My grandmother knew what she was talking about

My grandmother, as a good Victorian, was brought up in a household run with Mrs Beaton’s Book of Household Management as the bible. She always swore, but in a most refined way, that good food meant real food. The supply chain was shorter in those days. You never lived far away from the farms where the cattle grazed or the corn ripened. The milk was fresh from the cow, the butter freshly churned, the bread freshly baked using whole grains (they were lucky enough not to get caught up in the fashion for milling the corn into white flour with all the nutritional problems that caused), and the meat from animals hung after being freshly slaughtered.

As one of the middle classes, she lived on a reasonably healthy diet of protein, bread, potatoes and other fresh vegetables. If she hadn’t had to decant her body into one of those boned corsets that made it impossible to breathe properly and redistributed her internal organs, her life would have been perfect. Although, looked at from another direction, forcing such a narrow waist was a first version of this new wrap-an-elastic-band-round-your-stomach-so-you-can’t-eat-as-much surgery we hear so much about these days.
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