Consumed: How We Buy Class in Modern Britain. Harry Wallop
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to spend.
Second, it is the culmination of 60 years of experimentation – of freeing up the taste buds – that the end of food rationing and Elizabeth David and Raymond Postgate helped awaken and which took flight along with the first foreign holidays. David was the first of what would become a long line of cookery writers who not only provided recipes, but – in a strangely prescriptive fashion – laid down what was good food and what was not. A deb, who had been presented at court, she had the confidence to state categorically that the ideal was ‘sober, well-balanced, middle-class French cookery, carried out with care and skill’. Most working-class people from the provinces had just never been exposed to the Mediterranean produce she demanded – garlic, bay leaves, aubergines, courgettes and wine. Wine was something that was never drunk in the great majority of households. My father-in-law was typical of millions of working-class households in the 1950s in never drinking alcohol at home, save a toast on high days and holidays – and certainly never wine. He can remember the first time a bottle of ‘champagne’ came into the house – a present brought in by an uncle, who worked at the docks. A great hush descended as the family gathered around and opened the bottle. As a boy, he was aware of the disappointment from all the adults that there was no pop as the cork came out. They then quietly sipped their strangely dark and pungent liquid. It was, it turned out, Cognac Grande Champagne – a brandy, made from champagne grapes – but no one dared say anything that might suggest they had got it wrong. It seems inconceivable now, in a day when champagne is sold at £10 a bottle at Morrisons, that any family could have so little knowledge of what champagne looked or smelt like. Britain now consumes 35 million bottles of the fizzy stuff a year, enough for every household in the country to have one and a half bottles.
And thirdly, this bewildering choice in our kitchens has been driven by class divisions. Whereas once it was all about keeping up with the Joneses, now it is about differentiating ourselves from the Joneses. And helping us in this mission, indeed driving this project, is the world’s most sophisticated and powerful supermarket industry. Supermarkets not only have pioneered the cheap distribution of food, but they have also been at the cutting edge of social research, endlessly analysing who their customers are, and encouraging them to trade up – or sometimes down.
Now, about 80 per cent of all our food shopping is done in supermarkets. They didn’t even exist in 1954. Well, not in the way we would recognise them. Grocery shops were often fairly formal places, where you would be served by an apron-wearing assistant, who would stand behind a counter. The Co-op, at this stage the country’s largest food chain, had tried out ‘pay as you go out’ sections in its shops in the 1940s, but they had never taken off. It was left to Sainsbury’s to pioneer what was known back then as self-service with ‘Q-less shopping’. The company had converted a shop in Croydon in 1950 and cleverly used tough, unbreakable Perspex left over from wartime bombers as a means of protecting fresh food displays. By 1956 there were 3,000 self-service shops in Britain.
There are now well over 55,000 supermarkets, and with their growth has come the alarming decline of butchers, bakers and fishmongers. This rapid decline of the independents and rise of the supermarkets is often seen as a wholly bad thing. But the rise of large retailers, and their corresponding ability to negotiate hard with suppliers (because they were buying in such volumes), allowed us to eat more cheaply than we had ever done before. Back in 1957 a family had to spend on average more than a third of its disposable income on food and non-alcoholic drink. Despite recent food inflation spikes, this figure has fallen dramatically since the 1950s and now stands at only at 17 per cent. Food is still cheap in relative terms.
Most of us can now easily afford to buy all the calories we need, with spare change left over to spend on the fripperies, herbs, spices and exotica that mark us out as sophisticates. Nowadays, that may mean aioli from Tesco’s deli counter or samphire from Morrisons’ vegetable section. We have come a long, long way. It was not until 1970 that Sainsbury’s first sold pasta. It really was that exotic just a generation ago, and didn’t make it into the Office for National Statistics annual basket of goods (used to measure inflation) until 1987. Prior to the 1970s it was the preserve of specialist delicatessens, of which there were plenty in London, Edinburgh and wealthy market towns, but none at all in many working-class areas. That was why, on 1 April 1957, so many people were fooled by the spoof Panorama documentary that purported to show spaghetti growing on trees. Sainsbury’s now sells more than 70 different types of pasta, from wholewheat organic conchiglie to fresh walnut and gorgonzola tortellini. In 2011 the final triumph of continental over British eating habits, of Elizabeth David over luncheon meat, occurred when trade figures showed that, as a nation, we bought more olives than peanuts. The trendy wine bar had overtaken the pub.
The rise of the supermarkets and the rise of the middle classes went hand in hand with the rise of working women. Not only did this post-war phenomenon create a double-income household with the means to enjoy the finer things in life, it involved the woman of the household spending less time in the kitchen – for many a liberating experience their mothers could only have dreamed of. But this was only possible with the supermarket, selling frozen and processed food.
In the early days it was the brands that led the way. They were the ones to hold the hand of the nervous consumer having a go at cooking a cake from a pre-prepared mix, or serving up a TV dinner. And the well-trusted names of Flora, Birds Eye, Heinz, Fry’s, Batchelors, Cookeen, Vesta and Crosse & Blackwell introduced housewives and their families to not just a host of new flavours, but also endless short-cuts. Brands, invariably slightly more expensive than cooking from scratch, were mostly looked up to as an affordable luxury at this stage.
Frozen food could only become part of people’s lives once they had a freezer, which started to happen in the 1950s. By the end of the decade about 20 per cent of households had a freezer, and sales of frozen food doubled between 1955 and 1957.9 Birds Eye even opened their own chain of shops, and when frozen peas first became available there were queues out of the door in Kendal, such was the interest and hype surrounding these amazing things. Birds Eye frozen peas were also the first brand ever to be advertised in colour on British television.
But though owning a freezer was considered a major achievement for many families, frozen food after a while took on the air of inauthenticity, of food without distinction. And fish fingers, introduced in 1955, became the primary villain. The story goes that they were going to be called ‘frozen cod pieces’, until just a few weeks before the launch and someone pointed out how foolish Birds Eye would look. Children loved them. Thick Japanese-style breadcrumbs (the secret to the M&S Kiev) and an unthreatening-shaped piece of cod were promoted aggressively by television advertising – a primary black mark for many foods in a Wood Burning Stover household. Linda Shanovitch, revising for her 11-plus exam as a north London schoolgirl in the 1960s, recalled: ‘My parents were frightfully middle class so it would have been a disaster not to pass the 11 plus. I was terrified of failing. I remember on the day of the exam I got home and for a special treat my mother let me have fish fingers, which I was usually never allowed as she saw them as working-class food. All of my friends were working class, so I always wanted fish fingers. As it turned out I passed the exam and did really well.’10 When Elizabeth David revised her epic of French provincial cooking in 1977, she listed the deep freeze and prefabricated sauces as two of the evils of modern cooking.
After a washing machine and a television, a separate freezer was the most likely of all durable goods to be owned by a household headed up by an unskilled manual worker by the mid-1990s.11 Easy access to frozen pizzas, ready meals and ice cream was considered at the time a higher priority than even a telephone or video recorder.
Today’s fish fingers are Cheese Strings, Cocoa Pop Mega Munchers, Fruit Shoots – all highly processed, heavily advertised foods aimed at children and jeered at by the those who email the You and Yours programme on Radio 4. Sunny Delight was briefly catapulted into the position of Britain’s third most popular drink (behind Coke and Pepsi) after a relentless TV campaign. But after reports suggesting it turned toddlers orange it became so vilified that it has all but disappeared from view.
All of these products may be detested by Wood Burning Stovers, but they are a godsend for Asda Mums, who have an instinctive trust in big brands and a willingness to succumb to the pester power of advertising,