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Afternoon Reading: The British at Table

Afternoon Reading: The British at Table: Episode 3

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The British at Table

Episode 3

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Christopher Driver's thoughts on the evocative and bizarre language of food description.

By Christopher Driver.

Christopher Driver's thoughts on the evocative and bizarre language of food description.

Christopher Driver was a passionate writer, broadcaster, second-hand bookshop owner, conscientious objector and controversial hand-picked successor to Raymond Postgate as editor of The Good Food Guide through the 1970s. His descriptions of our changing attitudes towards what we allowed to grace our plates between the end of rationing and the affluent 1980s, and caustically witty observations of the marvels of British catering (such as the waitress who uncorked the wine with her teeth), made both informative and amusing reading. It is, as he said, "a book about the way we eat now in the light of the way we used to eat within middle-aged-memory. It is about ourselves as shoppers, cultivators, cooks and consumers." 

Driver saw the shape of food to come thirty years before the rest of us and his accuracy is extraordinary: "The march of regulation and technology means that to obtain good bacon it will be once again necessary to kill and cure your own pig, as in the eighteenth-century. Progress takes odd forms." 

It is sixty years since Postgate (known as "Public Stomach Number One" after founding his "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Food") first published the Good Food Guide. Here is an opportunity to enjoy part of its history in the words of its most eloquent editor, revealing everything from the lost world of whale steaks, coypu vindaloo and sweet and sour barracuda, to the language of food description that embraces such evocative phrases as "the flavour of unploughed fields" and "the texture of compressed string."

Read by Tony Gardner
Abridged by Neil Cargill


Producer: Neil Cargill 
A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.

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Christopher Driver's insights into British attitudes to food. Read by Tony Gardner

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