Where Did It All Go Right? (20 page)

I cling to the nostalgic conviction that we ate better in our pre-McDonald’s world than the kids of today, but it’s a close run thing. Given the choice, children of any era will instinctively choose the brightly coloured food with a picture of Mr Tickle on the side of the packet over the home-made organic flapjack in a Tupperware tub. I was alarmed recently to discover that kids today – the urban, Western variety at any rate – don’t even know how to open and eat a boiled egg. This ancient art is in danger of dying out, like lace-making or walking, gradually eroded to a stump by progress. Pretty soon, the only place you’ll be able to see the dipping of bread soldiers into a runny egg is one of those ‘living history’ folk villages. A young relative of mine once explained that he likes his eggs ‘flat’.

Their pop music’s not as good as ours was either.

But hold hard! What if my gastronomic superiority is misplaced? Sure, we had boiled eggs when we were yesterday’s kids – having them ‘flat’ was for special occasions and holidays only – but an egg was still as close as we sailed to healthy eating. A balanced meal for us meant something out of a box, something out of a tin and something out of a sachet. It was all
stuff
: baked beans, spaghetti hoops, luncheon meat, Dairylea, Cheese Singles, beefburgers, fish fingers, Sugar Puffs, Frosties, Golden Syrup, Rise
&
Shine,
¹
Angel Delight, Instant Whip, Dream Topping, Smash, Supermousse or a Mini-Roll.

During our annual self-catering holiday in North Wales, 1976, I helpfully recorded many of the meals we ate. Nutritionists look away now.

SUNDAY

Beans on toast, Dimple, cup of tea, Mini-Roll, cheese + biscuits

TUESDAY

Fish fingers, rolls, fried potatoes, half bun, choc cake, cuppa tea

WEDNESDAY

Beans, sossies, pineapples, choc cake, cuppa

THURSDAY

Beans on toast, treacle tart, Melissa’s mousse!!
²

SATURDAY

Chips, fish fingers, sossie, tomato sauce, Mini-Roll, Club, cuppa

TUESDAY

Beans, bacon, pineapple mousse

A Dimple was a cake, in case it’s not ringing any bells. An individual chocolate-coated piece of chocolate sponge filled with chocolate cream (named solely to mock my face). Probably Lyons. Now bear in mind we were on holiday – holiday! it was supposed to be fun! – and then return to your first thought: what a lot of fried rubbish and shop-bought confection we subsisted on. A strike at the Heinz factory would have killed us off.

We ate this food not because Mum was lazy or unimaginative, but because everybody did. It was the Seventies, the decade of
convenience
. New parents could still taste post-war austerity and wouldn’t wish it on their kids. They could still hear the ghostly clucking of the hens in the back yard as they threw their tins of ‘chunky chicken’ into the shopping basket. (The joke of chunky chicken, which came in a nondescript glutinous sauce and just needed warming through, was that it was more stringy than chunky, but it was bloody
convenient
.)

Mum tried us on vegetables (including the harvest festival specimens Pap grew up his allotment), but to little avail. I wouldn’t even eat the kiddy-vegetables, carrots and peas. I was against them.
³
They tasted suspiciously of … what they actually were, roots and seeds. I preferred my food processed, rendered, shaped, flavoured, enhanced, dehydrated and reconstituted. And when the food scientists finally got their tardy arses in gear and invented Ice Magic, a chocolate sauce that set when in contact with ice cream, I wanted some of that on top.

I know for a fact that Mum and Dad ate vegetables.
⁴
They were brought up that way. Dig for victory and all that. Plus, let us not forget, Mum and Dad were adults, with palates sophisticated by experience and dinner parties – in other words, they’d eaten gammon with a pineapple ring on top. If they didn’t at one point attend a fondue party, I’ll eat my hat.

Presumably to make us grateful for what we were, or weren’t, about to receive, Mum and Dad actually
boasted
about the dripping sandwiches they enjoyed as kids – just as I might now boast about drinking orange from a cup, rather than an individual carton with a bendy straw glued to the side. Mum even ate sugar sandwiches in her youth, and carried a yen for banana sandwiches into adult life, which was a bit unnecessary – we got the picture. We junior gourmets – Simon and Melissa were equally complicit in the great vegetable boycott – had already been spoiled by the individual Supermousse in a plastic jelly-mould-shaped tub, and the Dracula
ice
lolly (black, with ‘blood-red’ jelly filling). There was no going back for us. Only if there was a war would we eat dripping.

