of sweetness, like you'd use spice for sweetness, and that's very much how we used to use sugar in British cuisine as a sort of flavor enhancer. I say British cuisine-- nobody ever thought that the Britts had a cuisine, but you know. So in the medieval, in the Tudor period right up to the 18th century, sugar was something that you used in the sort of, rather as you do salt as a flavor enhancer.
And then increasingly as our colonial ambitions grew up, we recognized that we could exploit the Caribbean. We could have the kind of sugar plantations and all the horrors and the slavery and the kind of iniquities that that involved. And sugar sort of-- I think two things happened with it. Those kind of sugar plantations had a very strong hold on the kind of British government at the time. So the idea was that they had to be supported. They have to give a free and ready market for their produce of sugar to Britain. So it was a kind of government strategy as it were. And very early on, it was a strategy that was involved actually in the triangular slave trade. I mean, the brother of Charles II started this disgusting thing called the Royal African Company that had ships going through kind of the slave triangle and all that kind of idea of sugars just sort of booming onto the British market which starts from about the 17th century.
So in a way, the market was sort of forced in Britain. It was kind of created because it was convenient. It was politically convenient. But at the same time, later, you have industrialization. You have poor people who are not growing their own food and sugar becomes a sort of replacement food. It becomes a kind of replacement energy. It's kind of instant hit. Quite often, kids would be given sugar with jam. The strawberries that we were talking about, most kids would sort of taste the strawberry not as a strawberry, but as a kind of layer of cheap, red sugar essentially; sugar paste with a bit of sort of flavor in it. And it came in treacle or golden syrup or whatever. It was often a kind of replacement for food that there were these heartbreaking little interviews with kids by Henry Mayhew who interviews very kind of poor people in London, in the 1840s. And this girl says, "I have bread and jam for breakfast, bread and jam for lunch, bread and jam for tea. What I would really like is some meat. I have a taste of meat once every few months, once a year or something." That's what she wanted. Whereas now we sort of-- We've come to think of sugar as a sort of permanent treat rather than that replacement. So I think that's sort of definite.
The other thing about sugar that really did surprise me actually, is that the move to kind of say that sugar is a thing that kids should be eating, that happens really early on. There was a big kind of row with doctors in the 18th century between the ones who said, "It's natural for kids to eat or babies, infants to eat sugar. If you want to test its naturalness, then make a little water pap; flour and water, one with sugar and one without. And you'll see that your infant smacks its lips at the one, easily eat sugar." And of course now we know that if you introduce sugar into a child's diet very early on, they eat more and more of it and they taste it less and less. So they need more and more. It kind of works a bit like in that kind of drug sort of way and it feeds into problems of kind of ill health and dental cavities. It's now coming out that it's possibly bad for kids' attention and all the rest of it spans and all the rest of it. But that move to kind of say sugar is a natural thing for children rather than a small bit of kind of flavor enhancer, that's a move that happens early on. And then companies like Nestle pick up on that and start to kind of put sugar into their... So all those Victorian kind of baby foods all had sugar in. I don't know if they still do-- I should go and have a look actually. But they've probably got kind of sugar replacements; things that don't sound like sugar, but probably are sugar.
Ben (00:25:07):
I hadn't quite realized how early it was. And sugar has been a big symbol in this country because I remember reading about the sugar boycotts and it's really kind of one of the first fair trade. I do a lot of work within sustainable investment. So it's really interesting that that's a kind of boycott investment piece, which was probably quite a critical component in terms of the debates around slavery.
Pen (00:25:30):
Yes.
Ben (00:25:31):
Well, thinking about substitutes, I was also reading and it made sense, but I was initially surprised. So is it really true that Yorkshire pudding, which is this bread and batter, a component we have famously to roast beef, which is probably one of the things which is considered very British meal was really intended so that the male head of the house could simply eat more meat. So everyone got filled up on this bread batter thing, which now people really kind of like, but before was simply so that the man could eat more beef.
Pen (00:26:03):
It's so interesting, isn't it? Because I grew up in Yorkshire and I learned that in some history lesson. I was so shocked. I grew up in the seventies, eighties or something when we'd become much, much more child centered. It was such a shock to realize that children were so much lower down the pecking order in the kind of 19th century. And children in a lot of families, they might've been loved just as much as children today, but they were economic actors. Parents needed them to go out to work when they were 12, 14, 16, or even younger; depending on the time because obviously in the 19th century, they started to introduce education acts. So Yorkshire pudding starts to sort of emerge in the-- I mean, the recipe probably existed in some form for a long time, but recipes for it start to emerge in the 18th century. It does definitely have a reputation in Yorkshire as it can only be made in Yorkshire properly. If you go down south, they'll give you something rubbish. They'll give you battered pudding or something, which isn't the real thing.
Yorkshire, remember had energy, it had the coal fields. You could have a really bright sparkling coal fire. Your beef could be kind of whizzing round on a spit in front of a really hot fire. Get a Dutch oven or get a kind of tin, put your batter putting under the tin and all that heat will help it rise. So it does become associated with a kind of special occasion. There are fantastic records of people saying in families, "You start off, everybody would have a slice of Yorkshire pudding just to take the edge off their appetite." Then the man gets the most of the meat. We're talking about the 19th century here, early 20th century. Even if the man is not doing a kind of big, energetic industrial kind of job; if they're a clerk or work on a railway or something, they still have that status that they get the meat. That's going back to what we were saying earlier about fruit is for women, meat is for men. That idea has a very, very long roots in this country. And then the kids will get what's left. If it's meat like a rabbit or something, then the mom has to kind of police this divide. She has to kind of give the man the best bit of it, and she has to have something and she has to share out the rest with the kids.
