Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑Wed Apr 28, 2021 11:15 pm
I can see how a long history of urbanisation might lead to forgetting culinary history, though.
I thought people were saying "No the UK hasn't forgotten its culinary history, it's just that British women are too busy to cook."
If the argument is "British people have forgotten their culinary history, because of sexism and the way it interacts with historical materialist processes" then fine, but I don't see why it's snobbery to say so.
Or is it some other third thing?
I'd like to think that, in the future, societies will be able to have interesting culinary heritage and women's liberation simultaneously - is that achievable, and if so how?
No, I don't think anyone was saying that, were they?
Certainly, when I raised the point, it was intended as a reason for the UK forgetting its culinary history, not as an argument that we hadn't. And it was only ever part of the problem - a large part of the reason for supermarkets becoming so ubiquitous and powerful, which has definitely been a major factor in losing our heritage but not the only one.
I think woodchopper's point about urbanisation is also an important one. It fits with my own family experience too (so obviously, it must be true, anecdote being the most important evidence
). No-one in my family history has been a city dweller but most of my mum's side were town dwellers since around the turn of the 19th century and the men were carpenters, cabinet makers, blacksmiths - skilled trades with no connection to food or the land. My dad's side on the other hand never lived anywhere bigger than villages and the men worked on the land, ag labs or gardeners, right up to and including my grandad. The women on both sides either didn't work or were domestic servants. So the men will have been growing food and the women will have been mostly at home cooking for the family. They were poor and so the food they could grow was a large part of what they ate. Food culture has been traditionally passed down through the female line but I got diddly squat from my mum (unless you count my love of parkin, thanks to her first teaching job being in Yorkshire, or the rum butter her aunt in Cumbria used to send us every Christmas). My love of good food is almost entirely thanks to my dad - he was the better cook though only cooked on Sundays, and grew fruit & veg, did the shopping at the greengrocer for such veg as he didn't grow, made jam and occasionally chutney, passed on his love of apples fresh from the tree and Kentish cob nuts. He was also a big enthusiast for the cheaper and more obscure cuts of meat, including offal, although he hasn't quite managed to pass that on to me. I bl..dy love oxtail though, thanks to him.