][1]This blogger has been reading The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain by the writer Ian Jack.
It’s a series of essays looking at the various factors which have shaped the modern day UK.
One of the pieces, called Revolution on a Plate, lists the first times that Jack ate certain foods. Born in the 1940s, his experiences mirror the huge changes which have swept the British diet in the last sixty years.
From eating his first banana at the age of six to eating a curry at the Taj Mahal on Gibson Street in the Sixties, it’s a fascinating account of just how much variety is now available compared to earlier decades.
No-one would blink at seeing an avocado in the supermarket now but in 1968 the nobbly green fruit was hugely exotic.
This blogger grew up in the Seventies and Eighties when much of the foods that Jack considered novelties has become commonplace. It’s hard to imagine doing a similar list to Jack’s because we are used to having a huge array of different foods available to us.
Jack remembers eating his first sweet and sour pork at a restaurant on Shaftesbury Avenue in 1961. Perhaps the equivalent now would be to try and remember the first time that you ate sushi.
Do any readers remember the very first time that they ate a specific food? What was it and where were you?