I came across extraordinary stories of families who the man would be given something tasty for his tea. He'd be given like some kipper or some herring or an egg or something. And if he was feeling very indulgent towards his kids, he'd give them like the skin of the smoked fish, or he'd give them like the top of the egg or something for tea. And tea in Yorkshire is what we call dinner. It's the main meal you'd have at five or six or seven o'clock in the evening. So it's very interesting the way that children's status has changed over the centuries, but also how our perception of children's right to food has changed. And with status has come this idea that children have the right to eat what makes them happy. If it's perceived that they're happy by eating puddings or sweets or Coca-Cola, that's the job of the mom to make them happy. Whereas actually, as we know long term that is not going to promote kind of-- it might promote immediate happiness, but not long-term welfare.
Ben (00:30:03):
I was really interested in seeing those long-term roots. I mean, there was a couple of things I noted down. One was when the male head of the household went for his weekly meal out, that could be the meat free day at home. It's like, "Oh, great, we don't have to eat meat now." And that kind of echoed meat free days that we have. Actually, you referred to those education acts and how children became more aware of the rights and agency of children. And perhaps this effect going through that is now maybe children have too much rights and agency over how they like to eat. But that essentially the more progressive politicians or the progressive wings at that time actually pushed back the other way because they said, "Well, children need a right to work" because for poorer families, it was really necessary for children to go out. If they were going to be sort of stuck in school and not earning that it was going to be economic poverty and that whole idea. And then, "Well, if children like sweets like it is today, then maybe they should do. And what is the role of parenting or even the state to direct or influence-- influence that I found was really interesting. I hadn't really appreciated how deep some of these roots go. So my father-in-law is a coarse fisherman. Actually, he's gotten into the Guinness Book of World Records for his coarse fishing.
So been a fisherman for over years near Hanham and has talked about the rivers. So I understood a little bit about that and how he considers it and the commons. And I guess you would say it's a very working class pursuit, particularly how the fishermen there think about it. And the difference between fly, fishing and why salmon might be considered aristocratic. But I hadn't realized it goes back thousands of years really, or certainly hundreds rather than just sort of tens. And that divide is how we think about now where we might eat salmon and not really carp, although actually carps are great Asian fish and even is celebrated in places like Poland where it isn't here because it's considered essentially, I guess a poor person's fish or working class fish or a fish also of the commons where salmon is still-- you've got laws about it, you have fly fishing, and you have a state going all the way back to 10/66 and even previously. How do you view that roots of fish and that dichotomy today? I guess we're going to come onto in the enclosures as well, but there's part on your work on class and things. But it really seems to be very embedded in the food history we have today. I hadn't really appreciated how far back something simply like fish and whether you have freshwater fish or not, or salmon is so embedded in our history.
Pen (00:32:54):
Yeah, that really surprised me because this notion that the Britts don't really eat fish very much, I'd always thought that came from the reformation and that fish was considered sort of slightly poppish because it's what you have on Fridays instead of eating meat. But in actual fact, when I was writing this, I read some absolutely fascinating kind of archeological research and papers that say that the archeological records-- I just find archeologists extraordinary what they can do with kind of analysis; the way that they kind of look into the tiny, tiny bones or kind of look at the bones of something and they can figure out what that thing has eaten. But it seems that actually fish eating fell off a cliff with the Neolithic, and like you say, thousands of years ago.
So the Neolithic, probably around 4,200 BC about when this idea of farming. So the Neolithic; neo, obviously new lithic is the period when we start to farm rather than become hunter-gatherers. It's probably not an immediate thing. There's evidence that hunter-gatherers did use dogs to kind of round up wild animals in a kind of livestock kind of way. So it was probably a gradual transition. But what does happen is that we seem to just very quickly stop eating fish, not river fish. Even communities that are by rivers and communities that are by sea, it just drops or falls out of their diet. I'm imagining it's something to do with identity. I mean, we don't know. We need a time machine to really find out, but is it because we're going, "No, we are farming people, we are meat eating people. Therefore, we don't eat fish." And I think even that kind of non-fishiness-- and it's the same in Ireland, interestingly. It's the same in kind of northern parts in Scotland, northern parts of England across England. I wonder whether that kind of unfishiness from those thousands of years ago has stayed with us. And so we do embrace fishing as a sport. Fishing is very much a line to sport like your-- is it your granddad that does fishing?
Ben (00:35:24):
My father-in-law.
Pen (00:35:25):
Your father-in-law that does coarse fishing. And that kind of coarse fishing and fly fishing, that kind of difference. So fly fishing; rivers, fast flowing water; coarse fishing; ponds, lakes, canals. And that kind of emerged all probably again in the kind of industrial, the 19th century. Because before that, everybody ate carp. If you look at Isaac Walton, the complete angler, carp is one of the many fish that you expect to catch and eat. And carp has this reputation for being quite subtil; S-U-B-T-I-L and crafty, but delicious. Then we stop eating carp. Carp becomes the fish of ponds and canals; and ponds and canals are where the working classes go and fish because they're easier to access. You don't need to own the land around them. Trout and salmon is where you fish if you've got kind of status and land and all the rest of it.
So carp kind of falls out-- It's partly a class thing, but it's also governing the commons thing, which is something you mentioned, which I found completely fascinating. So all these anglers say, "Right, there is a limited amount of fish in these waters. We've got to introduce some rules, we can't just get rid of them. These are the rules and we're all going to pretty much adhere to them." And they do for decades and centuries. As an outsider, I'm not a fisher person, but for as an outsider, it appears to be very effective and work very well.
