Imperative cooking: dangerous mummies
THE beef on the bone episode is a clear warning that we cooks and eaters are not going to be left alone. Food has been a quiet backwater until now untouched by politics. The plans for a huge state bureau- cracy, the Food Standards Agency, and the proposal to license all food 'outlets' mean an end to our peaceful pleasure. Think, for instance, of how many dishes might be banned from restaurants by zealous state officials on the grounds of health and safe- ty. 'The health of the public', especially undergirded by the precautionary principle to err on the side of safety, could see off anything from proper mayonnaise to fresh cream and oysters. Indeed the Agency's police could be supportive and proactive and suggest to restaurants which dishes might be safest and, since their remit includes nutrition, healthiest.
Diarrhoea and other food hazards used to be thought a largely personal affair. Food was thought to be a matter of plea- sure and any ill consequences were accept- ed either as accidents or the fault of the insufficiently cautious customer: 'How silly of me to eat those mussels raw in a restau- rant I didn't know.' How silly of me. The zealots pushing for the Agency come from the Left; several were on the extreme Left in their not-so-distant pasts. They hope that the Agency will reveal the true culprits of diarrhoea and other ills as the evil food industry, farmers, advertisers, vested inter- ests, free trade — in short their old enemy, private enterprise. Correspondingly they assume that they themselves, consumerists and politicians will emerge as the protec- tors of public health.
There is another side to this as well. The victims of home-cooked food malpractice are overwhelmingly women — because women make up the majority of food cus- tomers who are `missold' dodgy food in shops — and children plus assorted oldies. It is an attack on the weak and the vulnera- ble by the powerful and the ruthless.
The lefties may, however, be in for a sur- `How do we get him to stop chewing things?' prise, compared to which the banana skin of the beef ban is trivial. What if the Agen- cy did a study, as it has been urged to do, to identify and root out the weakest parts of the food chain, those parts responsible for both food contamination problems and nutritional imbalance problems? And what if the villain turned out not to be the high- tech food companies or even the farmers but mummy in the kitchen?
Here is a 'food outlet' bigger than any other, the chief and final source of inno- cent children's food, and it is entirely unli- censed. There is considerable evidence that if anything is to be banned it should be mummies; and if anywhere should have a `condemned' notice slapped on it, it should be not the supermarket or even the restau- rant but the domestic kitchen. Lazy buying habits, bad storage habits, ignorance or neglect of storage lives, careless reheating, lack of knowledge or discipline in feeding children: there is a catalogue of domestic villainy waiting to be found. And a slogan: `untrained'. Why, these mummies are being allowed to have total control of the feeding of 'our children' (children become 'our' when public health scares are organised) with no training at all. Proper training and `quality assurance' are basic demands everywhere else. They are even more important where young, innocent lives are at risk.
Not only are mummies untrained and their quality unassured, they have no prin- ciple of accountability. Indeed they sabo- tage accountability. In their kitchens stands the fridge, the source of so much contami- nation. And they allow anyone to use it, to browse through it with hands unwashed, move things about, disturb storage time- checks, create a havoc of ignorance. Ask any mummy questions on which, when, how long, who took, what with, about her cen- tral stock and she is speechless.
And what will happen when the Agency talks to its fellow police in Health and Safe- ty and finds that these mummies run homes which account for far more 'accidents' than any factory? These homes are stuffed full of boiling kettles, sharp knives, burning hobs, scalding taps, misplaced heavy saucepans that fall on toddlers' heads. Any properly 'prioritised' intervention must surely tackle the home. Now lefties don't mind invading the sanctity of the home in the name of the public good, especially to protect our children. There is nothing they like more, as the child abuse saga continues to show. But that is to arrest and denounce men — selfish, strong men — not gentle mummies.
Well, it is, or will be, their problem not mine. I expect they will blame the school curriculum and lack of 'resources'. They might set up `support groups' or encourage the mummies to come to collective cook- ins of rice and beans or offer subsidised knife-blunting services. But none of it will make up for the shock of finding that the wrong person was to blame for our runs.
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