Optimum Nutrition - Winter 2021 - PREVIEW

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