Ben (00:37:06):
They still adhere to the rules today. So obviously, you have fishing licenses and the like, but they manage that. And you mentioned something which does seem to be true. So you catch a carp and you'll put it back.
Pen (00:37:20):
Photograph yourself, obviously.
Ben (00:37:21):
Yeah, exactly. You take a photograph, so you put it back, and they are meant to get craftier. So some of the most famous carp have names.
Pen (00:37:28):
Yes.
Ben (00:37:28):
And you try and catch them for the 18th time because by the 18th time they've got all the other 17 tricks. They're not going to have that. And it becomes, "We know there's this carp which lives in this pond, but we haven't been able to catch him for a couple of years because he's wise to all our tricks now." So there was that.
Pen (00:37:46):
And they're huge.
Ben (00:37:47):
Yeah. And they get really big. But I hadn't appreciated that element of the commons and going back and how the laws sort of changed around 10/66 and where it was and the like. I guess this brings us to your really interesting writing around enclosures. And obviously we have this a little bit today, "What is common land and what is not?" But I hadn't really appreciated how-- You could argue it's one of the key defining moments of British society where you took-- I think you have this phrase where you take the kind of common land and the acorn and they get turned into bacon and pig and things like that. The commons were really how a whole strata of society would live. And that essentially, there was a kind of class history, power, all of that warfare which sort of happened. The enclosures happened and it completely changed our way of life and then really resonates to things today. I'd be interested in how you reflect on that and what are maybe the key things which still resonate today and what you found when you were looking about that which maybe either most surprised you or think most people should know about the history of enclosures.
Pen (00:38:58):
Yeah. The whole book started with this concept of the enclosures actually because when I was writing my last book on Scoff, I hadn't appreciated how dramatic the enclosures were for the kind of economy of many kind of rural people. The enclosures happened over a long period. The first were in Tudor times, the last was in the 1920s, I think. But the height of them was the kind of 19th, 18th century; beginning of the 19th century, but particularly 18th century. And they dovetail so closely with the move to the cities for industry. So what happens with the enclosures is land is nominally owned by a landowner. It might be the church, it might be a Lord, it might be the king. There were ancient rights to use it.
Sometimes they were written down and sometimes they were not. So sometimes they might go with a cottage. If you pay rent for this cottage, it also gives you the right to graze two cows, two pigs, and a sheep or geese or whatever. It becomes a huge point of argument in the 18th century about whether it's a good use of land. And the people who win are the people with the agency and the power who have the ability to enclose it because it goes along with this argument that the population is growing massively. We have a limited amount of land, we've got to improve it. And so in the 18th century, enclosures were synonymous with this idea. We have improvements. So people would talk about improvements, and what they meant was actually enclosure.
So they'd mean that huge amounts of land that were kind of-- they might look like fields or more land, and people would graze-- If you were a villager, you'd have access to it to graze a few sheep or cows or whatever it is. The landowner then comes along and says, "No, I'm sorry, you can't do that. I'm going to put a fence around it and I'm going to use it for probably sheep or cattle. I need it. Sorry, off you go." And it devastated a lot of people's economy. The central question of my book was that, "Okay, well, if landowners are doing that, are they taking responsibility for those devastated people so that it's their land, they have the right to do it?" But they are changing the domestic economy of hundreds of people. So how much responsibility are they taking for that?
The answer of course is various and the answer is generally not very much. That's why you have people leaving the lands going off to the cities where there's this growing industry. And one of the reasons we are an industrial country, the industrial revolution was so massive here. Was not just the kind of technological discoveries, it's because people were kind of flooding into the cities looking for work because they weren't able to support themselves on the land. One of the other things that grew out of it is the allotment movement. And I think it's extraordinary because if you go to France, or if you go to kind of Eastern Europe, you quite often see people have their own little small holdings. They might have a few cows and a few sheep and it's a kind of normal thing to do. That's quite unusual in Britain. And that becomes, it's because of this fight between farmers who want their laborers to be hungry for work; so hungry for work that they'll come and work for starvation wages. And if you give them big allotments, big small holdings, they're not going to come work for you for almost nothing because they'll grow their own food, they'll have their own meat, they'll have their own milk from their cow.
So the allotments became-- farmers would kind of grudgingly supply them, but they were always too small to really support people. And that was the same with the clearances in Scotland as well, what we now think of as the crofts which were deliberately sized so that you could just about support or semi-support yourself. But those, what had been peasants, people working on the land were forced into the cash economy. They had to go and work because the perception was that the nation needed bodies, cheap bodies to kind of be fed into the cash economy. It wasn't a moment in time, but it was an extraordinary change.
Ben (00:43:51):
Yeah, and I hadn't appreciated that that was probably one of the push factors in the industrial revolution. Obviously, there's a lot of other things going on in the moment and was maybe one of the small push factors which made essentially Britain industrialized first versus some others. Because people essentially going to the cities and yes, there's opportunity. But why were they looking for opportunity? It was partly because they were pushed out. The other element which I hadn't understood which was really interesting, and it was versus food historians versus economic historians was around bread. And one of the first-- Is it pronounced the assize of bread?
Pen (00:44:30):
I think it's the assize (sizes) of bread.
