‘That was partly what I wanted to talk to you about,’ Dorothy continued. ‘We’ve been getting some scare stories from the States. You’ve heard of a drug called sulphadimidine?’
‘Can’t say I have. What does it do?’
‘Well, as far as pig farming’s concerned, it’s invaluable. Absolutely invaluable. As you know, we’ve made enormous advances in production levels over the last twenty years, but there have been one or two adverse side-effects. Respiratory diseases, for one thing: but sulphadimidine can help with some of the worst of these, you see.’
‘So where’s the problem?’
‘Oh, the Americans have been testing it on rats and they reckon it causes cancer. Now apparently they’re going to legislate.’
‘Hm. And are there other drugs you can use?’
‘Nothing as effective. I mean, we could probably cut down on these diseases by stocking less intensively, but …’
‘Oh, but that’s absurd. There’s no point interfering with anything which helps you to stay competitive. I’ll have a word with the minister about it. I’m sure he’ll see your point of view. Tests on rats don’t prove anything, anyway. And besides, we have a long and honourable history of ignoring the recommendations of our independent advisers.’
The main course consisted of glazed loin of pork, with garlic potatoes. The meat (like the quail’s eggs) was Dorothy’s own: her chauffeur had brought it down in an ice-box in the back of the car that afternoon, and she had given the chef detailed instructions on how to prepare it. She kept a small herd of free-range porkers in an enclosure at the back of the farmhouse, for her personal use. Like Hilary (who never watched her own television programmes), Dorothy had no intention of ever consuming the products which she was happy to foist upon an uncomplaining public.
‘These environmentalists get up our nose just as much as yours,’ said Henry, tucking in with gusto. ‘They’ve wrecked the veal trade, for instance.’
This was true: Britain’s largest retail producers of veal had recently scrapped their narrow crates and gone back to straw-yards. In response to public pressure, the managing director had admitted that the intensive system had been ‘morally repugnant’.
‘Well, I shall carry on using crates,’ said Dorothy. ‘We can still export them, after all. Besides, there’s so much stupid sentimentality about veal calves. They really are the most filthy creatures. If you don’t give them anything to drink for a few days, do you know what they do? They start drinking their own urine.’
Henry shook his head incredulously over the vagaries of the animal kingdom, and refilled their glasses of Sauterne. Meanwhile Dorothy was cutting the fat off her meat and carefully pushing it to one side of the plate. ‘We’ve got to watch out for the lobbyists, anyway. I’ve a suspicion they’re going to get more and more vocal.’
‘You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ said Henry. ‘The newspapers are never going to run stories about anything as boring as food production, and even if they did, the public wouldn’t be interested, because they’re stupid. You know that as well as I do. On top of which, most of the data’s protected by the Official Secrets Act. Absurd, but true. And anyway, whenever one of these boffins in white coats starts popping up with some crackpot report, what’s to stop you getting your own people to produce a set of figures which prove the exact opposite?’
Dorothy smiled. ‘You’re right, of course. One’s inclined to forget that not everyone’s as sceptical as you …’
‘It surprises me to hear you say that,’ said Henry, leaning back and loosening his belt with a pleasurable grimace. ‘I’m not a sceptic by nature. If anything I’m an idealist. And besides, I happen to believe most of what the nutritionists are saying at the moment. The difference is that I tend to be heartened rather than alarmed by the social implications.’
‘Meaning?’
Henry paused, absently wiping gravy from his plate with a finger. ‘Put it this way: did you know that over the next five years we were planning to scrap free school meals for more than half a million children?’
‘Not calculated to be a very popular move, I wouldn’t have thought.’
‘Well, there’ll be an outcry, of course, but then it’ll die down and something else will come along for people to get annoyed about. The important thing is that we save ourselves a lot of money, and meanwhile a whole generation of children from working-class or low-income families will be eating nothing but crisps and chocolate every day. Which means, in the end, that they’ll grow up physically weaker and mentally slower.’ Dorothy raised an eyebrow at this assertion. ‘Oh, yes,’ he assured her. ‘A diet high in sugars leads to retarded brain growth. Our chaps have proved it.’ He smiled. ‘As every general knows, the secret of winning any war is to demoralize the enemy.’
The meal concluded with apple-quince bread pudding, smothered in a honey and ginger sauce. The apples, as usual, were from Dorothy’s orchard.
∗
Ingredients: Modified starch, dried glucose syrup, salt; flavour enhancers monosodium glutomate, sodium 5-ribonucleotide; dextrose, vegetable fat, tomato powder, hydrolysed vegetable protein, yeast extract, dried oxtail, onion powder, spices, flavouring; colours E150, E124, E102; caseinate, Eioz; caseinate, acidity regulator E460; emulsifiers E471, E472(b); antioxidant E320.
Once when I was about twenty-five, I came home to visit my parents for the weekend. There were many such weekends during my time at university, but this one stands out because it was then, for the first time, that I noticed how drastically their eating habits had changed since I was a child. It started, probably, when I was eleven and they decided to send me to a fee-paying school. From then on they never seemed to have enough money. My father’s rises in salary were small and infrequent, and I think he continued to wish that they had bought a house in a less expensive area. My mother, at this point, went from part-time to full-time teaching. And yet it was a point of honour with her that there should be a hot meal on the table for us every evening. Increasingly, these meals were starting to come from packets, and in the mid 1970s this process was accelerated when they bought a small deep-freeze which was kept in the garage. My father, far from complaining, had developed quite a taste for this sort of food, partly because it bore a resemblance to the lunches which he enjoyed with his colleagues at the office canteen every day. I remember coming home that weekend and finding that the deep-freeze was stacked with more than twenty cartons of one of the Brunwin Group’s more lethal inventions: hamburger fritters with chips. All you had to do was shove the whole tray in the oven, and voilà, you had an appetizing meal on your plate in about twenty minutes. He explained that this came in very useful on the two evenings a week when he had to cook for himself, when my mother was working late at the school, supervising extra games. I said that it didn’t sound very balanced to me, and he explained that he supplemented it with two more Brunwin delicacies, viz. a powdered soup for starters, and then a strawberry or chocolate flavoured instant whip for pudding.
Ingredients: Sugar, hydrogenated vegetable oil, modified starch; emulsifiers E477, E322; flavourings, lactose, caseinate, fumaric acid; gelling agents E339, E450a; whey powder, stabilizer E440a; colours E110, E160a; antioxidant E320.
All those years, I see now, my father was clogging his arteries up with saturated fats. He would die of a heart attack, not long after his sixty-first birthday.
Does this mean that Dorothy killed my father?
∗
Dorothy’s record of success in pig management was just as impressive. These are only a few of the difficulties she was able to surmount:
1. CLUMSINESS: As soon as she started taking her sows off the earth, away from straw and into concrete stalls, she found that their chain of instinct would be upset: they would become clumsy and often lie on their own piglets while suckling.