Book Reviews: Stuffed; Silent Spring

STUFFED

A History of Good Food and Hard Times in Britain

Pen Vogler

Atlantic Books                      pp453                                        £22

The Godfather; Back To The Future; Beverly Hills Cop. Favourite movies demand a sequel, often more eagerly anticipated than the original. But in many cases they can be awful. Jaws: The Revenge; Basic Instinct 2; Grease 2. So be careful what you wish for.

Pen Vogler, it must be said, has a track record of combining diligent research into food history with the ability to produce work as readable as any fine novel, Scoff, reviewed here in 2021 is a food book which should be on anyone's shelves. I was delighted when Atlantic Books announced that a new Vogler was in the pipeline. I made sure it hit my shelves promptly in 2023. Why then so long for the review to appear?

The simple answer is that the reading has taken a long time. It pains me to tell you that this is more Jaws 2 than The Godfather Part 2. Appropriate but sad to say it's been like walking through treacle.

Pen is a very fine historian, and the research is exemplary - over 50 pages of End Notes and Bibliography. In the early sections there was quite a bit of the sort of food trivia which I love - the origins of the baker's dozen, for example, or the impact which a chef from a prestigious London club had on army catering a couple of centuries ago.

Then the buts start. I'm really not a great nationalist when it comes to reviewing, but the subtitle really should say England instead of Britain. Huge emphasis is placed on the English Enclosure Acts. Then consider her generalisatons about "British" diet. If you go back to its fundamentals, Pen tells us, the food of people in these islands is a hunk of beef and a pull of beer. Not this side of Hadrian's Wall, I would suggest.

Turnips? Trying to do a Burns Supper, she discovers by accident that ours are different to hers. Oatmeal? A promising sounding chapter with this heading very soon becomes a history of the Co-operative movement. An important topic to be sure, but her chapters have a regular habit of going off piste. Sometimes a section heading is pushed to breaking point. Take Sharing, for example. We are told that this is what we are really doing when we go out to eat. Sorry, but I know that the idea of a communal table is an absolute no-no for most of you. But, she insists, this is what is likely to account for miraculous feasts, from The Feeding of the 5000 (OK, I'll give you that one) to the miracle of today's street parties. Whit? The only miracle is if no one dies of food poisoning.

A chapter on pumpkin pie morphs into a discussion which rambles from Thomas More's Utopia through to Marx and Engels and Churchill's British Restaurants of the Second World War. I can discern the latter thread, but not its links to the regular Thanksgiving Day dessert. I could continue, but you get my drift.

Sorry to be negative, Pen, but Stuffed disappointed and bored me in equal measure.

 

SILENT SPRING

Rachel Carson

Penguin Modern Classics                     pp309                                            £10.99

If you're of an age, remember attempts at horror in the 1960s: if you're too young, do some research - and laugh yourself silly. Quatermass? The Day of the Triffids? Won't cause you any nightmares. Yes, the Daleks were a bit scary first time round, but a lot of Doctor Who featured stage hands trying to hold upright swaying plasterboard sets. For some real horror, read chapter one of Silent Spring, entitled A Fable for Tomorrow.

We are in a small country town in the heart of America, where all is harmonious. Then a strange blight came over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled...mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens: the cattle and sheep sickened and died...The doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness...by sudden and unexplained deaths.

There was a strange stillness. Birds had disappeared. On farms, hens brooded but no chicks hatched. Pig litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom, but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollenation and there would be no fruit.

She continues, describing roadside vegetation withered and brown; lifeless streams where all the fish had died, and a layer of white granular powder which had fallen like snow on roofs and lawns.

And the cause of this curse? No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.

Silent Spring was written in 1962. By that time agricultural chemicals had been common place for the better part of two decades since the war. Testing of chemical weapons had swiftly disclosed their efficacy as insecticides. They were swiftly embraced in a society where increased food production seemed desirable.

Carson was the first to go public in pointing out the horrendous impact this was having on our ecosystem. The now banned DDT was insecticide of choice. But if you were a farmer, there was a problem. Proving Darwin's theories, the insects rapidly developed immunity, requiring the use of ever more potent drugs. Sometimes, paradoxically, this resulted in what was known as flareback, a tripling or quadrupling of the insect numbers. The solution? Ever more quantities of ever more lethal chemicals.

Carson pointed out that these intended insecticides did far more than kill pests. They got into the crops themselves, and therefore into the human food chain. Nursing mothers passed them on to their babies. Underground springs and rivers carried them far from the site of their original use.

As you would expect, the chemical companies attacked her, by fair means and foul. They denounced her as a crank; as someone unqualified to understand the science (though she was a trained biologist); and even worst of all in their eyes, as a woman. They threatened litigation to prevent publication. Paradoxically this brought her more publicity.

As these criticisms were raging, she was suffering from an aggressive and misdiagnosed form of cancer. Despite that, she went very public. Her speeches, pointing out her independence - in contrast to those vested interests who attacked her - and her measured televison appearances facing up to, and answering all her critics, won massive support. When she declared, for the first time in history, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals from the moment of conception until death, America and the rest of the world listened. By the time of her death in 1964, this (eminently readable) book had sold over a million copies.

Probably more importantly, she won the ear of John F Kennedy and Congress. The President's Scientific Advisory Committee was ordered to undertake an examination of the subject of pesticide misuse. DDT was banned not that long thereafter.

You may ask why I'm reviewing a book of this vintage. Many reasons. Food experts ever since have cited it as an important influence on them. See, for example, the interview with Andrew Whitley of Scotland The Bread in this column a couple of years ago. A more prosaic reason is that I just found a copy and read it for the first time. It is a remarkable work. Not for nothing did The Times describe it as, one of the very few books truly to have changed the course of history.

In the sixty odd years since Silent Spring first appeared, many have taken up Rachel Carson's mantel and run with it, praise be. But if matters ecological and environmental are of concern to you, read this book for yourself. The events in The Fable of Tomorrow hadn't come to reality in their totality in Rachel's time, but might easily do so if we become complacent. A small change in the behaviour of every one of us may still be a force for good in protecting our planet.