George Orwell on Why Food Matters

'What's the most important thing in the world?' ...'Food!'

Wigan Pier (photo by Dave Green)

This convenient quote comes from George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a book about the terrible living conditions of unemployed coal miners in northern England in the 1930s.  Orwell's work is half investigative journalism (apparently the adjective 'creative' also applies), half social critique.  The first half of the book, the creative-investigative part, contains several memorable depictions of awful food.  Thirteen years after I read the book for a British history class, I still remember the tinned milk and the filthy boarding house.  The book also comes to mind when I read Virginia Woolf's Room of One's Own - I think because both Orwell and Woolf paint such powerful pictures of how physical misery paralyzes human endeavor (whether literary genius or simple work ethic).

All these concerns - bad food, social conscience, humanity's future - connect to more recent work on modern global food issues, such as Michael Pollan's books or Professor Brownell's food psychology lectures at Yale.  Yet even though I can quote Orwell saying, eighty years ago, that food is the most important thing in the world, I have a strong suspicion that his underlying logic for why food matters is quite distant from our 21st-century obsession with food.  The two big clues, for me, that Orwell was thinking something quite different from, for example, Michael Pollan, are a) Orwell's obsession with British racial qualities - this is his stated reason for worrying about unemployed coal-miners subsisting on fake tinned food; and b) the fact that none of the food in the book is appetizing - i.e., food itself isn't Orwell's point.  My working thesis is that food is still merely a tool for Orwell, as it is for Virginia Woolf, whereas for us it has become an end in itself.

Orwell uses food to excellent effect.  The first chapter of Road to Wigan Pier, describing the Brookers' boarding house where he first stays in Wigan, is a nauseous tour-de-force setting the sensory tone for the rest of the book.  Orwell deliberately mingles filth and food to accentuate the squalor of the place and its inmates.  No one in the house eats well, but the ones who can't afford the "board" half of room-and-board are the lucky ones.  They eat their own bacon and "bread-and-marg" out of their suitcases, or "packets of fish and chips" bought from somewhere outside.  (Orwell seems to consider this pretty poor eating - but, as with Woolf's food, my sense of taste isn't helping me much.)  The boarding house menu is more varied, but "uniformly disgusting":  it is "pale," stale, formless (boiled potatoes, rice pudding, tinned "steak pudding"...whatever that is) - and filthy.  Orwell finally lets go when the two ends of the eating process meet:  "On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave." (p. 17)

This chapter sets the book's sensory tone (smells, tastes, colours and textures), but its moral tone doesn't match the remainder of Part I.  Orwell openly blames the boarding house proprietors for its condition, perhaps because they are making a living on it.  When he comes to describe similar living conditions among the unemployed miners, however, he is at pains to show that they have no real choice in the matter.  Bad eating is a critical part of his case, because here he admits there is an element of choice at play:

"[T]he English palate, especially the working-class palate, now rejects good food almost automatically. The number of people who prefer tinned peas and tinned fish to real peas and real fish must be increasing every year, and plenty of people who could afford real milk in their tea would much sooner have tinned milk - even that dreadful tinned milk which is made of sugar and cornflour and has UNFIT FOR BABIES on the tin in huge letters." (p. 99)

Besides fake tinned food, the "appalling diet" of the unemployed miner's household consists of "white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes." (p. 95)  Orwell argues that the low-class preference for fake food is symptomatic, and symbolic, of the chronically unemployed miners' lack of hope.  It may be mathematically possible for these families to eat a healthier diet, but it is psychologically unlikely:

"[T]he peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. ...When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty.' There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. ...White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don't nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated..."  (p. 95-96)

These anxieties sound familiar, but why is Orwell worried?  Here is his explanation of what makes food the most important thing in the world:

     "When I was a small boy at school a lecturer used to come once a term and deliver excellent lectures on famous battles of the past, such as Blenheim, Austerlitz, etc. He was fond of quoting Napoleon's maxim 'An army marches on its stomach,' and at the end of his lecture he would suddenly turn to us and demand, 'What's the most important thing in the world?' We were expected to shout 'Food!' and if we did not do so he was disappointed.
     "Obviously he was right in a way. A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion. The Great War, for instance, could never have happened if tinned food had not been invented. And the history of the past four hundred years in England would have been immensely different if it had not been for the introduction of root-crops and various other vegetables at the end of the Middle Ages, and a little later the introduction of non-alcoholic drinks (tea, coffee, cocoa) and also of distilled liquors to which the beer-drinking English were not accustomed. Yet it is curious how seldom the all-importance of food is recognised. You see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market-gardeners...
     "So perhaps the really important thing about the unemployed, the really basic thing if you look to the future, is the diet they are living on." (p. 91-92)

For Orwell, food matters because it shapes bones, fuels wars, and determines national character.  Whether or not one accepts the racial logic (my question is, how does it differ from modern genetics?), Orwell's food is firmly anchored in history.  No ahistorical evolutionary food chain here.  Even the attraction of cheap sweets is explained in social, not evolutionary terms.

It's really quite interesting how Orwell's worries in 1937 do, and yet don't, map onto 21st C global health worries.  Orwell's idea of a healthier diet is familiar-looking:  get away from tinned food, eat brown bread, eat more fruits & vegetables and drink water.  "Nutritionism" is notably absent from his vocabulary, but he notes the lack of color (pale, grey, black) in food as a sign of dietary deficiency.  Yet Orwell's underlying concern is British racial (and moral) degeneration, which suddenly jerks us back to the 1930s.  The reason why the unemployed prefer empty-calorie foods is portrayed differently, too.  From Orwell's perspective, eating healthy is simply unattractive.  It isn't "tasty."  The documentary Food, Inc. (2008), on the other hand, makes it clear that the problem today is not just taste and habit, but cost and availability.  The empty-calorie diet is not only easier and tastier, it is cheaper.  Healthy eating can be financially impossible.  (Prof. Brownell makes the same point in his Lecture 8, discussing the irony of obesity in slums.)  The point is that government spending on health education isn't enough to change a population's eating habits - and Orwell already realized that.