Dont you find it ever so fitting that margarine came about in order to support a geopolitical struggle involving people killing each other? Excerpt: George Orwell declared that his strongest memory of the latter half of the First World War was not the slaughter but the margarine. “It is an instance of the horrible selfishness of children,” he wrote in his 1940 essay “My Country Right or Left,” “that by 1917 the war had almost ceased to affect us, except through our stomachs.” He underlined the moral relationship between bad food and bad character in Down and Out in Paris and London. “You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine,” he wrote, “is not a man any longer.” Orwell is scarcely the only writer to have been scarred by the butter substitute — the literature of postwar England is greasy with margarine. In 1919, D. H. Lawrence gratefully wrote to a friend, “The butter is a great kindness, for I sicken at margarine.” Evelyn Waugh, in his memoir, A Little Learning, recalls with distaste the “milkless cocoa and small pats of margarine and limitless bread” at boarding school. And W. H. Auden, who was also in school during the war, remembers reaching for a second slice of bread and margarine, something that was permitted, only to have a master acidly remark, “Auden, I see, wants the Huns to win.”
Posted on: Thu, 08 May 2014 22:27:40 +0000
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