I think the rot set in with food fads. How far back do they go? I have no idea, but it seems like centuries now. Have you ever noticed how common it is for those soulless eco warriors or proponents of any other cause that involves having more miserable self-flagellating lives, and all enforced with a remorseless addiction to legislation and compulsion, are associated with some sort of ostentatious self-flagellating diet regime and boring food?
It’s over 30 years since I set out on a motorcycle tour of England to take photographs for one of my first Roman history and archaeology books. One day en route I was cold, tired, and hungry. I stopped at a transport café somewhere in the West Midlands. I ordered the full works: eggs, bacon, sausage, fried mashed potato, tomatoes, baked beans, and ketchup.
The food exploded inside me like a nuclear tornado. I felt invigorated, alive, overwhelmed with a glow of optimism and the sense that the day was mine. Washed down by mugs of tea, the breakfast had transported me to paradise. I felt like an Olympian. Indeed, for a few hours, I was. It reminded me of a week on RAF camp as a cadet in 1973.
What’s more, it’s a utopia you can recreate any day of the week.
Who are these absurd celebrity restaurateurs with their ridiculous micro meals no bigger than a stock cube inserted into the middle of plates the size of truck wheels and prices to match? Have they or their patrons ever experienced fried mashed potato saturated with thick yellow egg yolk? I’ll bet they haven’t because if they had they’d have abandoned their holy cause on the spot.
For my money, such a full English breakfast feast can only be matched by sausages with cauliflower cheese, a couple of jacket potatoes and more beans, topped off by mustard.
With their own morale sapped by the food they eat, it’s no wonder that activists of our time have become enveloped in a cloud of millenarian despair and desperate to force everyone else to share in their self-denial.
So, this Xmas in the pit of Labour’s self-inflicted doom and hair-shirt vision of the future, with the shadow of JSO and its cohorts of miserable eco legionaries bent on turning us back to the Middle Ages before the world ends, and the proscriptive rules on car and boiler sales looming, sit down and have a monster breakfast fry-up.
And while you’re at it, watch the newly-colourized version of Sink The Bismarck on Youtube: a proper film with proper actors, a proper story, and a proper script – and, apart from the Kenneth More character, essentially a true one. When the battle’s over, he and his female assistant set out of course across Trafalgar Square for a monster breakfast.
You’ll feel overjoyed and buoyed up. The future will look rosy, and everything will seem possible. Indeed, it probably is.
So, pass the ketchup and Merry Xmas one and all.
Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian. His books can be found here.
This piece was first published in The Daily Sceptic, and is reproduced by kind permission.
If you enjoy The New Conservative and would like to support our work, please consider buying us a coffee – it would really help to keep us going. Thank you!
The first food fad I can recall was sometime in the 1970s (pre1978) when ‘experts’ announced the brown dye used in kippers and ginger biscuits was potentially carcinogenic – sales collapsed overnight – but in those days people still heeded the words of ‘experts’ and kippers were a staple for many. Now everything is either a wonder food or carcinogenic, and sometimes both at the same time, plus constantly changing from one category to the other (eggs), a cynic may wonder if the ‘experts’ have any more expertese than those who predict the future….
Taking quite a few bed and breakfast walking hols from April to Sept I usually take a full English breakfast in a morning which sustains me through the day, apart from eating some fruit, until an early evening meal – delicious.