Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

"Pig," wrote the gentle essayist Charles Lamb, in phrases ardent as a lover's whisper, "is no less provocative of the appetite, than he is satisfactory to the criticalness of the censorious palate. The strong man may batten on him, and the weakling refuseth not his mild juices."

"Oats!," snorted cantankerous Dr. Johnson in his famed dictionary, "a grain which in England is generally given to horses."

Bustling Dr. Edith Summerskill is neither an epicure nor a literary giant, but she too has had her say about the British diet. It was Dr. Summerskill who, as Parliamentary Under Secretary to the Ministry of Food, helped introduce whale meat and snoek to British markets as substitutes for juicy roast beef and mutton saddles. "I thought," she had the grace to admit then, "that I would be politically finished," but her British constituents managed to forgive her.

Last week Britons were considering another Summerskill attack on the British breakfast which might be less easily condoned. Oatmeal, she seemed to be saying, in flat contradiction of Charles Lamb and Dr. Johnson, was not only a substitute for the provocative pig, but an improvement on it.

"I have always recognized," Dr. Summerskill told a Market Research Society meeting in London, "that there is one thing the British housewife longed for, and that was to get back to bacon & eggs. I am sure," she admitted, "that every man here longs for a nice big juicy steak." But such yearnings, she insisted, were in reality nothing but an anachronistic hangover from the days of arrant capitalism when "meat was an index of prosperity," when men "ate steaks [because] it was the thing to do, like wearing a white stiff collar . . ." Enlightened Socialism "had established new feeding habits showing themselves in the decreased morbidity rate, the decreased mortality rate."

"It is possible," concluded Dr. Summerskill from the depths of her dietetic vision, that a day will come when "many people in this country will have become accustomed to cereals they never ate before."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.