SOME ODD SOCIAL CHANGES are recorded in the Annual Report
of the National Food Survey Committee (making its leisurely appearance twenty months after the end of the year, 1957, to which it refers). Who would have thought that the only people to eat more potatoes would have been those with an income of more than £1,500 a year, and that their consumption would have gone up by more than 25 per cent.? The reason, I have seen it hazarded, is that these are the people with the leisure, or the servants, to do delicious things 'to potatoes (after all, EscOffier lists fifty ways of cooking them); poorer, or busier, people get bored with having to peel the beastly things. Once upon a time I would have been surprised that agricultural workers eat less butter and more margarine than anybody else; but 1 have eaten at a farmers' ordinary, put on specially for the rich buyers and sellers of fat cattle, and been offered tinned soup, processed peas, margarine and imported cheese, so I no longer expect the English peasant or the English yeoman to eat the fruit of his labours as all other peasants and yeomen do. Incidentally, this report is the responsibility of the Ministry of Agricul- ture, Fisheries and Food. Wouldn't it save time and typesetting, without any danger of ambiguity, if this department now became the Ministry of Food, simply?
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