I know Mum and Dad ate vegetables because we saw them do it at least once a week: namely at Sunday dinner. (You have to understand that ‘dinner’ means lunch where I come from, and ‘tea’ means dinner. Think of it as Sunday lunch if helps you picture us eating it in the middle of the day.) For Sunday dinner, while Mum and Dad tucked into sprouts and crinkle-cut carrots, peas and broad beans, I would have the meat, the potatoes, the gravy and the Yorkshire pudding, and that was it. Meat and one veg. And if truth be told, it was only the meat I was interested in: I would methodically (and annoyingly) eat everything else first, as if ticking off chores, saving the beef/lamb/pork/chicken till last. Sometimes – if Mum was feeling munificent – I was allowed to put it between two slices of bread and margarine. (Try saying ‘melted hydrogenated vegetable oil’ without saying, ‘Mmmmmmm’.)

Sunday was the only completely traditional dinner we ate in a normal week, with everyone present in the same sitting, and no getting down from the table until Dad was finished. (Dad, perhaps aware that it was his
job
, ate loads more than anybody else, including the pieces of fat, skin, gristle and rind we’d wimpily left on our plates – the time-honoured ‘best bit’. Well, it’s hungry work in the police.) The reward for our obedience and for not sitting on our legs at the table would be some fabulous Sunday dessert, such as a trifle – made by Mum’s own fair hand but using reassuring, packet-based ingredients: Swiss roll, jelly, tinned fruit, custard – or, when the convenience food industry really started to get into its stride in the mid to late Seventies, packet cheesecake (which was so easy to put together with its numbered astronaut sachets, Dad sometimes made it).

The Collins family feared no God, but Sundays were still sacred. Half a tinned peach with cream and a dob of jam became ‘peach melba’ on Sundays. (And ‘Paul Melba’ in my TV-centric mind.
⁵
)

For the rest of the week, Mum had foolishly allowed herself to get into a routine of one ‘tea’ for us, and a separate ‘tea’ for them (dished up when Dad came home from work). This would have been more of a drag for her if cooking our tea involved anything more time-consuming than heating something up out of a tin and serving it with chips or a slice of toast. (I’ve checked and neither pasta nor rice were invented until about 1986.)

Still, at least we ate real chips, crinkle-cut by hand in the kitchen. None of your frozen factory fries, there was hard graft in our chips. Since ‘the freezer’ in those days meant a tiny compartment at the top of the fridge (one packet of burgers, a mousse and an ice tray and it was full up), Mum made chips from
potatoes
, peeling them with her metal knives and everything. Before the McCain mutiny, she, like every mother from Winsford Way to Winsford in Somerset, diced with the apparent possibility of a chip pan fire every other day, noisily reheating matured cooking oil in a spitting, fizzing cauldron of scalding death (wet tea towel, right?). Let us not then dismiss Seventies chips as either an easy option for her, or a processed food for us (they were neither spry, crisp nor dry, but they had at least come from the good earth originally).

What do I smell?
…

I know a lot more about nutrition now than I cared to know then (and more than most parents care to know now), so when I see other people’s offspring behaving in an irritable, listless or hyperactive manner I immediately think: bad diet, overdose of aspartame, not enough vitamins. But can they really be eating as calamitous a diet as I did? (By which I mean me and every other kid of my age: Generation E120.
⁶
)

Eating habits in the UK were transformed in the Eighties and Nineties, and as a result, consumers have become ever more demanding. In the Seventies – and you try telling this to those pesky kids of today – there
were
no diet versions of all the processed
foods
. If you wanted to lose weight (and luckily no-one did, except the Slimcea girl), you simply ate less. There were no salad bars, or bottles of mineral water, or vegetarian options. Not in Northampton anyway. (I’m not 100 per cent sure Hawaiian pizzas have reached there yet.)

But choice only makes you anxious. Ask anyone with 200 television channels. We had it relatively easy. The market was still super, not yet hyper or mega or even mini. The breadth and selection of processed rubbish may have been expanding exponentially throughout the decade that taste forgot, but the only fast food to which we had regular access was fish and chips. And until Mr Cadbury invented ‘fun-size’ Milky Ways, the notion of having multiple chocolate bars
in the house
was a Willy Wonka fantasy. Perhaps, through all that Corona and cochineal we still ate better than our own kids do today. We ate as badly as we could, but within the means available.

