Date of Release: 31 October 2002
For immediate use
Goodbye Mr Chips public school to make a meal of classic reference book
Pupils at a school famed for its association with one of the best loved 20th century movies will get a taste of wartime rationed food on 4 November. The pupils are to be fed a lunch that would have been an all too regular sight for young and old alike during the dark years of the Second World War.
They will be served a main course of thinly sliced corned beef, carrots, cabbage and mashed potatoes, followed by a baked apple in watery custard. Brown bread ground at a renovated medieval watermill will be served. Good clean tap water will wash down the vitamin-packed meal.
The menu was set in October this year by the celebrated 86-year-old food writer Marguerite Patton, a war time government food adviser who has maintained a high public profile in the decades since the war. A contributor to the television programme The 1940s House, she remains a prominent authority in the field of food and health.
The event, to take place at The Leys public school in Cambridge, has been set up to promote the publication of the 6th edition of a classic science book called The Composition of Foods. On hand to maintain order will be a soldier in 1940 uniform; also there will one of the editors of the book, from the Institute of Food Research in Norwich.
First published in 1940, one year into the war, the book has remained essential as a reference work for food scientists and people who require facts about the nutritional values of foods. Much of the book - being published by the Royal Society of Chemistry - is comprised of tables of statistics which today may appear mundane, but when they first appeared after painstaking research in the 1930's, they were acclaimed as a radical and welcome addition to our health and welfare. Today they form the basis for all nutritional labelling of foods and are essential for dieticians to develop nutritionally complete eating plans for people with diabetes and other chronic diseases.
The scientific partners Dr Elsie Widdowson and Dr Robert McCance produced the book following exhaustive research and analysis, the depth of which become the stuff of legend.
Elsie Widdowson even went to the lengths of injecting herself to test nutrition levels of certain foods and soon after the war's start she and McCance lived for weeks in the mountains eating a diet which they thought the British should consume during the conflict to maintain basic health.
The Government adopted many of the McCance and Widdowson recommendations and today's websites cover their achievements comprehensively. Many experts are of the opinion that the public have never before, or since, been healthier than it was during the years when the war diet held sway.
The Royal Society of Chemistry asked The Leys School if it would be able to convince its pupils that a wartime meal packed with vitamins would be acceptable. Dr David Giachardi, Chief Executive of the RSC said: "To its credit the school jumped at the opportunity. It was very opportune because some of the pupils are currently studying The Home Front as an aspect of the war."
The school, in Cambridge city centre, was the model for the bestseller Goodbye Mr Chips, which was made into a Hollywood film in 1939, winning British actor Robert Donat an Academy Award for his performance as the eponymous Latin teacher turned headmaster Mr Chipping, whose lengthy career takes in the First World War and whose life is touched by the deaths of hundreds of his former pupils.
British writer James Hilton, who also wrote Lost Horizon and Random Harvest, was a pupil at The Leys and built the character of Mr Chips on the former head of classics there. Men Behaving Badly star Martin Clunes is now performing the role in an ITV film in production, due to be broadcast next year.
Citation:
Food Standards Agency (2002) McCance and Widdowson's The Composition
of Foods, Sixth summary edition. Cambridge: Royal Society
of Chemistry. Compiled by Mark A Roe, Institute of Food Research;
Paul M Finglas, Institute of Food Research and Susan M Church,
Food Standards Agency.
For further information contact:
|
Jo Belsten BSc |
Tel: +44 (0) 1603 255 218 |
Notes for editors:
- The mission of the Institute of Food Research is to carry out independent basic, and strategic research on food safety, quality, nutrition and health. It is a company limited by guarantee, with charitable status, grant aided by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).
- The Royal Society of Chemistry is the Learned Society for chemistry and the Professional Body for chemists in the UK. With 46,000 members world-wide, it can trace its history back to the Chemical Society founded in 1841. The Society is a major international publisher of chemical information, supports hundreds of chemical meetings a year and is a leader in communicating science to the public.
-ENDS-
The information and images contained within these pages are © Institute of Food Research unless otherwise stated. Information may be downloaded for educational and research purposes as long as the source is clearly credited.
