After a short break, VB are pleased to welcome the return of regular contributions from Daft Old Duffer. Ed
I’m a bit puzzled by the way everyone is blaming the burger and crisp manufacturers for all the blubber waddling around these days
Like many of you, I was dragged up during the war years between 1939-45 and as far as I can recall, my diet consisted in the main of fat and sugar and salt.
We had plenty of fat
Whenever mother acquired some beef for our Sunday dinner we ended with a pudding basin full of beef fat. Absolutely delicious spread thickly on bread and coated with salt.
Neither pig nor sheep fat was so good cold. But hot, as part of a roast dinner, they were equally wonderful. While a bacon sarny composed of a slab of white fat, thinly veined with streaks of reddy-brown was perhaps the best of all.
And of course the spread scraped so thinly on our bread was margarine. Fat by another name.
Sometimes fat for afters too
Whenever Mum had accumulated sufficient stale bread and some raisins we feasted on bread pudding in which fat displayed itself happily.
Either in little sprinkles of white too small to bother about, or large lumps we tended to remove. Unless we noticed them too late to stop shoving them in our grubby mouths, in which case we shrugged and swallowed regardless.
After a while Winston Churchill let us kids have some ice cream either from Walls or Lyons. This came in the form of white blocks usually sucked from between wafers.
But my very favourite way of eating it was to douse it into a glass of Tizer and eat the half melted result with a spoon.
An unbeatable mix of sugar and pork fat then.
A spoonful of sugar helps ….
Sugar I also devoured as great heaped spoonfuls in tea or cocoa, as sugar sandwiches, syrup sandwiches, condensed milk sandwiches.
What I don’t remember eating – or even seeing – was anything green. There was sometimes some nasty smelling cabbage to leave on the side of the plate. But that was about it
And fruit? What was that?
Where does that leave me?
Following on this dreadful diet, if we believe our present day experts, I should have been vastly obese, diseased, prone to a life of coughs and flu and doomed to an early death.
Instead, following a youth spent playing rugby, running cross- country, cycling mile upon mile and swimming like a fish. I yet have no need of false teeth, walking aids, help to dress or do the housework.
It’s not the fault of food
The inescapable conclusion – it hardly matters a damn what we eat. For our digestive system can cope.
It’s what we do in between meals that counts.
And in the days of my youth not many had any choice about that Work was hard and long. Starting at 7am and stopping at 6pm only when no overtime was on offer, men shifted loads without benefit of fork lift truck or mobile cranes. While at home, their wives scrubbed and swept and cooked minus vacuum cleaner, washing machine, fridge or food mixer.
So that’s where all the fat and sugar and salt went – burned up to keep our body temperature up and to load lorries, warehouses, assembly lines, wash boilers and shopping bags.
We simply had no time to get fat.
Image: Dan Century under CC BY 2.0
