YouSaid · the spoken record

Pen Vogler

lines on the record: 32
first: 2023-12-17
most recent: 2023-12-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The health service and never be advised about diet, for example. And I know that might be changing a tiny bit now, maybe not quite enough. But that dissociation between food and health starts to happen in about, I'd say probably about the 16th century, when people start going, oh, you know, let's eat, let's grow turnips because turnips are going to produce enough food for animals and the animals are going to kind of make us, you know, we're going to then have meat and we're going to, that's going to make us rich as a nation. And so this idea of food being an individual thing, something you ate for your own personal health starts to change and it starts to become, you know, what's good for the kind of nation's health, what's good for us as a kind of empire, what's good for us as a kind of colonizing power. And that obviously, you know, is much more about economy and less about the individual.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, exactly. And so we do have, you know, we do have imported variety and we're very lucky, you know, we have a huge amount of variety, but there is a cost to it. You know, it has made us more food insecure as a nation. And it has also taken us a little bit further away from the understanding, those ideas about food and health that you started asking me about. And I think actually that dissociation between the idea that what you eat is Your health is dependent on what you eat, which was a sort of mantra, you know, of kind of medicine right up to the present day. You could go through.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sorry about that. Yeah, yeah, okay. So Just pick up and I'll just say. I'll talk about sort of feed insecurity and imports, okay? So what imports have given us is a huge amount of variety. We can eat almost anything at any time. What industrial food has given us is something that looks like variety, but actually isn't. It's dependent on wheat. It's dependent on a few very, very small food narrow food crops, you know, wheat, particularly wheat, sugar in its various forms and a few other grains and all the rest of it. So if something happened to kind of the world of wheat, for example, we'd be staffed, you know, if it all kind of succumbed to some blight or something like potatoes in Ireland did in the 1840s. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I mean, we've had it, you know, we've been dependent on food imports for hundreds of years, and it's varied over the 20th century. It was really high before the First World War. It was like 60% of our food was imported. And then clearly that makes us incredibly food insecure as a nation. And after the Second World War, a lot of the kind of pressure on farmers to produce more was because of that recognition that we were very insecure, food insecure as a nation. That's not a good place to be.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You had scarcity, and that would impact the whole, you know, of the food chain. And they understood it. And I think there's a lack of that kind of granular understanding and interest that is really relevant. And so that's what one of the reasons is we kind of subcontract all that thinking to retail, to supermarkets and to industrial food producers. who think about food in a very different way. They think about food, how to produce the most cheaply, and that doesn't as a whole service well.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whatever you want to call them really on the whole understand and respect food. I came away with a much really much higher kind of Better rather idea of how important that kind of passion for food is because you've got to have somebody in society who's defending it for everybody. And just going back to this idea of Westminster, I think that Westminster in some ways today is an area of, you know, where people believe in cloud dogs. They don't know. They don't go to farmers. They don't walk around them, you know. And they probably don't make much food for themselves or their families at home. And so I think that there's a big disconnect all the way up the food chain. And if you look back in the, again, if you go back to the sort of 18th or 19th century, a lot of people, and this again, I'm not proposing this as a we should be returning to this, but a lot of people in parliament were landowners. They had farms themselves. They knew about farms. They understood when you had bad weather.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think we have. If you look at, if you compare two things now, it's often said that the problem with kids is that they don't know where their food comes from. So it's often, you know, and I have a lovely example of a friend of mine who's a trainee probation officer. This is many, many years ago, took some young kids from Bristol to a farm and they'd never been to a out of the city before. And one of them points to a sheep and says, look, cloud dogs. And it's an example of how kind of distant, you know, kids are from farms. And that's often said, and I'm sure that's absolutely true, but I also think in Westminster, we have a huge degree of distance from farms and farmers and people who actually make their own food. One of the things I ended up realizing at the end of this book is that people who make food cooks.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Paying them to produce food that everybody can eat. And then also now the question we really are facing is paying people to produce food that is not going to kind of end up killing us because ultra-processed food is, according to the scientists, is so bad for us. It's a very long running question, really. And yes, and you have to, at some stage, and I think it's beginning to happen now, you have to go, well, okay, who's going to take responsibility to finding the answer in such a complex food system?”