During the summer holidays of our pliant youth, my mother would drive my sister and me to a Pick Your Own Strawberries field. Armed with a paper bag containing tablespoons of sugar, we were lifted onto the farmer’s commercial scales. Weight established, we were let loose among the lines of fruit while my mother settled under a tree with a lurid bodice ripper. After a long, warm, and scented afternoon of creeping along the plants to pluck the best of the berries and dip them into the sugar - for the crunch, not the sweetness - we would stagger back, stained and sated. Deposited anew upon the scales, the farmer would make a theatrical show of just how much heavier we had become. In a performance both of them directed at us, he and my mother then noisily negotiated a suitable price per the extra poundage he assured her we had greedily consumed, before we were driven home, both sides content in the outcome, and my sister and I silenced by a surfeit of strawberries.
It was all a good deal more relaxed than current family visits to amusement parks, where hysterical screaming and empty wallets are the outcome of pricey rides and nourishment provided by lurid snacks in foil sacks.
In the last five decades on both sides of the Atlantic, the marketing of junk food to children remains largely unregulated. Driven by the increased consumption of fast food, in the US, the calories from eating out have almost doubled from 18 percent to 32 percent, a figure that should have featured as an element in what used to be the Food Pyramid. This was a design to guide consumers to healthy eating but abandoned in 2005 for being outdated, not to mention incomprehensible. Some new visual might usefully reveal the reverse - just how much consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables has declined in the US and the UK, with less than a fifth of adults in Britain meeting the recommended 5 daily portions of fruit and veg.
Between the early 1990s and 2020, the British government published almost 700 obesity policies. Yet in that time, there was no reduction in obesity nor in health-related inequalities between the different strata of society. Governments are fearful legislation will drive up food costs, reduce competition and consumer choice, and irritate the wealthy industrial food complex that finances their election campaigns, effecting jobs and driving down growth.
In 2022, over one billion people worldwide were living with obesity, says the World Obesity Federation. Since 1980, obesity rates in women have more than tripled globally, quadrupled in men, and increased tenfold in children and adolescents. The marketing of junk food to children remains self-regulated in the US, so perhaps the figure is not surprising. Although food marketing isn’t entirely unregulated in the UK, there are so many loopholes in the law that regulation surrounding it has become too complex to implement effectively. Despite this, in the last two decades death from heart disease has declined, in the US by 77 percent and in the UK by 30 percent. In the US, this is in part because of the ban on partially hydrogenated vegetable oil and artificial trans fats, rare in British foods. However, 100,000 premature deaths annually in the US have been attributed to the government’s failure to restrict sodium in processed and restaurant foods.
You might weigh on the upside the fact that while most processed American foods are curiously sweet, just 10 percent more refined sugars are consumed there today than back in 1975. Sorry to reveal this: it’s only because in the US the addition of sweetness contrived from High Fructose Corn Syrup, scarce in Europe and the UK, has rocketed. A sugar tax is levied against soft drinks in the UK and other countries as part of a drive against childhood obesity. But in the US, only a handful of American cities actually apply a ‘sugar tax’.
Since 1975, the price of food in the US and the UK has increased disproportionately as a result of inflation. In 1975, a groceries shopping basket would have cost $74.99 in the US. Today, according to officialdata.org, that same basket would now cost about $414.43. The UK’s Annual Report of the National Food Survey Committee records the average expenditure on food per person per week increasing from just under £2 in the first quarter of 1970 to just over £4 in the last quarter of 1975. In 2025 in the UK, the cost of food consumption at home per person per month officially is £135.70, so much less than I spend buying carefully.
The price of milk then and now provides a simpler comparison, though the complexities of pricing food today and accounting for inflation make it hard to give an exact increase in its real price. In 1975 in the UK, to Drinka Pinta Milka Day cost 6 old pence (the equivalent of 2p). Today, it’s 95p. My reckoning say that’s an increase of 1483 percent over 50 years, which with my maths skills I wouldn’t dream of contending could possibly be correct. In the US in 1975, one pint cost 40-60 cents. Today’s pint costs around $3.92 - about 880 percent higher. (On the accuracy of both sums, I defer to the loyal Tabled reader who regularly keeps an eye out for exuberance in my calculations and will report back his anticipated corrections.)
In other changes, since the 1970s we’re eating a third less beef, although twice as much chicken and a quarter more pork. That advertising campaign's contention that ‘the other white meat’ is more healthy has clearly had an impact, despite the fact that pork is scientifically classified as a red meat. And we really don’t want to go into what chemicals go into chicken, do we.
