I thought I’d met posh people before I came here, but actually I’d just met people who eat olives.
Jess Phillips, Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley. HoC speech, January 2019.
A number of years ago I helped my Aunt design a menu for a casual get together. We needed a list of non-confrontational dishes for a dinner that would appease a difficult part of the family, her twin sister and husband, who were resolutely resistant to gastronomic innovation, and who would likely take umbrage at any uppity kitchen behavior. No asparagus, no broccoli, nothing that would smack of social climbing, like laughably better-than-thou artichokes, or fancy foreign aubergines. Chicken with carrots and peas it was to be, with a daring, cheeky lemon sauce (NO GARLIC!) to poke fun at but not incite class tensions.
Innocently, I offered to bake some bread to sop up the gravy. When it came time to hand it round, I explained that it contained olives. An icy chill enveloped the table. “I’ve never had an olive, and I don’t think I’m going to start now,” said my Aunt, the difficult one, relying on the downward consciousness of the assembled company to endorse her refusal to cross class lines. Immediately I knew that I had accidentally thrown down a gauntlet, a test of working class pride and intransigence, to tempt my albeit distant family to lighten up a bit and get over the war. It was 2001, after all.
To an outsider, the language of vegetables in the UK is not easy to speak. It is a minefield of class prejudice that a certain segment clings onto, despite demographic and sociological changes that have otherwise broadened the vocabulary and regularized the pepper and the courgette, for instance. The olive belongs to a class of food that typifies a tension held dearly by a section of society, in that it connotes the GnT drinking middle class munching on foreign delicacies before they crack open a tray of Waitrose quails in aspic. Too rich and hoity toity for the likes of us.
If my parents never ate olives, and they absolutely didn’t, why o why would I expect culinary curiosity from an Aunt and Uncle who were even more aggressively unadventurous than my Mum and Dad. (My Dad died without ever tasting rice, presumably because that was his brand of patriotism.) My naivete struck me in the face like a wet cod, certainly not like a wet langoustine. I felt the full force of happy ignorance, and its moral disapproval of curiosity.
Although the landscape has changed, and the mainstreaming of food items has encouraged experimentation in exotic cuisines and ingredients, the olive remains symbolic of an intransigent class divide. And although I have been gone from England for over 35 years, I would hazard that every Brit could compile a list of what, to them, is on one side of the line and what is on the other. To the outsider, the idea of a codified fruit and vegetable snobbery, inverse or otherwise, is ridiculous. Yet everywhere has its own food snobbery; here in California, how hilarious and socially ostracizing to suggest opening a can of peaches. So an understanding of olives is essential to an understanding of British politics, as they are currently playing out. Watch Jess Phillips’ olive speech in the House of Commons last week to see what I mean.
Back at the dinner table another of the guests, the husband of a cousin, piped up, “Same with me, with cherries. Never had one, never will. Too much bother.” Suddenly, it was a race to the bottom, and the flag of what was socially appropriate had been seized by the people representing 1945. My poor little apple and cranberry tart, what smug missile would they lob at it? Would it be the ditch I would die in?