My sound or rotten bones

Brave birds and bad bananas

There is a lot of talk currently about Ultra Processed Food. Chris van Tulleken has a new book out with the not-that-much-of-a-reach title of Ultra Processed People, which I have not read. Nor have I read George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier although it is on my guilty list. But because Orwell said clever things about fish and chips, which I’m writing about today, I found a selection of his quotes and wonder why we need new books about bad modern food when Orwell said it so well 86 years ago:

“To begin with, there is the frightful debauchery of taste that has Like already been effected by a century of mechanisation. This is almost too obvious and too generally admitted to need pointing out. But as a single instance, take taste in its narrowest sense - the taste for decent food. In the highly mechanical countries, thanks to tinned food, cold storage, synthetic flavouring matters, etc., the palate it almost a dead organ. As you can see by looking at any greengrocer’s shop, what the majority of English people mean by an apple is a lump of highly-coloured cotton wool from America or Australia; they will devour these things, apparently with pleasure, and let the English apples rot under the trees. It is the shiny, standardized, machine-made look of the American apple that appeals to them; the superior taste of the English apple is something they simply do not notice. Or look at the factory-made, foil wrapped cheeses and ‘blended’ butter in an grocer’s; look at the hideous rows of tins which usurp more and more of the space in any food-shop, even a dairy; look at a sixpenny Swiss roll or a twopenny ice-cream; look at the filthy chemical by-product that people will pour down their throats under the name of beer. Wherever you look you will see some slick machine-made article triumphing over the old-fashioned article that still tastes of something other than sawdust. And what applies to food applies also to furniture, houses, clothes, books, amusements and everything else that makes up our environment. These are now millions of people, and they are increasing every year, to whom the blaring of a radio is not only a more acceptable but a more normal background to their thoughts than the lowing of cattle or the song of birds. The mechanisation of the world could never proceed very far while taste, even the taste-buds of the tongue, remained uncorrupted, because in that case most of the products of the machine would be simply unwanted. In a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned food, aspirins, gramophones, gas-pipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc. etc.; and on the other hand there would be a constant demand for the things the machine cannot produce. But meanwhile the machine is here, and its corrupting effects are almost irresistible. One inveighs against it, but one goes on using it. Even a bare-arse savage, given the change, will learn the vices of civilisation within a few months. Mechanisation leads to the decay of taste, the decay of taste leads to demand for machine-made articles and hence to more mechanisation, and so a vicious circle is established.”

Bare-arse savage!

This does read as the cry of a Luddite, but it is also right in that mass production has levelled out difference and difference in taste and we are poorer because of it. The Cavendish banana, still around though it was predicted to go extinct ten years ago because of Panama disease. The boring Golden Delicious. (Do not search for “apple standardization” unless you want to know a lot about a Silicon Valley company that makes computers.)

In Tamil Nadu, where I went to interview Arunchalam Muruganantham, Menstrual Man, for my book, I learned a lot about periods and sanitary products and how to eat from a banana leaf while sitting cross-legged on the floor. (My sedentary-weakened hips could not manage it and Muruga had to find me a stool.) On the way to visit a small charity that produced low-cost sanitary pads, Muruga stopped to buy some bananas. I don’t much like bananas. They are very good pre-race and pre-running food, perfect for about an hour before you begin, when you have long since digested breakfast but don’t want to weigh yourself down. But I don’t like them. And I don’t like them because they are always the Cavendish: woolly, bland, boring.

But these bananas were different. They were smaller, darker. And they tasted like toffee. They were a revelation and an introduction to the fact that perhaps I did like bananas, I just didn’t like the standardized, denatured Cavendish. I’ve never found toffee bananas since.

And a final thought from Eric.

“A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion....Yet it is curious how seldom the all-importance of food is recognized. You see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market gardeners.”

Or fish fryers. Maybe this is Caroline Criado-Perez’s next campaign, now that we have a statue of a woman — a woman! how terrifying! — in a public place that matters.

(Just kidding, CCP does plenty and doesn’t need any more jobs or to save us all from our patriarchal oligarchal aesthetics.)

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Animal hero of the week

Pigeons again. Because how can I resist telling the story of a pigeon called Tyke (a word that denotes Yorkshiremen but apparently not women), who was also known as George?

