I wrote last week about my Yorkshire grandmother’s wartime cookbook. I was thinking as I wrote about the ways the urgencies of war accelerated changes in British domestic life. The demand for women of all social classes to take paid work while men fought necessitated the provision of daycare for pre-school children. Technologies of war soon found peacetime uses in domestic appliances and architecture. Food technology born of crisis shaped the ultra-processed foods and ready meals that in turn shaped the sicknesses of three generations.
I was also thinking about what might have been. Because the British government thought it obvious that women who were working full time could not also be expected to cook for everyone every day, there were communal, subsidised canteens in many workplaces, of the sort that survive in much of the rest of Europe, and also diners called “British Restaurants”. These were state-subsidised, obliged to meet specified nutritional standards and to use produce from British farms. Prices were capped, and staff guaranteed a living wage. They lasted into the 1960s.
A long time ago, I visited a friend’s parents in northern Spain. My friend’s mother was a teacher, and returned from work lugging bags of textbooks and students’ work to grade. But she was also, carefully, carrying a brown paper bag holding foil containers, and when I went to help she said take ‘that to the kitchen, please, it’s dinner’. ‘From school?’ I asked, and she told me that the school kitchens prepared food for the students at lunchtime and also to sell at cost price to parents and teachers for dinner. I was dismayed; I hadn’t come to Spain to eat school dinners. No, she said, it’s good, you’ll see.
It was good. Not restaurant food, but unpretentious home cooking from raw ingredients in the local tradition, chosen to tolerate cooling and reheating. My friend made a salad and afterwards we went out for ice-cream.
Let’s put a real kitchen in every school. We could use some of the Apple taxes
Give me wartime food advice over the maddening dietary diktats of today
I don’t need a smartwatch to tell me how rested I am when I wake up
For seven years, I slept four or five hours a night, rarely for longer than an hour at a time
I know it can’t happen here, though school dinners are coming and there’s a campaign to bring public diners back to Scotland. But imagine if we decided to use some of the Apple taxes to put a real kitchen in every school.
Let’s imagine these same kitchens reopening in the evening for community dining. Maybe the school dining room is pleasant enough for adults
Imagine if we could pay people who like and care about cooking to work in those kitchens. Imagine if we could pay Irish farmers to grow fruit and vegetables and supply well-reared eggs and dairy and – if you must – meat to them, perhaps the produce supermarkets won’t take. Maybe imagine cooking well from raw ingredients as part of the curriculum in those schools. Let’s have vegetable gardens, orchards and – go for it – hens at the schools too. (Schools in Denmark and Iceland do, so the weather is no excuse.)
Imagine that the menu is determined by what the farmers deliver that week and the preferences of the community. No pork, in some places. Probably good to have a vegetarian option, something gluten-free. But it’s like going to someone’s house for dinner – within reasonable limits you get what you’re given, what the land gives.
Imagine if these community kitchens are making good food, so that not only do we not have to spend the rest of the week trying to compensate for the ultra-processed crap now served in some Irish schools, but we look forward to eating it ourselves after work; to not having to choose between the work of cooking and the health consequences of ready meals and takeaways.
Imagine a collective decision to use taxes to save money by making nourishing food affordable rather than treating the consequences of its scarcity.
And now, while we’re about it, let’s imagine these same kitchens reopening in the evening for community dining. Maybe the school dining room is pleasant enough for adults.
Maybe people who would otherwise be reluctantly alone for the evening can come to the community diner and eat with their neighbours; let’s address loneliness as well as poor nutrition. Maybe people who are trying to stay away from the pub and can’t afford a restaurant can meet their friends there. Will we have a special table for people who want to sit quietly with a book? One for small children and their parents, and another for folk who really don’t want to watch anyone putting food anywhere but decorously in their mouths?
Maybe not. Maybe the point of this fantasy is that we all eat together, and well.