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, where you have this very definite sense that people who are, in those days we'd call them agricultural laborers and the farmers and the landowners just wanted them to be available for totally cheap labour, even if they could hardly afford to kind of look after their families themselves because the farmers wanted to sell as much grain as possible. And then you get this ridiculous situation with the corn laws in the early 19th century when we start as a nation start to get threatened by cheap imported grain. And for 30 years or so, there were tariffs to make that grain more expensive because it didn't suit landowners and farm big farmers to be undercut by imported grain. So these questions of how you kind of square that circle of paying people to produce food and then”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With a strawberry thing, I find it quite extraordinary because every Wimbledon, the press starts to kind of go, what's the best strawberry? And they don't say it's this breed or this breed or this breed. They say it's this supermarket or this supermarket or this supermarket, as though supermarkets kind of bred them, which is just a neat image for how kind of dependent we are on supermarkets for our food and how we identify them with our food. But I think really the point, I guess I'm trying to make is that growers are so squashed by them and they have to produce cheaper and cheaper and cheaper food. And what about the people growing the food? You know, if they're not being paid well to produce food, how can they afford to eat well? And this is not just a question for today. This is a question that has been bedeviling us since the early 1990s.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While the supermarkets put huge expectations on farmers to produce food, kind of perfect food, kind of almost Frankensteinian kind of like weird food. So if you look at strawberries, for example, strawberries, because of pressure from the supermarkets, because they sell so well in the summer, sometimes many supermarkets sell more strawberries than any other product over the summer, more than bread, more than milk is extraordinary. So if you look at strawberries, they have been under pressure from the supermarkets. The strawberry growers have managed to make a near kind of perfect berry that doesn't squash, that manages to ripen, that ripens early, you know, that stays late, that is sweet, you know, is soft, it's perfect for us. And that was thought to be almost impossible when people started kind of strawberry growing. And so, which is great. We have lovely berries.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was not enough fruit and veg because there have been terrible weather in Europe. The idea is that the retailer decides who gets what decides on the rationing, decides how that's going to work, decides on the prices. And fixes, there's this strange kind of system that British supermarkets have is that they very early on fix these long contracts with their suppliers. And so they know what the price is going to be. There's no space for it to kind of go up and down. And so I think that, and we feel comfortable with it as consumers, we think, oh yeah, that's normal. That's what happens. But I think it does have a very long, very specific history. And I don't think it's quite the same in other countries.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of farmers and the people who are growing the corn onto the bakers and partly the millers. And so the bakers become these people who have to sort of show that they're adhering to this legislation. They had all these very complicated tables to tell them how big or small their loaf could be. And that worked for centuries. But I think what we've got out of that is this sense that the bakers, and we don't really have many bakers anymore, we do have supermarkets, we've got from that this sense that retailers are the people who are responsible for getting our food to us. And obviously there are exceptions. The Second World War is a major exception, very successful government intervention in kind of food and access to food and also quality of food. But on the whole, if you look back in the pandemic, if there was no, or recently when...”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interesting is that the longest running piece of food legislation ever, bit nerdy this, but starts in about 1256. It's called the Assizes of Bread and the Assizes were kind of county courts. And it meant that everybody got together and said, this is how much a loaf of bread would always cost a penny. You'd get always be able to get a penny loaf and the asises would get together and say, this is how big it would be. So if the price of grain went down, then you'd have a bigger loaf. If the price of grain went up, you'd have a smaller loaf. And it did two really interesting things. It kept everybody quiet. It kept everybody happy. They knew that if you had a penny you could afford to eat, you could afford to eat something. But what it also did is it moved the kind of spotlight about who's kind of making food available to everybody away from the landowners and the people.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People because bread is not the easiest thing to produce, it's actually quite complex, it's quite difficult, it requires the whole community to get on board with it, to, you know, thresh it, grind it, grind the flour, produce the mill, bake it in ovens when you might not have an oven in your house. And so in some ways bread is the ideal thing to control communities because communities need to get together to produce it. Bread was definitely the main staple of the medieval diet. Or the one that everybody aspired to and actually probably an easier because you needed an oven and most people wouldn't have had ovens and an easier thing to eat would be a kind of mess, like we call it now a potage, which would be grains and vegetables, onions, whatever you had around. And it was definitely seen as kind of lower class, lower quality. Bred was what everybody wanted and increasingly white bread. And what was really...”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The period, but I think in some ways the key thing for us is always bread. And since medieval times, the focus has been so much on bread and beer and how you make sure that everybody always has access to bread has been a kind of key part of legislation.