Michele Verroken

Winston Churchill took time out in July 1940, with German invasion barges gathering across the Channel, to tell his own Ministry of Food that a vegetable diet would lose the war. On 14 July, three weeks after France fell, the Prime Minister wrote to Lord Woolton, the department store boss he had kept on as Minister of Food, about what the British were going to eat. He started on the meat ration. Then he turned to the experts. Almost every food faddist he had ever known, he wrote, the nut-eaters and their kind, had died young after a long period of senile decay. The British soldier was far more likely to be right than the scientists. "All he cares about is beef." Then the line that should be framed in every food ministry in the world. The surest way to lose the war, he told Woolton, was to push the British public onto a diet of milk, oatmeal and potatoes, washed down on special occasions with a little lime juice. He was writing to a ministry that was about to discover the cartoon vegetable. Potato Pete and Doctor Carrot would soon be selling roots to children from the hoardings, Dig for Victory was turning lawns and parks into allotments, and meat was rationed by price, so the less you could afford the less you got. The planners wanted bread and potatoes to carry the nation. Churchill wanted the nation to have its beef. He fought the small battles too. In 1941 the ministry proposed calling its new state canteens Communal Feeding Centres. He wrote back that it was an odious expression, suggestive of communism and the workhouse, and renamed them British Restaurants, because everybody associates the word restaurant with a good meal. A man who would stop in the middle of a world war to rescue the word restaurant had his priorities in exactly the right order. The ministry got its vegetable dinner in the end. That same year the kitchen of the Savoy produced the dish that carried the minister's name: a pastry lid over potatoes, cauliflower, swede and carrots, thickened with oatmeal. Woolton pie was pressed on the country as proof that a family could manage perfectly well without meat. It contained two of the three foods the Prime Minister had named as the way to lose the war, which suggests nobody at the ministry read his memo past the word beef. The pie is remembered most fondly by people who never had to eat it. Eighty-one years after that memo the vegetable plate came back, without a war to excuse it. In 2021 Henry Dimbleby, the restaurateur appointed to write Britain's National Food Strategy, asked the country to cut its meat consumption by 30% within ten years. Woolton pie recipes now circulate as the sustainable option, the meatless plate has become the policy, and it is the beef that has to justify itself. The man who actually had to win the war, with the U-boats sinking the convoys and the Luftwaffe over the Channel, looked at the evidence and concluded that a nation fed on oats and potatoes would lose its nerve before it lost a battle. With the invasion barges in sight, the Prime Minister put in writing that oatmeal and potatoes were the surest way to lose a war. They are now sold as the surest way to save the planet.