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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast and our special pre-Christmas edition.

I'm Sam Neith, Literative of the Spectator, and my guest this week is

Pen Vogler, the food historian whose new book is Stuffed, a history of good food and hard times in

Britain. And it's full of, well, as we'll find out, full of all sorts of Christmas he thinks,

as well as all sorts of good food. Penn, welcome. Now, Stuffed has a kind of double valency in your title.

And I would start by asking you a bit about what the...

There's this huge, wide-ranging social, cultural history.

But what was it setting out initially to sort of address?

So Stuffed is the kind of two... the good and the bad of our food system.

The good, there's the good stuffed where you've had a nice meal,

you're stuffed pleasantly, hopefully, full of food

and feeling kind of good about the world,

or your larder is stuffed full of food,

and you feel that you can approach the winter season, you know, with equanimity.

And of course, the bad stuffed is the opposite is when you have no food, no choices,

you've run out of road. And really what I was trying to do is think if we're all kind of aspiring

to the good stuffed and yet so often historically people have ended up being stuffed literally because of pandemics or wars or the plague or because of, you know, a cost of living crisis, all those things that sound really familiar to us today.

And really I wanted to figure out how historically people have thought about those kind of, you know, those kind of

inequalities and what responsibility people have taken for it. So what's the, you know, if you're

...