Ben (00:44:32):
Where essentially there was a kind of economic control. And economic historians have tried to study this, but I'm not sure the data has been good enough and then obviously the food historians look at it. I mean, what are the lessons you take away from that? And I guess there has been a little bit of debate on it; has resurfaced post pandemic as to whether we should have controls on food. Is there price gouging? Are there market limits? Because I guess the market argument is if there's a storm and you suddenly charge a thousand dollars for your ice shovel and then you go back, you'll never shop at that shop again because you feel you've been priced gouge. But actually, when you're thinking about food and things, it's a little bit more complicated than that and maybe the market won't work in such a way. Although we've seen it in the platforms where some of them decided not to list people who thought there was too much price gouging in terms of what we were doing. But yeah, anyway, on bread and history.
Pen (00:45:39):
Yeah. So I found the bread story really fascinating. So we'll do bread first and then price gouging as I think it's a slightly different subject. So the assize of bread were Britain's longest running pieces of food legislation. It starts in about 1256. Well, it's so long ago nobody can really be sure. And it's basically formalized shrink flation. So what happens is that assizes, if you've heard of the county Assizes, it's basically local courts. And the local courts get together with the landowners who are reducing the grain and maybe with somebody who represents the bakers. And they go, "Okay, how much does grain cost at the moment, whatever it is." That means that the price of bread will not change, the weight of it will. I was always very perplexed as a kind of reader of English literature why there was always this thing called the penny loaf. There was a penny loaf in Smallet, and there's a penny loaf in Dickens, and then there's a penny loaf a century later, and you think, "How does this happen?" Basically it's because the assizes of bread say, "You'll pay one penny for your loaf."
But it's just that as grain gets more expensive, the loaf gets smaller, and then when the price of grain drops again, the loaf gets bigger again. So this is the idea. And it was very effective because it meant that for the poor, they could be seen. It was a kind of piece of sort of interventionist legislation; so the poor could see that they were being looked after, that they could always afford something. But it was also very effective for landowners because actually, whereas it was necessary to have it because the cost of wheat might go up and down, it took attention away from them and onto the bakers because the bakers were the people who had to implement it. And that's what I found so fascinating. It seems like that's the first moment in British history I feel it's kind of where our sort of relationship to our supermarkets has grown from; this idea that the bakers, the retailers, those are the people who are very visibly going to kind of control this relationship.
They are going to decide what it is that they can afford to give you to eat. You're talking about these economic historians. There's lots of kind of hilarious tables with impossible to read kind of economic sort of algorithms about if this kind of bread weighed this much, then brown bread would weigh a bit more, and then a finer white red would weigh less. This is how it would all relate to each other. The tables were shared in the 13th century and there were mistakes in them. So it's not surprising that actually it was quite complicated, but it lasted. It lasted for nearly 600 years, extraordinarily, until there was a much more kind of pressure in the late 18th century on kind of urbanizing populations.
And there was a lot of food riots, particularly in the late 18th century. And it was seen not to be working. So it was abolished in London and then abolished later in the rest of the country in about 1836, I think. But coming to your point about price gouging, for me, I think our extraordinary relationship with our supermarkets starts there; starts in medieval England because we now look to our supermarkets to legislate about all kinds of things. In the pandemic, they decided on rationing who could buy how much pasta or whatever it was that was short. It was this summer, wasn't it? Or kind of earlier in the spring when there were problems about distribution, particular salads; fresh fruit and fresh vegetables. And all our kind of friends in Europe are going, "Ha ha ha, we can still get fresh tomatoes."
It's because our supermarkets have decided that they're going to have a contract with their suppliers where they pay a certain amount, and they're not going to deviate from that. And it means that if the cost of tomatoes goes up, the suppliers go, "Well, we're not going to supply you then because we'll get more from this German supermarket or this Spanish green grocer," for example. So that's why we had lack of kind of fresh fruit and veg on our shelves at that moment. But I think it's just an indicator of that kind of bigger position that those shops have got in our lives, and we feel it's normal for them to dic-- I wouldn't say dictate, but to kind of ration and to kind of make those kind of decisions about how to share food out in our lives.
Ben (00:50:50):
Well, that's a good segue maybe into a couple of elements in your own life or some other more fun questions. So I picked up that you spent some time in what was the then Czechoslovakia teaching and being laughed at for trying to suggest that Britain might have a little bit of a food culture.
Pen (00:51:12):
Yeah, they thought that was hilarious. They knew for a fact. We didn't.
Ben (00:51:16):
What did you learn from your time there? Do you think there's anything particularly misunderstood or, I guess this was just a little bit after the Berlin Wall came down which is in your anecdote. So a lot of that had changed. But maybe your thoughts on spending some time there and either reflections on food or what was maybe misunderstood or what you learned.
Pen (00:51:37):
Yeah. So two things about what's now the Czech Republic, but was then Czechoslovakia. So I lived in this little town called Liberates, which is just north of Prague. I was introduced to carp for the first time, I couldn't believe that carp was their kind of Christmas dish, but it was. I wasn't there for Christmas, but they shared it with me. Easter, I think we learned all about it. So that's the first time I understood that carp was eaten because it isn't any long-- I mean, it used to be eaten in Britain; just brought in as a kind of thing
Ben (00:52:12):
And a celebration dish, not only...