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Century means people just don't really want to let strangers into their houses because they might bring the plague. But they might bring these very seditious ideas about equality and rights to other people's food and they certainly don't want that either. And so yes, asking about how kind of people's food changes. I mean, so in some ways kind of that idea of sort of status and food hasn't changed that much. You know, we have this idea that wine is kind of middle class or for the, you know, or for the, you know, the heads of houses or the ecclesiastical abbots and heads of houses and then the beer would be for the kind of lower or water or whatever for the kind of lower visitors eating with the lower monks in medieval times. And so those ideas kind of move all the way through.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were Yes, exactly, exactly. And that's gone on for centuries. And that has carried on for centuries. And this is why, and it's carried on in Britain for centuries. You see that there's a very funny little detail in the Bayer tapestry when you see the Normans being shown feasting before the Battle of Hastings, and they're all just eating meat. You can see the meat being hung up over the fire. And then you can see the Anglo-Saxons who all just drinking. They food in sight. They just had these wonderful kind of huge drinkings horns. And that idea of a British kind of drinking culture seems to have very, very kind of early roots. But it also part of a kind of, there was a hospitality culture with very early kind of medieval roots. And I look at one moment when that probably changes because the plague in the”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's quite a lot of responsibility. People have to come, they have to bring their own food, they have to get themselves there to this kind of communal feasting ground. So I was quite interested in why, and I was thinking about this and the pandemic particularly, why would you do that? You know, it's almost easier just to sit at your own kitchen table if you have one and feed yourself. So, you know, and yeah, so that was my kind of little hop back into kind of neolithic feasts, which should all be about roast meat, roast pork, maybe some early beer, we don't know, but there's a chance barley will just barley will just turn itself into beer if it gets half the chance and it might well have done sort of, you know, 4,200 years by BC or 5,000 years BC.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I was fascinated by, I'm fascinated by the work by the psychologist, Robin Dunbar, who describes what happens when you all get together and you eat and you drink and you might sing and you dance and all the rest of it. And he describes what happens to your body. You get sort of a little kind of physiological lift. It makes you feel good. There's a kind of physiological payback for eating together, which we feel because actually there's also a real kind of downside to eating together. And this is what you see in kind of the kind of archaeological remains of Neolithic feasts or early feasts is that there's obviously quite a lot of violence. You see quite a lot of skulls that have been kind of got little damage to the left-hand side or wherever somebody's kind of like whacked them on the head.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's really interesting. I mean, I start right actually. I basically start in sort of late Anglo-Saxon England because that seems to me the moment when those ideas about kind of like how a community works together and kind of how power gets sort of organized.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think when he's trying to get the government to agree to feed kids in the holiday. And it seems like such a basic thing. And you think, can't we agree on this? Such a tiny thing. And you look at, and so I was really interested in the history of thought behind school dinners and why we're so kind of conflicted about them, why we don't go, yup, kids, they are our future. They will be paying our pensions. They will be signing up to protect us, you know, if there's a war, we need to feed them. You know, why there's so much kind of, or we country and a community need to feed them, why there's a lot of pushback. And I wanted to explore this idea that on the one hand, it's easy to say it's the government's responsibility. And it's also easy to say it's parents' responsibility. And I wanted to explore kind of where the responsibility.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The concept of the army now is that the army feeds its soldiers. And that took a long time to grow because it relies on logistics, it relies on kind of all kinds of very complicated kind of food systems. And I look at that moment in the kind of 19th century when that happened and also a particular moment in the Crimean War in the 1850s when it just failed almost completely. And you had the people dying from nutrition related diseases being nursed by Florence Nightingale and eventually cooked for by this amazing sort of French chef called Alexis Soya. So I look at those moments of kind of war. And then of course kids in the pandemic. So my bookend in a way, the book with this idea that in the pandemic, do you remember the whole Marcus Rashford?”