While Walmart sells a quarter of all groceries in the US, the organic sector accounts for 15 percent of all fruit and vegetables bought. By contrast in the UK, all organic products including meats, grains and more as well as fresh produce, account for a mere 1.4 percent. Fresh vegetable consumption has remained stagnant in 50 years, in both the US and the UK. On the other hand, 50 years ago, nothing we ate would have been bio-engineered. Today in the US the majority of corn, soy, and canola is.
It’s all very well to say we should all eat more fruit and veg, pulses and legumes, and less meat. But there is slowly growing media coverage of a rapidly approaching global water crisis. Kearney, a global business management consultancy, has reported on the water crisis in Beijing, where freshwater availability per capita is far below the ‘global water poverty’ mark. Given China’s global significance and its impact on food security and supply chains, the report calls for urgent attention to Beijing’s crisis.
How will we cultivate the rice, the grains, the fruit and vegetables we need when already scarce supplies of water are being diverted to increasingly greedy data warehouses to cool down their databases? Supplies will become even more challenged as we embrace the charms of AI.
I’ve no proposals, I’m afraid, nor have governments who only look ahead to length of their terms of office.
Next week I promise to bring greater cheer to Tabled. Meanwhile, to tide you over, here is a photo of a summer familiar: a quiche. I haven’t given a recipe because you can probably make one with your eyes shut. (If you can’t and would like one, say so in Comments and I will post one.) What I do want to pass on is some ‘elevations’ that have made a significant difference to the quiches I have baked over recent summers.
First, the pastry. I’ve settled on this recipe as by far and away the best. It doesn’t get soggy and it’s deliciously ‘short’.
225g/8 oz plain flour
½ teaspoon salt
65g/2½ oz butter
65g/2½ oz lard (NO substitutes - it’s NOT optional)
1½ tablespoon cold water
1 egg white
Sift the flour and salt together, add the butter and lard cut into small pieces and rub until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs. This can be done in a food processor. Tip into a large mixing bowl and stir in the water with a table knife until everything starts to stick together. Bring together into a ball, turn out on to a work surface lightly dusted with flour and knead once or twice until smooth. Roll out the pastry thinly and line your chosen pan. Chill for 20 minutes.
(A new trick I came up with: I recommend heavily greasing your pan then lining it with greaseproof/parchment paper to make it easier to lift your quiche out once it’s cooked. Rub your hand assertively over every bit of the paper, making it stick to the pan base and sides. Then pull the paper up and out then reverse it into the pan, pressing it onto the bottom and up the edges. This way, you’ve properly buttered both sides with one single action.)
What you fill your quiche with is up to you. The Italians have a wonderful concept, the ‘svuota frigo’, or ‘fridge-emptier’, to create a filling that saves vegetables and bits on saucers from the bin. But whatever you decide yours is going to be created from, may I urge you not to use whole eggs, as is the conventional instruction, but only the yolks. Save the whites for meringues, which this recipe reveals are a doddle to make. Also, go for cream instead of milk unless you’re under heart observation. Yolks and cream make a richly sumptuous wobbly custard, not a solid medium that imprisons unmoving ingredients.
One of my most popular svuota-frigo quiches is this one, quite a grand one stuffed with confit duck leg and garlic sausage.
1 leg and 1 breast of Confit de canard
6 gésiers (confitted duck gizzards) (optional but I promise you they’re not revolting)
2 Toulouse or other garlicky sausages, cooked and cooled
100g/3½ oz Cantal cheese (or Cheddar or hard cheese)
5 egg yolks
225g/7½ fl oz crème fraîche or light cream
¼ teaspoon grated nutmeg
freshly ground black pepper
1 large bunch flat-leaf parsley, leaves only, roughly chopped
1 clove garlic, peeled and finely minced
Remove the skin and bones from the duck and shred. Peel and shred the gésiers. Slice the sausage into 1¼ cms/½ inch slices.
Grate the cheese. In a jug, beat the yolks with the cream and season with nutmeg and pepper. Add the parsley and garlic and whisk in well.
Scatter half the cheese over the pastry base then distribute across it all the meats. Scatter over the remaining cheese. Gently pour the cream mixture over all.
Set on a baking sheet and bake 20 minutes at 190C/375F then lower the heat to 180C/350F and cook for 20 minutes more. The custard should wobble but not be wet, so check after the last 15 minutes, giving the pie tin a wriggle. If the edges of the quiche are browning, tent the pie with foil.
Cool 5 minutes then lift the quiche out by the parchment paper to a plate to serve, on its paper or with it removed.
So interesting. We keep detailed monthly records on our spending and have been ASTONISHED at how much our food has bill increased. We have started cutting back. And forget nonessential treats like almond butter, that are just too expensive now. But I won't give up on organic butter and eggs.
Wow Julia. So many insights - particularly stunned by the organic stat for the UK. Why are the British unaware of the importance of organic food? Lack of info on pesticides and their dangers in the British media?