Pen (00:52:13):
As a celebration dish, yeah. But no longer. So that really fascinated me. But also, the Czech Republic, I was there from I think January to June, and there was very, very little fresh fruit and vegetables in the markets and in the shops. Lovely bread, very lovely cheese. The food they had was quite kind of solid. It was good. It was nice. Very good beer. I remember going to Poland and just seeing all this kind of fresh fruit and veg in the market in Poznan and thinking, "Oh my God, I haven't seen that for months." I don't know why Poland managed it and Czechoslovakia didn't. But this question I ask myself kind of about how much should government intervene in food. I think Czechoslovakia is probably an example of too much government intervention or it's the problem of kind of state planned agriculture when it isn't allowing entrepreneurs to go over to somewhere else and bring in kind of fresh food. So their diets probably suffered a little bit because of it. So I think that broadly governments have a role to play in our kind of food system-- and an important one. But I wouldn't give our food system over to a government. You can see how it works.
Ben (00:53:54):
It's where that balance is. And I think actually there's a lot of work, like you mentioned on the transition thing about food security. So there's one element of sustainability, but there is another element, particularly in Britain where we could be more food secure. And maybe the government might have a role in, I suppose they call it market shaping, where you shape your own domestic market, but don't necessarily control it, but you set the conditions for it.
Pen (00:54:19):
Yes.
Ben (00:54:19):
Maybe another fun one would be if you went back then to anytime, anywhere, who do you have for dinner and what do you eat? Because you've written all of these books from Jane Austen's Time and Dickens and the like just showing the really fascinating recipes they might have eaten and actually what it says about either class or the time. But maybe if you are going back anytime, anywhere, what are you eating and what are you having for dinner?
Pen (00:54:48):
Well, the offer of having dinner with either Dickens or Jane Austen is just too irresistible, really. It's such a good question. I'm a sort of snapper up of trifles kind of food story, and I don't focus on a particular period. So if you drop me in any period I would be absolutely fascinated to find out what people are eating and what they think about it. So if I was dropped into a sort of medieval village, for example, I have a fair idea of what the Lord is going to be eating and what he thinks about it because there are records. There's lots of visual records of 12th, 13th, 14th century sort of feasts Chausa and all the rest of it when we've had this kind of emerging sort of middle class we know about some of the things that they would eat. But what I would love to know is-- I go right back in my book to sort of early medieval. So it's a sort of what we call the Anglo-Saxon period when 10% of the people are slaves in Britain.
Ben (00:56:00):
We don't know what they ate.
Pen (00:56:02):
Well, we do actually probably know what they ate because there were records of the reeve, the guy who would look after an estate. There are some records-- there's one from Bath Abbey from the early 11th century-- before 1066, so before this massive kind of normal invasion where he says, "This is my job. I have to make sure that the shepherd gets some sheep milk and some cheese, and I have to make sure the slaves get some beans and all the rest of it. But I would love to know what people thought about it. So we have inklings of what people ate. And the other thing that I find totally fascinating is our relationship to foraged food because we have this idea now that everybody in the past foraged. It was just a natural, normal thing to do. But the records of it are really scant. And there seems to be a perception that people did not-- that you could forage for medicine and that was kind of okay. Or you could pick blackberries if you were a child. But the foraging food in the hedgerow was quite, or in the fields was quite shameful. It indicated you couldn't afford to eat it yourself. So that's one of the mysteries that if you offered me a time capsule, I would love to go back to a village-- any period actually-- and try and find out really what people thought about the food they were eating. Did they love it? Did they kind of hanker for something different? We know that they sometimes anchored for better bread, softer bread, whiter bread. What did they think about food that was out there?
Ben (00:57:45):
That's fascinating. And that puts into context your chapter on warts, those sort of Herby elements. And then also just this whole go back and forth on not what people think about nettles, like a nettles soup. But actually, we go back and there is this little bit of it. We have this romantic notion that, "Oh, you forage for these nettles and you get this soup." But actually at the time, it's like, "Well, nettles soup is only if you really couldn't afford to have anything else." It's the lowest of the low in order to eat.
Pen (00:58:13):
Well, you might have it and just not tell anybody. It's very, very hard to know.
Ben (00:58:18):
That'd be interesting. I think I would do a classic and I'd be really interested in Shakespeare's eating. Well, maybe he ate with his crew and company and things like that.
Pen (00:58:33):
I suspect meat, beer, bread.
Ben (00:58:35):
Yes.
Pen (00:58:35):
But how much veg because they don't talk about the veg. They probably had it-- probably quite a wide variety of veg.
Ben (00:58:42):
Was it different amongst the company of actors and all of that in that time. So I think that's quite interesting because food's quite an interesting part of his plays, which comes through. So I'd be interested in whether that was a thing. That's actually maybe quite a good segue into your own writing process or writing day. Do you have an element where you're doing a lot of this research? Like you say, you're kind of picking things and ideas. Do you tend to write sections by hand or in verse? How do you think about writing? Do you have a particular process or is it just come about organically over the years?
Pen (00:59:18):
Well, I work four days a week at Penguin Books actually. So my writing is quite concentrated into Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays for this book and then a sabbatical. So for my last book, I had a few months and this book I also had a few months-- six months. It's so little time. You have to really knuckle down and do it. And at the beginning of my sabbatical, I was thinking, "Oh, I'll go off and go on holiday and I'll see my family." And then I kind of started working I was thinking, "No, I just need to get my head down." So what I do is I do most of my research in the library, in the British Library which is amazing. It's such an incredible resource. It's incredible that it's free to use, so exciting. You can go in and take out a herbal of beautiful illustrations of strawberries or dandelions or something published in the 17th century, and you just have it and hold it, turn the pages. It's just so wonderful. So yes, I would kind of try and be quite efficient in my reading; read a lot, try and kind of. And then just keep a kind of magpie like. Pick out the things that were interesting, that kind of fit together.
Ben (01:00:42):
And then handwritten notes when you're reading them?
