Healthy Eating Edwardian Style
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 5 April 2019
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Elsa Richardson uncovers the early history of the wellbeing industry and introduces Eustace Hamilton Miles, a diet guru who made his name selling health to Edwardian Britons. Reformers promoted the ‘simple life’, one that emphasised fresh air, exercise and the consumption of ‘sun-fired’ foods such as wholegrains, fruits and vegetables but this ‘simple life’ was also a highly profitable enterprise.
Elsa Richardson teaches on the history of the emotions and is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. The Essay was recorded at this year's Free Thinking Festival with an audience at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio
Producer: Zahid Warley
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's |
| 0:27.5 | out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.3 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:37.0 | Hello, I'm Rana Mitter, and I'm delighted to be introducing this short talk recorded at BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival. |
| 0:44.0 | Elsa Richardson teaches the history of the emotions, and she's a Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. |
| 0:50.2 | She's a new generation thinker on the scheme, which the BBC runs with the AHRC. |
| 0:55.7 | I don't know how many of you here are aware of Philboid Studge. |
| 0:59.9 | It's a breakfast serial invented by the Edwardian author Sarky, |
| 1:03.8 | and it's the subject of one of his funniest short stories. |
| 1:06.7 | And that question of eating healthily back in the early part of the 20th century is pretty central to what our speaker today has to say. |
| 1:15.9 | So could we welcome our speaker today, Elsa Richardson, to talk about healthy eating Edwardian style? |
| 1:26.6 | When I was a student in Glasgow, I worked weekends in a health food shop near the university. |
| 1:34.1 | It was quite a large store, more of a supermarket, really, with wooden shelves stocked with |
| 1:39.3 | bags of nuts and dried pulses, fridges stuffed with tofu and live yogurt, and a deli counter selling bean |
| 1:45.8 | burgers and vegan cakes. There was a section dedicated to Musley and another to healthy treats |
| 1:50.8 | like sugar-free gummy bears and carib chips, jars of unsalted peanut butter and agave syrup, |
| 1:57.5 | packets of fair trade coffee and boxes, oh so many boxes of herbal tea. At weekends, |
| 2:05.1 | the shop would fill with a mix of wealthy ladies clutching yoga mats, wholesome looking families |
| 2:10.4 | doing their weekly shop, fitness fanatics bulk-bying spirulina powder, and haggard-looking |
| 2:16.4 | students trying to undo the excesses of the |
... |
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