Class, cuisine, and catastrophe: The food divide fuelling a global health crisis

Words: Andrew Kenny

Photo credit: British Vogue April 1st 1977Eric Boman.

The working-classes prefer white bread to brown bread, have a lot of sugar in their tea and don’t like salads. I have seen this clearly in South Africa and in England, over the last fifty years, in towns, factories, shops, streets and restaurants. This highly significant class difference has enormous consequences for growing ill health among the working classes worldwide and yet, as far as I know, Karl Marx, who was obsessed with class, never mentioned it once. (I know why, and shall explain below.)

In all my free viewing on the web, I have only once been interrupted by an ad that I found interesting. I watched this one beyond “Skip” until the end. It was part of a campaign called Chew on This, which is trying to stop the marketing of junk food for children. Its Episode 3 was entitled, “How is Big Food stalking our children?” It claims that highly processed junk food with lots of refined sugar and salt is damaging the health of millions of children. True. It also claims that “Big Food”, meaning the big food manufacturing corporations, are deliberately targeting children. True, but they are not doing so to wreck the children’s health but to boost their profits, which is always the aim of any capitalist. Usually, this aim results in a better outcome for producer and consumer. In this case, it does not produce a better outcome for the child consumers. Chew on This suggests that children are naturally drawn to healthy foods, but that Big Food has perverted their appetites towards sweet, unhealthy processed foods. Untrue. Children are naturally drawn to sweet things, as any mother will tell you. Just watch little children in a supermarket; they have little interest in healthy vegetables and huge interest in chocolates, sweets and crisps. As a young child, I had a continual craving for chocolates and cakes, and regarded the main meal as a hurdle to be overcome on the way to the pudding. Big Food just encourages this early unhealthy appetite. The result around the world is a pandemic of obesity and diabetes, especially among the lower classes.

We have just moved from Fish Hoek to Kleinmond, a little coastal town 33 km west of Hermanus. In new surroundings you notice things you hadn’t noticed in your old surroundings. For one thing, when you look at the racial geography of Kleinmond, it is hard to believe that apartheid died 30 years ago; indeed it is hard to believe it died at all. Kleinmond is divided north and south by a main road, about 3.5 km long. To the south is the sea, and this area is almost entirely populated by whites, mainly Afrikaners. To the north are the mountains, and this area is populated by blacks, coloureds and whites. In the west is a black township of shanties and low-cost housing; this extends to Harbour Road below it. From there to about 11th Street (the streets run north and south) is the coloured township of Proteadorp, consisting mainly of low-cost housing. From 11th Street to 2nd Street and beyond to Middelrivier Street on the east is where the white people live in houses varying from well-off modest to mansions. The separation of the races seems almost absolute. Roughly speaking, the further to the east you live, the richer you are. In South Africa, race and class are quite closely matched. Since most blacks are working class, their eating habits are similar to those of the white working classes.

The racial divide is stark, but race relations here seem much better than they were in Fish Hoek and surrounds, where I have spent 40 years of my life. Everyone here is much friendlier, and crime levels are much lower. I feel safe here, which I never did in Cape Town. But you cannot help noticing not only the division in race but the division in class – and the division in food.

On the west side of Kleinmond above the main road, it is difficult to get brown bread, and almost impossible to get wholewheat brown bread. To get it, you have to go to the east, to Spar in the shopping centre. Shoprite has opened a new shop in the west end, where there is plenty of highly refined white bread and no wholewheat brown that I have seen. Shoprite has a genius for understanding the market, and so this selection of breads must reflect consumer tastes. We live in 7th Street near the mountain, where the shops in the west are somewhat closer. Once or twice, feeling hungry, I popped into the fast-food shops there looking for a snack that was not very sweet and did not contain meat. I found nothing.

I am acutely conscious of being a right little middle-class prig when it comes to food. I make a big point about being a vegetarian (I gave up eating meat and poultry 54 years ago as a gesture of solidarity with the animals we abuse) but I still eat fish and eggs, even though I have seen the hideous deaths of fish on the hook and in the net, and know of the suffering of egg-laying hens. My youthful cravings for sweet things have fallen away, which I think is a usual experience, and now I never consciously eat anything sweet (although I know the manufacturers put sugar into all sorts of food) and I drink tea without milk or sugar. But I am conscious that when a hostess asks how I like my tea, I say “No milk, no sugar!” a bit too loudly.

I drink tea by the pint. I learnt this habit from the workers of a Manchester mill where I was on shifts for four years. (The further north you go in Britain, the worse the eating habits. In the north of England they love the “chip butty”, which consists of a refined white sandwich or a bun filled with fried chips and flavoured with a lot of salt and tomato sauce – now unfortunately called “ketchup”. Scotland is even worse, and I am told some of the inhabitants have fried Mars Bars for breakfast.) The Manchester workers all had pint mugs, which they called “pint pots”. They would put several spoonsful of tea leaves into the mug, pour boiling water over them, and then add about six spoonsful of sugar and a lot of milk. They would drink about a gallon of tea a shift. I did the same and still do, but now without the milk and sugar. I am very fortunate in having a poor sense of taste and smell, and so food has never been important to me. It is easy for me to eat only what I am told is the healthiest food. But for most people it is rather difficult. Without being influenced one way or the other, they, especially the working-classes, tend to choose unhealthy food. Big Food preys on their unhealthy instincts. Dieticians and nutritional experts, such as Tim Noakes, appeal successfully to the middle-classes to shun sugar and refined foods. These two opposite forces widen a class gap in food, but the gap exists naturally. Why?