Pen (01:00:44):
No. I type notes and then I can kind of crosscheck what I'm looking for in my search notes. So then I'll have a little document that's probably going to end up being my chapter when I put in the things that I find unmissable interesting. And then the chapter sort of emerges from them.
Ben (01:01:05):
And then do you consider yourself more a historian then or more of a writer? Because I guess you are writing-- When I read it flows into what I guess people are saying as this narrative nonfiction-- a story comes out as opposed to just a collection of facts. There's argumentation and evidence within that. I would go so far to say there's some style-- You can have something which is sort of an encyclopedia, although actually, they have style as well. Tries to nudge towards the neutral, whereas a writer will have something to it. And obviously, I think you are writing nudges to something which has a style, also has a story. So are you conscious of that and do you consider that, or do you still consider yourself more from a historian route to sort of argument and the evidence part of things?
Pen (01:01:58):
I don't really think about it at the time, actually. I guess I think if I'm interested in it, then I hope other people will be interested in it. Some things I find really funny. I put things in if they amuse me or if I'm interested in them. And there were kind of a couple of chapters where I started writing them and I just wasn't interested enough. I started trying to write a chapter on sweet potato, and I just thought, "Do you know something? I just don't care enough."
Ben (01:02:29):
Easy to edit out that if you don't care about it.
Pen (01:02:32):
I'm sure sweet potatoes are really fascinating. I just didn't find the fascinating stuff about it. So I'm not terribly conscious of trying to do one thing or another. I just put it together and try-- I edit constantly.
Ben (01:02:48):
Okay. You edit as you go.
Pen (01:02:49):
I edit as I go. So I write something and then think, "It's too long, too long. Get rid, get rid, get rid" or kind of rephrase it, change it; sometimes move things around. I think particularly with this book, because I'm trying to pull in not just the story about different foods, but about the way people thought about them at the time or the way people were thinking about quite big subjects about economics or responsibility or whatever. So I'm trying to kind of pull in occasionally a bit of Adam Smith's or Edmund Burke or something a tiny bit but only as they relate to my argument. And so I'm very conscious that I need to try and explain that and explain why I feel it's relevant to Kippers, for example. So Adam Smith has this whole chapter at the End of Wealth of Nations on Herring, which I found totally fascinating. I thought, "I've got to put that in." But how do you weave it in because there's so many bits of that story to tell? So that's the hard bit for me is structuring the kind of the story and the thinking around it.
Ben (01:03:55):
That makes a lot of sense. And how important are your Yorkshire roots to how you are today? I mean, obviously you've been in London for a while now. There's a feeling of this kind of north south divide a little bit. But actually, when you travel around, it gets even sort of deeper than that. So Yorkshire people feel very Yorkshire. It's not just the north south element. Is that quite important to you or your writing?
Pen (01:04:24):
Not consciously, but I know it is because I know that I'm completely fascinated by anything that comes out of Yorkshire. Yorkshire has this kind of age old kind of rivalry as Lancashire as well. So I was conscious that I had to very deliberately kind of stop thinking about Lancashire as a Yorkshire person would, and try and think about Lancashire as a feud historian would. But yes, the north south divide and where that comes from, and whether that is natural or somehow imposed, somehow has that grown out of our kind of historic, which I think actually probably has o a degree that I find really fascinating. Yes, as you say, I kind of grew up in Leeds in Yorkshire, and Yorkshire was very much-- Yorkshire's a very sort of larger than life county. It's very kind of proud of itself. It's proud of its kind of food and it's northern roots and all the rest of it in the way that Scotland is.
So I really recognize that kind of idea that you get particularly in Scotland, and this is what Scottish food is. And if you translate that to places like Ireland where its food story has been much more kind of beaten around by kind of the Anglo-Irish kind of settlers. And Ireland's sort of peasant food, I suppose, was really kind of erased as much as possible by sort of colonial actions. So I find that kind of regional, I think possibly because I come from this kind of quite proud county. I find those regional differences really fascinating.
Ben (01:06:17):
Okay. That's quite a good segue into-- I have a bits of fun section has only come to mind around food and what you may think of it and how we do it. So easier by question, how do you put peas on your fork?
Pen (01:06:36):
I love this. I have a chat in scoff on peas and I don't even know if I'd really realize that the "posh" way to eat any food is to squash it on the back of your fork.
Ben (01:06:51):
Yeah. The fork's held the other way round. I say the other way round if people sort of thinking, you put it on maybe a bit of a mash and put your peas on.
Pen (01:07:00):
Yeah, exactly. No, I don't do that to be honest with you because I love peas so much, I couldn't bear just to have three peas and to eat three peas at once. I want a whole kind of fork full of them.
Ben (01:07:14):
Sure. And then the meal towards the evening, should we think about, I guess there's tea; high tea, dinner, supper. What should we call that meal?
Pen (01:07:26):
We should call it whatever we want to call it. I think this is the thing. People say to me, "Should you put cream or jam first on your scon or should you put milk or tea first in your tea cup?" I think you should do-- in terms of those foods, you should experiment, see what you like the taste of and do that. I love the fact that people call meals different things. I love the fact that in Yorkshire, people have tea and maybe supper, whereas in London, they might have dinner. I think regional differences are really fun, really important, but also actually really precious because anything that links you to your family and your community and kind of your place in the world is important. You said this is a fun fact and I'm going back to the kind of the serious point about my book. But really one of the things that emerged from me is that one of the problems of our kind of globalized food system is that we've ceased to look after our kind of community customs. So anything that kind of unites a family, or a community, or a nation, or a county or whatever, I think is valuable. I think any good food is valuable in doing that.
