Optimum Nutrition - Winter 2021 - PREVIEW

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Interview HISTORIAN ANNIE GRAY DELIVERS A LESSON ON BRITISH FOOD Food historian and Radio 4 regular Dr Annie Gray talks to Alice Ball about why the current adage to ‘eat what your great grandmother ate’ for healthier nutrition may, in fact, be misguided Y ou may have heard experts say: ‘Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food’, but Dr Annie Gray (PhD) isn’t so convinced. According to the food historian, eat how your ancestors ate and you could end up with gout — an arthritic condition considered something of a “disease de jour” in the 18th century. “People romanticise the past,” she says over a video call. “They think we all lived in harmony with everything, but they forget that the diet of the poor was awful — and in many ways, the diet of the rich was too.” The 19th century is another case in point. “You’ve got the poor reliant upon bread,” she says. “That in itself isn’t that bad — a good loaf of bread is pretty good for you — but the trouble is the bread wasn’t good quality. It was always made from white flour, which has got the wheat germ taken out, and then if you’re dirt poor you’re probably putting sweetened condensed milk on it which is largely just sugar.” Malnutrition also takes many forms, she says. “You can be malnourished in the 19th century and it will show OPTIMUM NUTRITION | WINTER 2021/22 17
Interview Image: Rrraven © 123rf.com because you’re incredibly thin and you’re not getting the nutrients you need, or you can be malnourished in the 21st century and be grossly overweight. Those two are just two sides of the same coin.” Gray, a broadcaster, writer and cook, has specialised in the history of food and dining in Britain for more than a decade, focusing on the 17th century onwards. You name it, she’s eaten it; from kangaroo brain cakes (“tasted a bit like spam, to be honest”) to an “epic” boar’s head during a Tudor feast. Since 2012, she’s been a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4’s The Kitchen Cabinet, and her latest book of the same name (fully titled The Kitchen Cabinet: A Year of Recipes, Flavours, Facts, & Stories for Food Lovers), which delves into Britain’s culinary past and present, was published in September 2021. So she is perhaps well qualified to declare that insults thrown at British cuisine (or, perhaps, Britain’s lack of cuisine) are “total baloney”. “Britain has a really good food heritage both in terms of British dishes — roast meat, fish and chips, and pork pie — and our own food culture going backwards,” she says. “Yes, French cuisine was what ruled the roost in terms of the aristocracy for much of the past 500 years, but that was true right across the world — certainly among English speaking and European areas.” She does, however, believe that British food suffered after the Second World War — another reason why modelling your grand- or greatgrandmother’s diet mightn’t be the best approach. “I think a lot of people don’t realise that during the war, rationing was bad. But after the war it became worse,” she says. “And when you think about kids growing up, you’re eight when the war breaks up, but you’re probably married “I think a lot of people don’t realise that during the war, rationing was bad...but after the war, it became worse...” “We’ve both reduced the number of things we eat, but also in some ways we’ve got too much variety in others. You can get 20 different varieties of pasta or five different types of ketchup...” with kids by the time rationing ends. That chance to learn, that transition of knowledge [about good food], isn’t really there.” It’s perhaps an ironic statement, considering that during her own teenage years, Gray survived on microwave meals. “My mother really couldn’t cook and my dad sort of could, but it was classic 1980’s family fare,” she says. This changed when the family moved to France during her A-levels, and Gray boarded with a French family. “It’s a bit of a cliché, but it was this total epiphany where I suddenly realised that food could be incredible. “My mother’s omelettes were always awful — you could bounce them off the ceiling. But I had one in France and was like ‘This isn’t an omelette’, because it was cooked in so much butter and unbelievably good. “I think it was at that point I realised if you’re going to eat three times a day, you should make it count.” At the University of Oxford, where she studied modern history, she was “the person who was roasting pheasant and making [her] own pasta”, despite a lack of cooking facilities. Yet after graduating, she still had no idea what she wanted to do and ended up “getting sacked from basically every job”. “I decided I would go back and do a masters [in historical archaeology] because I still loved history,” she says. “Then I left, got sacked a few more times and did a PhD. By this time I knew I wanted to study food and I knew I wanted to work with museums. The PhD allowed me to do those things.” “Greater choice…all an illusion” According to Gray, one of the biggest differences between historic and modern day diets is the variety of what we eat. With advances in trade, technology and travel, it can often appear like we have greater choice over our diets. But this, she says, is “all an illusion”. “There were 3,000 varieties of apples in the Victorian era, but today you walk into the average supermarket and get five, and they’re all enzyme treated. “We’ve both reduced the number of things that we eat, but also in some ways we’ve got too much variety in others. You can get 20 different varieties of pasta or five different types of tomato ketchup.” Certain vegetables have also disappeared from modern day diets completely; skirret (a root vegetable), scorzonera (similar to parsnip) and salsify (a root vegetable with an oysterlike taste). Jerusalem artichokes, which are beneficial for gut health, were also eaten habitually, and when it came to meat, every part of the animal would be eaten. Yet meat was “very much for the rich”. Historical cookbooks tend to draw attention to meat consumption, but this is only because the “food that gets the publicity is the stuff the rich ate”, she says. “We get this skewed idea that everybody ate loads of meat, very plainly done with some vegetables on Image: Torky © 123rf.com 18 OPTIMUM NUTRITION | WINTER 2021/22
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Optimum Nutrition - Winter 2021 - PREVIEW

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