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?

OurBlanche, attempts by middle class people to get involved in the diets of the less well off are met with howls of mockery and abuse on here. It's none of my business what somebody else feeds their kids. Why would my opinion on their diet matter to them? It wouldn't.

They usually want stuff they know they can use.

Dependent upon personal tastes, available fuel, what else they may have in the kitchen cupboards, the availability of kitchen cupboards let alone contents, kitchen facilities in general, what they can physically carry, what won't go off once made, what will stretch furthest.

Long term factors like 'healthy' don't always come into it. We are talking literally hand to mouth, maybe no cash to hand at all. Planning involves holding on until the next agency visit when things may or may not get better.

It's not like having run low on stuff. It is having run out of stuff and not having the wherewithall to replace any of it.

I'm from a working class home, my parents were from traditional northern homes. They were upwardly mobile though, but foodwise we ate the way my mums family did.
Food was mostly homemade (we did have things like baked beans and fish fingers) and very plain and simple, based round bread and potatoes, and meat and 2 veg. As far as I can tell, thats the way most people ate. We did have porridge sometimes, but we preferred cereal.
I feel that's the sort of food 'culture' thats missing nowadays, replaced by junk food and takeaways on one hand, and things like Jamie Oliver's recipes on the other. Jamie's great, but he just doesn't connect with some people. I remember watching a programme where he was teaching a group of women to cook, and it was just cringeworthy.That's where the 'classism' comes in, IMO.

I'm not sure anyone on this thread has actually said that a food bank should hand out bowls of gruel and expect a handwritten letter of thanks to the donator for it. Nor has anyone suggested bags of random food items be handed out and the reciprient told to make a two course meal a la Ready Steady Cook.

I didn't think that this thread was about how grateful people think those who need to use a food bank should be but about how surprising some posters find the idea that porridge oats are considered these wildly exotic food substance when there's others in the same land that consider it a very basic food substance.

Of course food has class connotations. That's a different - although related - debate from what to put in a food bank donation. I tend to donate things like packets of sugar, bags of pasta, and jars of pasta sauce. Loo roll if the fb wants that sort of thing. I figure those are basic things that most people like and I'm not concerned about the ingredients for their overall diet.

This debate reminds me of one I've had regarding charitable donations of toys for children's Christmas gifts. A lot of people felt that books were the best thing to give. Those poor kids don't have books! We can fix that and make their lives better! I'm of the opinion that we should give small children what they're most likely to enjoy and I'm pretty sure the odds are better if a three-year-old boy gets a big, red firetruck with blinking lights and siren.

I quite fancy that firetruck myself :)

I've just bought a 1kg bag of porridge oats for 75p. One small mug of oats makes a huge bowl of portidge bit that amount of cornflakes would be teensy.

I'm not sure how much a kilo of cornflakes or coco pops would be but I suspect a lot more. And porridge is healthier.

Maybe it's an English thing? Is porridge posh down here?

We used to have porridge all through winter back on my parents' farm in Oz (with demerara sugar, butter, cream, etc etc....we used to run and work it all off though) we like our food are greedy fuckers though