Ben (01:09:03):
Going back to it which actually links all the way back to our strawberry; the variety of the different things whether that's regional, local, and how you did it, rather than having one strawberry to rule them all would be interesting.
Pen (01:09:13):
Yes, the lord of the strawberry.
Ben (01:09:17):
I guess the last one on that is how should we or how do you eat or drink-- maybe eat or drink soup. I was with someone the other day and they spoon their soup-- well, I consider it backwards. And then some people who spoon it forward. Then actually in the Asian diaspora often we won't be given a spoon because we'll drink it from the bowl, which makes a lot more sense also for the kind of soups that we have, although you have these sticker soups or whatever. But yeah, spoon backwards, forwards. And obviously, the kind of answer is we don't care. But how did different spooning soups come about?
Pen (01:09:58):
Oh my goodness. I think anything like pushing your peas on the back of the fork, spooning backwards, as you say, any of those elements or kind of etiquette about food are an indication that I'm eating this slowly because I'm not starving. It's placing yourself in the status of somebody with leisure and plenty of food who has time to do all these things, who doesn't have their tea at five o'clock because they've come in from the field starving, who eats their supper or their dinner at eight or nine o'clock because they have the leisure to have afternoon tea at three or four o'clock. All these things are a kind of deliberate separation of the body and the body is need for fuel from the thing that we're eating.
Ben (01:10:54):
The upper classes do it or the ones who are very wealthy and then the middle classes follow.
Pen (01:10:58):
Everybody else copies, yes.
Ben (01:10:59):
Actually, it was the same in our history of theater. So in fact, you could go back. So Shakespeare's Globe, you had the Groundlings, very noisy, it was all very mixed, and you actually often were to talk through performances and that. Then those with wealth and power didn't want to be associated with it. So they drew the audiences differently. You had to be quiet at performances. You started to segregate how you go to theater. So a very classic process there. Great. Okay. Final few sets of questions then. We might do a little bit of overrated or underrated. So I'll give you like a word or a thing and you can either make some comment or say whether it's overrated or underrated or some commentary about what it is. So I'm going to start with tripe. I guess we could think about awful in general. But tripe, do you think is overrated or underrated?
Pen (01:11:54):
Well, tripe has a whole history behind it of how it used to be. We would now probably say overrated because tripe was kind of posh and fish and chips, for example. I'm going to reserve judgment, I'm going to reserve the right to...
Ben (01:12:10):
That's fair enough.
Pen (01:12:12):
Because there are tripe lovers and that's great, I would say.
Ben (01:12:16):
I think my personal view is now that is a little bit underrated.
Pen (01:12:21):
Yes, I'm sure you're right.
Ben (01:12:22):
And it's underrated for me because-- So I'm trying to eat less meat, but meat has been a really big part of how I've grown up in food culture. But I've taken the view that it's really only just both respectful and sustainable to appreciate everything about an animal. So if you have tripe which can be done really well, then the fact that we waste so much of it, I don't think is a good idea because it has really cultural connotations. There's no nutritional reason why we shouldn't eat some of these things. So obviously it swings and roundabouts and things, but for me, although I know it probably just has to be cooked quite well. So another one on this is gin. Do you think gin might be overrated, underrated, or any commentary on its history?
Pen (01:13:14):
So gin is fascinating because for a long time gin was very underrated because it had this kind of scurrilous past. It was kind of mother's ruin. It was the thing that women would drink instead of looking after their children. They had the gin craze of the 18th century supposedly. The government kind of put a lid on the gin craze partially by legislation, and the government said, "Right, okay, we're going to get rid of-- Nobody can distill gin in their front rooms any longer. You've got to have a proper still and a proper license to do it." So gin suddenly became much harder to get access to. And for a long time, it kind of found tonic. It kind of became a sort of colonials drink. But it was pretty underrated. Then we've recently had a kind of gin renaissance. Gin makers have challenged HMRC and said, "Give us a license." And HMRC have said, "Oh, okay, we'll give you a license." So now you have lots of gin. I suspect gin-- maybe we've had peaked gin.
Ben (01:14:30):
Yeah.
Pen (01:14:30):
And as soon as you see drinks getting sweet-- if you have very sweet kind of...
Ben (01:14:39):
You've gone from gin and tonics to gin and all of these other sorts of cocktails and things.
Pen (01:14:43):
If you get gin and sort of very sweet cocktails with lots of kind of very sweet kind of kiwi fruit and strawberry kind of flavors, I think that is an indication for fashion that we've had peak whatever it is, and fashion will go and move on to whiskey or something that's kind of a bit more macho or bold or harder or something.
Ben (01:15:02):
Yeah. I hadn't thought about it that way. I'm not sure what I've own feel about gin, but I kind of think some bits of alcohol have now got definitely overrated like alcohol pops. Alcohol pops are just not a very good idea on that. But anyway, overrated or underrated on a couple of other things. Goose?
Pen (01:15:21):
Oh, goose is-- In Stuffed, I talk about the enclosures through the kind of prism of the goose because apparently our common lands were just flocks and flocks and flocks of thousands of goose and everybody would own one. Goose was the meat that most people could afford at Christmas. You'd save up and you'd have your Christmas goose. I don't think it's underrated now. I just think it has been wiped off the table by turkey, for example. And it would be nice to see it come back again.
Ben (01:15:59):
Yeah. Well, I think turkey's definitely overrated and goose underrated, although that's also with Asian food as well. But also that's fact that you cannot really-- I guess turkeys have it to a certain degree, but you can't really fast grow geese.
