Dear LPG, 

I watched some of the horrid things eaten in Australia every year by the celebrities that become ‘Get me out of here’ contestants.  I often find myself turning the trials off because just knowing what they are attempting makes me ill. 

But just watching got me thinking about the foods I don’t like. Even though I will never be considered wealthy or famous enough for a paid trip to Australia, I have concluded that while I have tasted some of the more exotic but generally acceptable world foods, there are many generally accepted foods that I wouldn’t even put near my mouth! 

When I think back to the food I ate as a child and compare it with what is available to the normal pallet today, I cannot help but marvel at how eating it and cooking it has evolved.  As a child, eating your greens was what my parents insisted upon. While I remember compelling my children to do that too, I think that it is so much easier for people to move so much further afield from where they were born, which has resulted in most people, no matter what their nationality, having a much broader pallet these days. Still, for all that, there are some foods that you will never find me anywhere near!

I remember my mum having to make everything from scratch every night in the 1950s when there were no freezers and post-war rationing, whereas I had a freezer in the 1970s, which made it easy to prepare two or three dinners and freeze half for future meals. Then came the 1980s, when I recall the rise of the ready-made frozen TV dinner. Still, many of us are now embracing cooking again, albeit with the assistance of a relatively expensive box of pre-selected ingredients delivered to your door.

One thing featured more than any other is all the food adverts, magazines, and television food shows available to us now, but we all need to eat. Another aspect that has always bothered me is how the celebratory chefs who judge all the television food competitions know they have chosen the best when making their decisions, and why we all watch despite never getting to taste what they are judging. Can we truly judge by the appearance of the dishes alone?

All this got me thinking about how we, and as one who had lived in England all my life, I have to talk mainly about the British people, ever managed to eat our way to 21st-century survival.  Have you ever wondered what our ancestors used to eat and how they prepared it before there were recipe books and food science?  There are many pictures of people eating, but the details are often about the people, not the food.  

According to the Internet, the first recorded set of cooking recipes was found on bits of pottery in Mesopotamia. The first English Cookbook, written based on a set of notes left by the cooks of King Richard II, was published in 1780. The recipes date back to the late 1300s.   

I googled the age of the world, which is about 4.5 billion years old. I am no mathematician, but that leaves a lot of years when what we used to eat was never recorded. So, we must continue to guess what was eaten before that. This still leaves me with nightmares about some of the foods my forefathers (and mothers) ate, which have contributed to my makeup … 

KE, Deptford 

KE shares what she found…

(►►►)   (►►►)