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Milk, bread, bloaters and right-wing politics: Sunday's food quotation

The law requiring pasteurization of milk in England was a particular target of Uncle Geoff's. Fond of alliteration, he dubbed it the "Murdered Milk Measure", and established the Liberty Restoration League, with headquarters at his house in London, for the specific purpose of organizing a counter-offensive. "Freedom, not Doctordom!" was the League's proud slogan. A subsidiary, but nevertheless important, activity of the League was advocacy of a return to the "unsplit, slowly smoked bloater" and bread made with "English stone-ground flour, yeast, milk, sea salt and raw cane sugar.

Wherever he went Uncle Geoff carried stacks of copies of his letters to the Times and Spectator, together with printed directions for preparing unsplit, slowly smoked bloaters and home-made bread. My mother gave wholehearted support to his ideas on health, to which she added a few of her own. Not only were we strictly forbidden to eat any tinned food, but adherence to Mosaic diet laws was enforced as rigidly as in any orthodox Jewish household. Pork, shellfish, rabbit were proscribed for schoolroom fare on the grounds that Moses had considered these foods unhealthy for consumption by the Israelites, and because my mother had a theory that Jews never got cancer.

1978 Jessica Mitford, Hons and rebels (Quartet Books) p. 29