Pen (01:16:16):
No.
Ben (01:16:16):
And so as part of that as being part of the slow movement, and therefore essentially being forced seasonal because of that and then all of those connotations.
Pen (01:16:27):
If you go into a supermarket, you might well be able to buy a jar of goose grease for your roast potatoes and very delicious they will be too. But it's very unlikely you'd be able to buy a goose at Christmas.
Ben (01:16:40):
And actually I guess that goose fat might've been from the Christmas before anyway because it lasts for a very long time.
Pen (01:16:45):
It does lasts for a long time, yeah.
Ben (01:16:46):
So I'm not even sure where it would come from. Okay. And one more on this which you sort of mentioned briefly. Maybe it'd be the history rather than overrated and underrated, but you could do so as well, is herring.
Pen (01:17:00):
Oh, totally underrated. That's an easy one. So herring has this massive role in our history and we've just sort of turned our back on it. Particularly in Scotland, the Scottish clearances were done for herring. All these people were pushed off the land and told to go and fish go on. "There's all this herring out there. Just go and make-- like I was saying before, become part of the cash economy. Fish, earn your living." So people had tough lives following the herring shoals as either fishermen or the girls were the herring girls on land. And they'd follow them all the way down the east coast from Scotland, down to Cresta, down to Great Yamas. Live in huts, gut the fish and pickle them and salt them and all the rest of it.
Herring has been an enormous part of our life. In the seventies we'd overfished, we had to stop fishing it for a while, let the stocks build up again. But if you look at Holland for example, it has its herring feasts and it has sort of special days when they celebrate them. And we have herrings in the form of kippers, particularly a very British way of eating herring. We've just kind of forgotten about it. And I think that oily fish-- Anybody who's kind of writing about food and health at the moment will say oily fish is really good for you. It's good for all kinds of your bones. I'm not a medic, but it's a very useful part of the diet and I think we've let it just go.
Ben (01:18:42):
Sure. I was in Copenhagen earlier this year and I was just in a restaurant and asked them, "What's your special dish or what's the dish I should most try?" And no doubt, first one to get, "We have this form of open herring that you should try and we're very proud of." And they did it in a certain way so definitely with that.
Pen (01:19:03):
Yeah.
Ben (01:19:04):
Great. Okay, last couple of questions. One is are you working on any particular current projects or are you excited about anything? Obviously, you'll probably be talking about your book quite a lot, but are you looking forward to another project or something already? Or what are you spending your time on?
Pen (01:19:20):
Well, the book flattened me so I'm going to recover a bit, talk about it a bit I hope. I have long wanted to write about our religious festivals and food, and what they mean, and why they're important, and how they bring communities together or not, and how they are the kind of one-- two sides of a coin; feasting and then fasting. We've kept the feasting, we've lost the fasting. And I'm really fascinated about how the fasting is also part of our communal health, but our physical health as well. And so it'll be something in that direction, not sure what.
Ben (01:20:07):
Interesting. And will you concentrate on British festivals? Because I guess with other cultures they've kept their fasting a little bit more. Obviously we have towards Easter and Ash Wednesday and the like within that. But then if I think of South Asian and all of these other type of festivals and the interlink with food is quite interesting. Some of them actually, I think of the Jainism. Some of those are essentially vegetable festivals as well. They're not necessarily surrounded around meat. So you're interested in all or will you concentrate because of the British roots on Britain, or probably yet to decide yet?
Pen (01:20:47):
I think yet to decide, because what you've just said is really interesting. I think this is probably-- We learn a lot in Britain from other countries. We've learned a huge amount from immigrant cuisines and the way that people have kind of opened restaurants to us from Chinese or Indian cuisines and all the rest of it. That has kind of flatten or rather our instincts to be very hierarchical to things. And yes, we should definitely. I think there's so much we can learn from other cultures. At the moment, for example, this is a statistic that medics talk about in terms of ultra-processed food, is that our consumption of something like 60% of our calories comes from ultra-processed food, very high. In Portugal, apparently 10%. So clearly other cultures are able to kind of keep ultra-processed food-- food that is becoming obviously bad for our health-- keep it at Bay. And I'm really interested in how food cultures are resilient in that sense.
Ben (01:21:57):
And also what we absorb or not sort of like this idea of British curry obviously wasn't around 500 years ago and how we acquired that. Well, that's a really fascinating project. And then the last question would be, do you have any life advice for listeners either about being historian or being a writer or anything to do with food, and you think back about your own path that you'd like to share with anyone?
Pen (01:22:27):
I mean, I sort of fell into being a food historian sort of by accident. I'd always loved writing. I thought I wanted to write fiction. If my advice is anything-- and I'm not going to tell somebody how to run their life. But don't assume that fiction is the only way of writing, I think is what I learned. When I was working for the British Museum press, the publishing bit for the British Museum and I discovered that they published books on food history and it was like falling in love. I'd never knew that it was even a subject-- and this is 20 years ago or more. So finding that kind of subject that just feels so right to me was really transformational. And then thinking, "Well, maybe there is more to this writing lark than just writing novels."
Ben (01:23:21):
Great. Well that sounds like excellent advice. So I will once again highlight-- and for those who are on the video, Stuffed: A History of Good Food and Hard Times in Britain, which will be out in November in the UK. I highly recommend it. And thank you very much.
Pen (01:23:38):
Thank you so much. It was such an interesting conversation. Thank you.
Ben (01:23:41):
Great.