I may well be retro-fantasising, but wasn’t there simply more meat in the burgers then? After all, pre-McDonald’s, mechanical recovery was less sophisticated, demand was lower, production was less pressurised and rocket science was still largely the province of NASA, not Asda.

The important thing is this: I ate whatever I wanted for the entire duration of my childhood – except perhaps for that single sordid
escargot
we had forced upon us by cultural bullies as the climax to a middle school French trip in June 1978. I was what I ate. But believe me I loved my food. The description of mealtime in my diaries is always lovingly inscribed: ‘I had a smashing tea, it was the best tea I’ve ever had’ (24 February 1973); ‘lovely tea: cheese sandwiches, pork pie and crisps and fruit cake for afters’ (21 September 1975); ‘lovely dinner and lovely tea’ (12 September 1976); ‘Mum made a really fun flan! eg. flan and real strawberries everywhere + jelly + cream’ (27 June 1980). Lovely!

Whether crap food was better or worse then, I still managed to thrive on it. I was, as we have seen, rarely ill. I was in fact literally full of beans. I was neither especially irritable nor clinically hyperactive. There was no noticeable deficit in
my
attention. Perhaps it was all that fresh air. No, really. Perhaps it’s because there were
no
computer games to keep me indoors, soaking up radiation, making me violent and frustrated. I mainlined colourful processed rubbish and lived.

It’s tempting to nod sagely at the sentiment in the slightly wordy chorus of that excellent Faces song ‘Ooh La La’:

‘I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger.’ But do you really? I’m inclined to say the opposite. I’m rather glad that I went about my childhood business in total nutritional innocence, food unlabelled, E-numbers undisclosed. Quite honestly, it didn’t seem to do me any harm. Except perhaps foul up my teeth and give me asthma. (Do you like the ‘perhaps’?)

Back to that Pam Ayres poem:

If I’d known I was paving the way

To cavities, caps and decay,

The murder of fillin’s,

Injections and drillin’s,

I’d have thrown all me sherbet away

Would I really go back and eat my way through boyhood differently? Cast that floury sherbet to the four winds like ashes scattered at sea? I think not. Texan bars
⁷
tasted so good, and a man’s gotta chew what a man’s gotta chew.

* * *

The trouble with having grown up in the late Sixties and Seventies is that none of the food and drink is around any more. The custard tarts have changed. Walnut Whips don’t have a walnut inside. Welfare orange has been phased out. Whither Kunzel Cakes? Blobs? Dimples? Freddo bars? Those biscuits with stick men playing different sports on the underside?

How are we supposed to enjoy a true Proustian rush? When
Marcel
Proust invented the concept in his novel
Remembrance of Things Past
the object of his nostalgic reverie was a Madeleine – the light, spongy cake French people dunk in tea (‘I raised to my lips a spoonful of the cake … a shudder ran through my whole body and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place’). This wasn’t some vague memory of a cake, it was the cake itself that took his protagonist back.

Of course, Marks & Spencer did their own Madeleine in the Seventies. A typically heavy-handed interpretation, it was a sponge tower with a tablet of apricot-flavoured jelly in the centre, tarred and feathered with adhesive syrup and desiccated coconut. I scoffed a few of those in my time, leaving the jammy bit until last by eating from the bottom up. I’d love to think that eating one now – if only! – would take me back to Saturday teatime.

A la recherche des gateaux perdus
.

Every generation has its food memories, be it bully beef, sugar sandwiches or Outer Spacers.
⁸
Generation E120 had – albeit briefly – Space Dust, a confectionary fad now remembered to death thanks to the nostalgia industry but still evocative for me. It was 1978 and the craze entered my orbit just as our year were setting off for Normandy in France for the aforementioned snail-eating school trip. Space Dust was the big hit of the ferry crossing. We all bought in bulk at a service station, and proceeded to walk around the decks with our mouths agape and our tongues orange, while the crystals crackled away to nothing.

It was like having a campfire go out in the back of your mouth, and was only food in the sense that it was taken orally. More akin to eating something out of your chemistry set. (I never had a chemistry set but I knew the drill: stink bombs, crystals, cupboard under the stairs.) However, with all that I know now and didn’t know then, I’d still have to neck some Space Dust if you magicked a packet up and handed me some. As it snapped and crackled and dyed my tongue with foul tartrazine I’d be
there
, transported back to the ferry (it was called
The Dragon
) – my first time on a boat and
the
first member of my immediate family to leave British shores. A momentous occasion marked by a once-in-a-lifetime sweetmeat.