to wonder what middle class/working class parental cliches you have actually experienced?

[vitaminz]

This thread is not to be taken too seriously and no offense is intended.

Today when I was in the supermarket I overheard another shopper saying to what appeared to be her daughter "Clemmie, shall I get some brioche?", she really did sound like a middle class cliche.

My aunt who thinks herself a bit posh used to go to sommerfield and use her M n S carrier bags

Koala I think it's about when the food went mainstream. Croissants were around in my childhood (although not in my local mini-market or bakers!)

I remember when yoghourt was only found in obscure health food shops and then adverts for small sugared pots aired on TV (Ski brand!). Hummus entered my consciousness way after that and so to me (age 48, and brought up on a northern council estate) it still is quite new! My Mum doesn't eat it.

Oh and olives were served in cocktails iirc.

Koala I think the thing about those foods (brioche, hummus etc) is that you are right they are pretty everyday foods now and available almost everywhere. So for our children they are no different to say, baked beans.

But I think for a lot of parents (definitely me anyway and am in my forties) they are absolutely not the foods of our childhood, they were either unheard of or an exotic rarity. They seemed to come in when people (largely middle class at first) started having regular holidays abroad and trying 'foreign food'. People developed a taste for them but they were hard to come by in UK and had an expensive cache about them. Then shops in UK cottoned on that there was a market for these products so produced them.

So when my 5 year old demands brioche, it does honestly feel like a precious/ middle class thing for him to say, simply because it would have been so if I as a 5 year old had demanded it. Even though I know logically that nowadays it really isn't.

Funnyossity crossed posts!

Muskey That reminds me of the time I posted a song by The Lancashire Hotpots called Chippy Tea on facebook (comedy song which I'd posted tongue in cheek seeing as I'm a Lancashire expat and was about to go to the chippy)

I saw a frightfully MC friend a few days later who asked if I'd had my chippy tea then laughed a lot "Gosh, yes, real peasant food isn't it?", me to self "she just called me a peasant didn't she? "

I don't really get it. The class thing.

I have a master's degree, my DH left school a 16. We are both self-employed (I am a freelance translator, my DH is a manufacturer) but we don't earn a lot of money so we get tax credits. We spend a disproportionally amount of money on good food (always organic, free range, local etc.), but we never go out and our clothes is from the sales or second hand. Our DCs have several middle names and are both very able academically, but we spend all school holidays "unschooling" them, usually outdoors. We can't afford to go on holidays abroad. We rent our house. We read lots of books, fiction and non-fiction. we listen to classical music and Radio 4.

Where are we in the class system? Wannabe-middle class without the income?

Brioche has layers of meaning for me ovenchips, and unsurprisingly being British, class come into it!

Never had heard of it then lived in France and saw it in the supermarket; it was wrapped in plastic and looked doughy and sweaty. There were much more appealing carbs at the bakers!

A while later back in Britain I was working on a farm when friends of my employer came to stay with young kids in tow. They were one morning making (to my low church ears) a very great effort to get their toddler to say "brrrioche" in an accurate french accent; it seemed to have cultural importance - they discussed how their French friend they all knew ate it, and Mummy and Daddy ate it when they holidayed in France etc etc. That was the first time I was aware of the stuff in the UK (v late 1980s).

I've tried it now and it is a bit doughy..

On the whole the food revolution in Britain has been great - if you have the money to indulge of course and the self control to be able to stop!

Ah, okay, thanks for the explanations!

It's still difficult for me to get my head around, being born in Australia (although with one British parent). Nobody here talks about 'class' so openly; you'd get some very odd looks if you did. And I can't imagine gauging it by what food someone ate, of all things. I mean, of course someone's general food choices reflect their income and education to some extent, I'm not going to pretend otherwise, but there are no 'totemic' foods, like brioche or olives...

I'll never fully understand it, or be comfortable with it, but it makes interesting reading. As you were!

Koala you have the great advantage over me of living in modern times!

For the generation after mine the aspirational food has maybe been asian? I know a Mum who rolls sushi for her kids.

Not really relevant to the thread but I did smile when a young British Muslim man over in Syria was interviewed about whether Dave Cameron was right that he was liable to come back to Britain radicalised. He laughed at the idea of ever wanting to come back to UK and finished scornfully "David Cameron- Wake up and smell the hummus!"

Taking the hummus meme to a whole new place!

btw, love your username funnyossity my Nan used to say that all the time "Come here you funnyossity/she's a right funnyossity that one" etc etc, makes me smile (see?)

I can't remember what I said exactly, but I caught myself 'performance parenting' with 5YO DS in public recently.

I was mortified.

Koala - I'm in NZ and I think it's disengenuous to pretend there's no class structure here - I'm surprised its so different in Oz! The types of food you/one consumes are undoubtedly class-ridden as well. I will out myself to fellow Wellingtonians, but Moore Wilsons Fresh is riddled with the middle-classes, stocking up on organic, free-range, freshly roasted and hand-crafted/picked shiz...

You can't move for them on a Saturday afternoon, especially.

I've gone backwards. V middle class upbringing with private schooling and so on. I've never quite lived up to my potential and now decidedly working class. I've inadvertently given my children v middle class names.

Well in our house we eat hand rolled cous cous I'll have you know. None of this poxy supermarket stuff for us, we import it directly from the women who make it in rural North Africa.

In other words DH's Sisters and SIL who make huge batches of cous cous by hand and then send us back with about 9 million kg of the stuff. No matter how MC (or North African you are) there is a limit to the amount of cous cous you can eat!

Me: dd, thinking about going to see Grandma and Granddad at half term. That will be nice won't it?

Dd: (aged 7) oh yes brilliant Mum, but only if we can stay at the St Regis!

Grandparents live in the UAE and we stayed at the St Regis ONCE for a huge treat

What's all this about non-ethical quinoa?

Quinoa has become a massive export leaving the locals to eat less nutritious stuff.

Prof Yaffle I just lost a post to you about lovely chippy teas and peasants being the new navy... Glad you like the name anyway! It has grandparent associations for me too!

I heard a colleague ask their 5yr DS what he wanted for dinner. He replied 'gnocchi and pesto, mummy'. Not exactly egg and chips is it?

You could always ask yourself do they sell it in Iceland? and no, they don't sell hummous. Iceland could be the benchmark for whether or not a food is MC

I had a very WC 70s upbringing where threatening to batter your children on an hourly basis was the order of the day.

'knock you from here into next week'

'knock you from here to kingdom come'

'smack you so hard you won't sit down for a week..'

Ahhhh memories.

As an aside, has anyone else heard Delia Smith says hummus?

She pronouces it who-mousse and like it's two words, it's bizarre

Also the way the woman who does the voiceover on The Great British Menu says consomme drives me up the wall totally irrelevant to the thread

I'm also not sure that hummous is as ubiquious as the MN hive-mind thinks it is.

DS has started to complain about having hummous in his sandwiches at school because the other kids go "urrrggh, what's THAT?!". We're MC (by culture more than income, these days) but DS goes to school on a council estate and which has a very "rough" reputation, and probably not a lot of parents who would identify as MC.

He also got a "urrrgh, what's THAT?" comment re mini mozzarellas in his pasta salad.

Do people honestly think that everybody in the country eats the same food and that your food choices are not influenced by your culture and income (ie. class)?

Er, they do sell hummus, taramasalata, etc in Iceland.

I feel most conflicted when we order drinks in a bar and DS(9) wants a tap water. He doesn't like fizzy drinks and genuinely prefers water but I feel the need to tell the staff in case they think I'm making him have water only in a MC way. I want to buy him a full fat coke as a decoy.