If You Think School Lunch is Bad Now…

When I’m deep in research and writing mode, I like to head to the Wellcome Collection library in Euston. There’s something about it that just gets you in the zone in a way that I can’t at my local library. You can’t bring in bags or jackets or even a water bottle; you have to decant your laptop and any books, paper, and pens into a shopping basket that you carry to your desk through electronic barriers that you need a card to tap in to. Everything else gets left in a locker. Everyone in there takes themselves a bit too seriously; a lot of medical students and researchers. You can request materials from the rare materials room but it’s by appointment only and they have pillows and foam bolsters to prop the old books open. You’re not allowed to talk in there except on Thursdays. 

The collection has a lot of rare and unique materials (ergo why you can’t bring anything in with you), and my inner nutrition nerd can’t help but rummage around the stacks for relics of the past. Like the 1991 dietary reference values book that I had to battle it out with my classmates for the university’s only copy when I was an undergrad (now fully disgusted ofc). Or, The Bible, aka McCance and Widdowson but also a book of McCance and Widdowson lore. Or Elsie Widdowson’s PhD thesis on apples or just a big old box of McCance and Widdowson’s stuff. The stacks sometimes turn up gems like this 100 year old diet book – boldly titled Girth Control – which is depressingly similar to diet books of today. 

Once, I felt brave enough to make myself an appointment in the rare materials collection so I could showdown with Alice Ravenhill, the ‘mother’ of Domestic Sciences in the UK, which then became the applied discipline of nutrition and dietetics. If you’ll recall, she was an opp – a card carrying member of the Eugenics Society – and we can trace the troubling ways nutrition and dietetics privilege a certain type of body and way of eating to these sentiments of ‘population hygiene’. While the contents of the book were deeply troubling, the actual book itself was incredible to see; different articles and journals, some in different languages, bound together with a hand written index. Here are some photos I took; looking the book up online you’d never be able to tell what the book was like irl. 

The last few times I’ve been to the Wellcome it was to research last week’s essay on Abolishing The Family Meal. I was flipping through a book called Slice of Life, the British Way of Eating Since 1945, mostly looking for intel on the British Restaurants I covered in the essay, but I kept getting distracted by all kinds of little nuggets of history. There was one in particular I wanted to share with you about this, errr, recipe(?) for a school lunch developed by the School Medical Officer for Glossop that makes Turkey Twizzlers seem kind of quaint and nostalgic.