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they couldn't graze. And it's the same in Scotland as well when you have the clearances and you have people, peasants that have been called, you know, living on the Klans people, living on the land with a very kind of settled, hard going, but settled form of kind of, you know, you have this, you have milk and oats and you have, you don't have, you probably don't have meat. they raise little hardy black cattle and sold them to people who could afford to eat the beef but there was a sense that and then there would be somebody kind of you know the laird of the manor we're talking about scotland still you know would be there looking after them so the clearances and the enclosure was a kind of principle they're the heart of my book they're the moment when or the moments when that changes but there are also crises such as wars if you look at the way that the army is the”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's absolutely true about the pandemic. We became very aware of it. And in fact, I was kind of writing my book and thinking about my book through the pandemic. But the first impetus for it was actually what you talked about right at the beginning was the enclosures. So the impetus was that the enclosures meant that villagers had some rights to graze animals, graze livestock. collect firewood, all the rest of it from land that they did not own. It wasn't owned in common on the whole. It would be owned by landlords or owned by the church. But they had rights to it. They had rights of common. And that's why we are commoners, and that's why we have the House of Commons, because we are essentially descended from, you know, people who use the common. And that, although it wasn't one moment, was a massive change because it meant that there's a huge proportion of people working people suddenly stopped having access to protein.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“not being healthy enough to be conscripted for not conscripted but to join up in the army for the Boa War and that caused a huge ruckus in the early 20th century and that's where the idea of school dinners comes from the idea that you actually should start feeding kids because your country needs those kids to be healthy so yes I think there's a kind of there's a sort of double answer is that yes people who could afford it had probably much, much better diets too much meat obviously but you know in the summer when you had sort of fruit and vegetables they would have been much more kind of whole but but also for below a kind of certain level there wasn't there wasn't a sense of most people there wasn't much sense that kind of vegetables was a thing you ate because they were good for you vegetables were the thing you often ate because that's all there was”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was definitely a lot of malnutrition. I mean, you really took depending on who you're talking about at what period and what kind of access they had to money and food. But it's really interesting because if you listen to The Zoe Health podcast today, for example, that all the stuff we've been told about now is to get variety and whole food, this idea of whole food. And so I think in the sense of pre-industrial food, particularly pre-1970s food, Again, you know, with huge kind of caveats because there were terrible problems with adulteration in the 19th century, people's food was”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And really, who took responsibility for making sure that everybody is fed. Because there was a sense, not very perfect, that you had to take responsibility for people locally. And if they couldn't eat food, then something else had to step in, whether it was charity or church or landlords. And again, I say it was completely not perfect. I'm not trying to say that kind of pre-industrial Britain was a haven of equality and lovely eating because it wasn't. But it was a different idea about where food came from and who grew it.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out of local areas to cities because people pay more for it. And the local people would riot and say, no, this is our food. We should be able to have access to it at prices we can afford. And of course it breaks down completely in the kind of following century in when people leave the land and go and work in cities, in industries and in kind of businesses. And so what I wanted to kind of trace was like what food felt like and you know what it felt like to kind of just eat a lot of beans and bread and oats for example. This is you know way before we have kind of chocolate and coffee and things coming into the country.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, if you go back to pre-enclosure, so the enclosures at this long period, the first official enclosures about 1604 carried on until the last official enclosures, the early 20th century. So before then there was an assumption of some kind of kind of community responsibility really for food. And I'm not saying that medieval or pre-modern Britain was a, I mean, it wasn't written in those days, but was a great place to be, you know, there was slavery in Anglo-Saxon times. There was a huge amount of poverty. But there was a kind of general sense that food came from somewhere locally. You could see it and you had a part in it being grown. And of course, you have examples of, for example, in the 1790s when that starts to break down and food is sent.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Historically, there's been too much of people being stuffed because they've lost their food or their jobs or their land or there's a pandemic or there's a war or a crisis. And that's what I wanted to explore is who takes responsibility in those circumstances.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thanks, Alice. It's really nice to be talking to you. Stuffed, it's rather like scoff. It has a sort of double meaning. And there's two different kinds of being stuffed. One is the nice kind of being stuffed. So you've had Christmas lunch or Sunday lunch or dinner or whatever you call it from wherever you are in the country. And you feel kind of pleasantly stuffed. And then you are stuffed when you've run out of road. You're stuffed when there's no good options left when you don't have any choices or all the choices you're presenting with bad ones. And it seems to me that the way we've organized ourselves in this country around our kind of food production, our kind of the way we eat it is on a continuum of those two things, you know, being good stuffed, bad stuffed, and perhaps not quite enough in the middle of kind of being sort of pleasantly fed. There's too much.”
2023-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · Stuffed: Pen Vogler on Britain's Food History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT