To not understand why food is such a class issue in the UK????

[Notcontent]

This is prompted by the food bank thread in Chat. If you haven't read it, it's basically various posters claiming that porridge and honey are "posh" foods that "normal" people don't eat...

Anyway, I have lived in the UK for over a decade and still don't understand this obsession with categorising food in such a way. What is the origin of it? Many of the foods considered "posh" are basic foods which normal people around the world have eaten for hundreds or thousands of years, and are still eating them.

Why are chick peas sneered at while baked beans are ok?

Why do people prefer to give their kids cornflakes and think that having porridge is something to laugh about?

I grew jp in a working class home and I had porridge most winter mornings.

You got me deogratias. Most days my breakfast is big protein - salmon and scrambled eggs, omelette with goats cheese and spinach etc. Don't do sugary carbs at breakfast. DH otoh who comes from a huntin' shootin' fishin' sailin' background is wedded to his white Warburtons toast - he does betray his origins by having honey on it though. And he has milk and sugar in his tea - there's no hope for him.

Actually cooking and reading seem to be the preserve of the middle classes.

I come from the underclass rather than the working class, when my parents were able to cook ( ie they were not pissed) they did cook proper meals. We lived on things like corned beef hash, cottage pie, stew, tripe soup. Every now and again we would have pizza and chips but not every night. We could not afford takeouts.

I am working class and spend much more time homemaking than my middle class friends as a rule. We have a proper breakfast every morning which is sometimes cereal but often eggs or pancakes. Growing up when I stayed with relatives who were working class we always had a proper breakfast. I rarely use convenience foods, especially now that I am SAHM. When I go to Waitrose I see a fair few ready meals in trolleys but because it is not pizza or fishfingers it passes as vaguely healthy.

We also read books, as a feral member of the underclass I would go the library after school to read. We did not really have books at home because we could not afford them but some of us definitely read.

MN has a very strange view of what it is to be working class.

Suppose I'm working class. Well working class roots, council estate filled with hate, but now i live in a very affluent area.

I still work all hours so what's that make me;?.

Note to self get porridge from Waitrose ASAP:)

Does anyone know if it's still the staple brekkie in HM prisons?

^It's a shame porridge is seen as posh. It's very cheap, very easy to cook provided you have either a hob or a microwave, you don't need to add anything but water (adding some milk is my preference but at a push just water is fine) and a bit of your sweetener of choice, it's healthy, it's warming and it's very filling.

But apparently it's demeaning, preachy and unrealistic and to expect desperate, hungry poor people to eat porridge.^

^^This.

Half the world, that are generally much worse off and spend a much higher percentage of their income on food than most people in the UK, live mostly on porridge, or a variant, or rice and beans or similar.

But anyone suggesting that people here should eat such a diet are widely derided and accused of being 'preachy and unrealistic', like Jamie Oliver or a conservative MP a few months back. These basic cheap nutritional foods are written off as apirational and middle class.

Jamie Oliver is widely attacked on here for trying to encourage people to cook and eat better - which is bonkers when it would lead to a much better quality of life for many people - instead of being overweight and ill on nutritionally deficient and expensive processed food, be healthier on cheap staples like porridge, pulses, grains and seasonal vegetables?

JO was criticised for citing Italian Peasants with their very cheap mussels and pasta - another cheap pasta dish upthread is also given as an example of a Labour Leader being out of step with his core voters - both pasta and mussels, or fettucine (sounds posh but is only a type of pasta FFS) with capers, tomatoes and olive oil) are very cheap, good food and quick and easy to cook.

It is obviously a very complex issue, but also appears to be almost unique to the UK (and possibly the US?), so the question would be, 'what is so fundamentally different about the UK to the rest of the world' and our attitude to food? The OP says she has lived in the UK for 10 years, so has clearly noticed a difference to where she lived before?

Someone upthread has mentioned the relentless advertising and pushing of shitty processed food. Maybe that's it?

It's not necessarily working hours - some people work long hours and still cook, some people work fewer hours and still 'don't have time to cook'.

Lots of things are cheap, quick and easy and don't require specialist equipment. OK you could argue that a microwave oven is - but how are people heating their ready meals? Slow cookers are cheap, use tiny amounts of energy and can be used to make cheap ingredients into a meal.

It could be that in the UK it is a lot easier to eat cheap food without needing to make any effort than it is elsewhere, where it is often simply not available or too expensive.

So some people have lost the ability to cook and don't see why they should make the effort when they don't have to and food only becomes and issue when people don't have the money to either buy good quality ready made food, or equipment to cook their own? Hence why it always comes back to poor people, with no-one criticising the better off person who can afford to eat at M&S and Pret?

I've stayed away from this one, being the stupid bugger who made the comment the thread is based on. But I'd like to explain the porridge thing... as I did on the other thread.

Porridge is fine. Donate it. It will be used. Many people like it.

However, it will not be the first choice for many others because

• it may be unknown to them, they may prefer toast, cornflakes or just a cup of tea for breakfast. People who are utterly penniless will often look for familiar foods with us, to maintain a semblance of normality for themselves and their kids.

• it uses a lot of milk. We don't hand out fresh milk. Many parents choose to live off milky tea or coffee during the day, only eating with the kids in the evening, so milk, usually longlife or powdered, is used for that - both as food substitute and personal heating

• they may find Reddybrek easier or tastier. Many do.

• they just don't like it. Many people don't and there is no law that says that because it has been donated any one person MUST gratefully accept it.

It has nothing to do with class, gratitude or any other of the somewhat odd reasoning given here and the other thread.

It has to do with living without a penny in cash and knowing you have to make a choice between heating and eating. Such extreme poverty may be for a short space of time, but many remain only a pound or two away form that choice or many months, which is why we get repeat referrals.

If you find someone's choices odd, so be it. But please don't condemn them.

On the other side, it is quite amusing to see further evidence of the MN stereotyping that caused me to post about my offensive giggle in the first place

"it uses a lot of milk"

Am I the only person who makes my porridge with oats and water? I just use a small bit of milk to cool it down.

Indeed. Many of us who are "posh" don't have milk or dairy products anyway.
Eggs are best not sugar and carbs whether that be honey and porridge or frosties and bread.

Totally agree with BarbaraofSeville. Basic cheap foodstuffs are seen as aspirational.

I reckon people in the UK (though not Scotland come to think of it) are strange about porridge generally - across all classes.

I'm always baffled by these people who pay for Oats So Simple sachets or processed 'baby' porridge when porridge oats are one of most straightforward convenience foods of all time.

It's definitely a UK thing. I'm considering making regular donations so I looked at the kind of thing people were giving in my local supermarket. There was artichoke hearts in tins and jars of white asparagus for example.

I don't even know if I would know how to use them but if I was desperate I'd find out. And here you can give what you like and eat what you like and nobody judges you.

Incidentally, lidl is my local supermarket.

I always think that too Laurie, if there's one thing that really doesn't need speeding up or dumbing down it's porridge!

Porridge is traditionally made with water but could equally be made using milk or dried milk. I suppose if you were desperate and only have a kettle you could make adequate porridge with the kettle and dried milk and oats. If you wrapped the bowl in a towel or something to keep the heat in, it would probably thicken up quite well.

I like tinned artichoke hearts but not really tinned white asparagus. I guess you may be in Spain Mrsnec? It seems popular there but far inferior to fresh but I suppose they do it for food preservation, needs must purposes.

When I was a child my dad was a striking miner so we only had my.mums part time wage for a year. We received food parcels from German miners so were introduced to a lot of unfamiliar food that we had to eat because we couldn't afford anything else.

We also had things like day old bread from the bakery and misshapen seconds in discount freezer shops that made Iceland look posh. But we were very grateful because the alternative was no food at all.

Here if you donated those things you could start an argument along the lines of 'people who use food banks don't want obscure ingredients like tinned artichokes or asparagus' against 'how dare people assume that food Bank users are unsophisticated and only want spam and custard' .

It's a dilemma. Give them what I eat and risk the items not being used, or think 'what do poor people feed their kids? Ah yes, jammy dodgers' and be thought of as a snobby elitist c*nt.

I'm staggered at the basic lack of empathy and understanding on here, tbh.

Food is never just about nutrition and calories. Particularly when other aspects of life are difficult, food is about comfort, familiarity, the satisfaction of providing for your family, treats, respite from the difficult aspects of your life.

Yes, there's a case to be made for saying that basic cooking skills have been lost over the past couple of generations, and for encouraging people to consider their food choices in the light of health and nutrition. And yes of course it is highly likely that many people on restricted incomes could in principle make choices that would ensure a better supply of nutrients for a given amount of money.

But how many of us, when we are even mildly stressed, never mind homeless, mentally or physically unwell, penniless or facing down the other kinds of desperate circumstances that cause people to turn to foodbanks, would immediately think, "I know, I'll take some obscure ingredients that I didn't choose myself and have never used before and create an innovative nutritionally balanced meal for my family?"

Of course we don't. When we're tired, ill, anxious or run down, we break out the beans on toast, the tinned rice pudding, the findus crispy pancakes (or whatever your chosen comfort food), or turn to the take-away menus. I've been sufficiently exhausted to not be able to face the idea of standing at the cooker long enough to make basic pasta and sauce for my kids, never mind root through a bag of unfamiliar foods and work out what to do with them, and I have two degrees, a wide range of cookbooks, a supportive dh and unrestricted access to kitchen equipment and fuel.

How is it okay to judge people who are desperate enough to turn to a foodbank for having a preference for foods that are familiar to them, which they know how to prepare and which they know their family will like? And that's without even considering the implicit criticism in giving people food that they (for whatever reason, none of us are free of emotional baggage, especially in regard to food) consider as not for people like them.

To people who can't get their heads round that, I suggest that next time you feel utterly exhausted, overdemanded and generally at the end of your rope, you send a random person you've never met before into a random shop you've never been in before and ask them buy you £10 worth of food. Then take it home, unpack it on your kitchen counter and see whether you feel inspired to create fabulous new dining experiences for your family.

My money would be on not.

Porridge is posh? Right, that's the last time I'm buying naice ham, move over ham, you've had your day it's now naice porridge.

WhatAgony Beetle said - brilliant

Fair enough Beetle, I don't think anybody expects FB clients to change their tastes. It's just surprising to hear that some foods like porridge or honey are alien to whole swathes of society.

I dare say that I'd get my head ripped off for saying that people on lower incomes tend to feed their kids processed sugary foods. I'd be called a snob. But this thread is saying look, they eat jam and biscuits, deal with it.

But Morris, they aren't alien. They are just less well liked, maybe never used/not regularly bought by some people.

That you struggle to believe it is only because you do regularly use them. No class thing there, just a question of familiarity.

When we're tired, ill, anxious or run down, we break out the beans on toast, the tinned rice pudding, the findus crispy pancakes (or whatever your chosen comfort food), or turn to the take-away menus

That's interesting.

If I am tired, I'll or stressed I can honestly say that preparing and eating home made food is always guaranteed to make me feel better.

I wonder if it's an age thing? I'm in my 50s and we simply never had convenience food growing up, my parents couldn't afford it. So it isn't something that occurs to me to eat.

I do think it's criminal that children aren't taught to cook. We manage to toilet train then and teach them to read, I think cooking is just as vital.

No Morris, people are not saying that. They're saying everyone eats jam and sugary shit regardless of class

And no, I would agree with you. In general, as shown by a lot of research and the shopping habits of millions, families who are cash poor do tend to eat less healthy diets.

Unless you join food activists, volunteer in various organisations, manage to persuade massive corporations to ignore their core customer base... what are you going to do about it?

As a snack or treat, I love sweets, chocolates and crisps etc. But for meals I would want something wholesome, usually. So I'd expect that FB users would want calorie dense treat food but also nutritious foods to make meals with.

A pack is put together that will provide the necessary nutrition to get people through 3 days. Three days. The people using the food bank might have a full kitchen or might just have a kettle. They haven't necessarily got access to a fridge. It's about filling them up. All the angst sounds very let them eat cake (sweetened with honey.)