A JUNIOR Health Minister,
Anna Soubry, has caused a stir by declaring that you can tell if
someone is rich or poor by how fat they are. It is true: the
shoppers in Waitrose look different from those in Iceland, and it
is obvious that cheap food, especially of the "Buy One Get One
Free" variety, is the rubbish that never goes off - Pringles, Kit
Kats, etc. But fresh food can be cheap, especially in markets,
where you see immigrant families stuffing their bags full of
cut-price fruit and veg.
The real problem is the
lack of an embedded British cooking culture - knowing about food
and what to do with it. The decline began here: Victorian London
glittered with produce from all over the Empire, but the working
poor (especially women) who lived in slums with no kitchens or
gardens had no choice but to eat debased, synthetic food.
Margarine, along with
tea, white bread, and white sugar, became the stuff of life for
millions. Other countries, slower to industrialise, held on to
their food memories longer. Today, any French teenager still knows
how an omelette (the ultimate in cheap, fast food) is made, and
will have eaten many in his or her lifetime; but I would be
surprised if half the children in England would recognise one, let
alone eat it.
But middle-class horror
of the "self-indulgent" food tastes of the working classes is
nothing new. As ever, the clear-sighted and plain-speaking George
Orwell nailed it, in The Road to Wigan Pier.
"The ordinary human being
would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And
the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less
inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. When you are
harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull,
wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'."
EXCITING may not be the
first word you would think of to describe Latin, but it does have
its thrills. I am not talking about my old Latin mistress, a
spinster in her 60s, who took to wearing see-though
leopard-skin-print blouses - presumably to get us to focus more
closely on Kennedy's Latin Primer - but about the thrill
of decoding something tricky, or reading an ancient author in his
own language (still possible for GCSE Latin).
And where modern
languages deal with the banalities of everyday life, such as how to
catch a train, go to the shops, or order a meal, Latin gets
straight in there with the sex and violence. The Cambridge
Latin Course kicks off with the death of an entire family at
Pompeii, passes blithely through executions, torture, and
poisonings, and finally arrives, for Year 10 pupils, at the
persecution and suicide of the Jews at Masada in AD 73. Nice
people, the Romans.
As for sex, it is all
lascivious slave girls or spoiled matrons. The Cambridge
Latin Course paints a picture of Rome (probably
accurate) as a macho and misogynistic society with good plumbing.
No wonder my (female) pupils sometimes shriek with horror at what
they are being asked to translate.
But every now and then we
come across a reading that leaves me gaping, but the girls
completely unmoved - our differing reactions being a precise
indicator of our respective ages. These are the bits in which
Romans writers talk about the early Christians.
For my secular,
relativist pupils, there is nothing special about these passages,
but for me, raised on tales of saints and martyrs, it is
gobsmacking to see the whole thing from the other side, and to dis-
cover that the people I was taught to think of as wicked heathens
were actually quite thoughtful and nice and did not really want to
hurt anyone.
Pliny, for instance, is a
genial sort of cove who is sent off to govern a province on the
Black Sea, and finds himself having to deal with a number of pesky
Christians. As far as he can see, they are not doing much harm.
But, as he writes to his employer, the Emperor Trajan, he knows he
has to keep things running smoothly. He cannot have some weird
religion stirring anything up.
So, if the members of
this "degenerate cult" persist in meeting in secret, calling their
leader God, and refusing to worship the Emperor, even after Pliny
has given them several chances to stop being so silly, well, he is
sorry, but he has to cut their heads off. You can see his
point.
Ditto Tacitus, a
historian, writing about Nero. Nero blames the Christians for the
Great Fire of Rome, but that's OK, Tacitus says, as they are
already hated by everyone for their "abominations" - i.e.
cannibalism. (Well, if you go around talking about eating the body
of Christ, you must expect the logical Romans to assume the
worst.)
"This mischievous
superstition", Tacitus writes, "was briefly checked by the death of
its leader, Christus, at the sentence of Pontius Pilate, but then
broke out again, not only in Judea, the source of the malignancy,
but also in Rome, where all things evil and shameful congregate and
find a following."
Bracing, isn't it? But it
does you good to question your certainties - and Latin is
surprisingly good for that.
TO COME back to the whole
thin/fat thing again: are you one of the many people on the 5:2
fasting diet? That's the one where you fast for two non-consecutive
days a week, and eat "normally" (whatever that means) for the
remaining five days. Everyone I know is on it, and being very
holier-than-thou about it.
But, apparently, like all
other diets, this one is doomed to failure unless you are doing it
for religious reasons. It has been suggested that those whose
abstinence from food is part of a spiritual quest will fast more
successfully than those who are doing it for vanity.
So that's me off the
hook, then. I am not sure what I believe now, and, whatever it is,
I do not feel strongly enough to give up two whole days' worth of
food for it. Those Romans have a lot to answer for. And anyway, I'm
with George Orwell on this one - I'm off to put the kettle on and
have a nice piece of cake.
Oenone Williams lives in Salisbury with her five children
and a hus-band who sings in the cathedral choir.