Of course he was named Tyke, because he was born in Cairo to British and South African parents. He was at some point (the biography may know his nationalities but it doesn’t record everything) seconded to the Middle East Pigeon Service. The archives of the Middle East Pigeon Service are held at Kew archives, and now I really want to read them. The UK’s National Pigeon Service was formed in 1939. Pigeons were accepted from pigeon breeders — I can’t bring myself to call them “fanciers” — who had a minimum of 20 pigeons who had been trained as homing pigeons.

Stop for a second and consider that word. Homing. Isn’t it lovely? To home. I home, you home, she homes.

Here is a short film about the RAF’s training of pigeons, which is noticeable for the narrator’s ability to use “pigeon English” with no shame.

From the website Pigeons at War:

With the Royal Air Force receiving improved aircraft during the 1930s they were able to conduct operations further than before and for longer. The issue now arose that in case of emergency could a crew get a message back so a search mission could be made to find them? As long as the aircraft was above 5,000 ft any emergency transmission should get through. Below this it was unlikely to and if the aircraft had ditched in the water or force-landed it would most likely put the radio out of action. In the event that the radio did still work there was the issue during wartime that a message being transmitted could be picked up by the enemy so radio silence was essential and another method of communication was needed.

The solution for this came in the shape of the RAF's Pigeon Service, each reconnaissance and bomber aircraft would have a pair of homing pigeons aboard in a specially constructed watertight basket. So in the event of a ditching or force landing of an aircraft the crew's location was written down on a piece of paper and put into a canister attached to the pigeon's leg. Different coloured canisters were used depending on the service using the pigeons. The RAF used three variations blue, blue with a white patch and blue with a coloured disk. The pigeon was then released and would return to its loft where the message was given “urgent priority” and sent to the Air Ministry by the Postal Authorities as a telegram. Once received a search and rescue mission would get underway.

Whilst one of the major factors for using homing pigeons was their ability to find their home loft wherever they were, their speed and range were also impressive. With an average speed of 50 mph it made it almost impossible for them to be shot down by ground troops. So the Germans turned to birds of prey to attack and stop the birds getting their message delivered. The range of a homing pigeon was around 300 miles so a bird whose loft was in the East of England could be released in parts of France, Netherlands, Belgium, the North Sea and the English Channel. At this distance the birds had a success rate of over 86% and in some cases flew further providing their crews with a chance of being rescued and many aircrew would, thanks to these brave birds.

In June 1943, Tyke was stationed on an American bomber — although his citation for the PDSA Dickin Medal states that he was employed by the RAF in the Mediterranean — hopefully in a watertight basket. The bomber was shot down, presumably over land, and Tyke/George was released to find help. He flew a hundred miles in poor visibility, in a war zone, to an RAF airbase, who duly sent assistance for the American crew. The crew insisted that Tyke had saved their lives. I have found no more information about what happened to Tyke, or whether he was allowed to retire gracefully to a comfortable pigeon loft in Yorkshire or Cairo.

Tyke, the Yorkshire pigeon who wasn’t

Should you want to know more about wartime pigeons and their role in intelligence, head to Jennifer Spangler’s exhaustive site, which lists examples of pigeon messages including:

• “They are beaten and tortured to try to make them talk, but they invariably remain mute.  They are brave people.” 

• “Tell your bomber pilots to be more accurate.  Many civilian victims.” 

• “…please let us know over the B.B.C. saying that you will send immediately two other pigeons and quote the coordinates.”

You can also read her book As Me: A Story of Birds, People, the Second World War, and Reincarnation perhaps because “birds play major roles in the story and many sections are told from a bird’s perspective.”

To end, a quote from a book by Garry McCafferty, They Had No Choice, Racing Pigeons At War, in which McCafferty tells the story of a soldier called Tom Milar, and includes the last entry from Milar’s diary, written when he was severely injured while serving somewhere in France:

Things don’t look too good.  I’ve been badly hurt, my left leg has been blown away from the knee. I don’t think I will last much longer as I am losing too much blood.  I’m in the South trench but everyone is dead, there is no movement, only the smoke and the smell. Please tell Mary and the children that I love them with all my heart, I hope they don’t feel bad of me. I can’t write much more. I am weak. I know I will soon be with my Maker.  I am not afraid. I thought I was on my own but a red pigeon has just fallen from the sky and is just a few inches from me. He must be on service too. We make a good pair, I have one leg left, and he is missing a wing.  I will keep him warm, we will go on together, goodnight, God bless.

Tom

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