Childhood memories - we're talking 1950s here. For me the memory of shelling peas provides one of those madeleine moments; it was a communal activity - you, your nan, your mum, your sister (no men), sitting in the sun outside the back door; peas into the saucepan, empty pods & haulm on to a sheet of newspaper later to be wrapped up tidily & deposited in the bin
A pound or two of pods, some flat & green, some fat, some warty, sere & yellow. The plump yellow pods usually provided the fattest palest peas & were easiest to pop; the flat, bright green pods were hard to split open, often had to be torn apart, & frequently provided no peas at all, just minuscule seeds which could not be sloughed into the communal saucepan. But they did provide the guilty treat - guilty because you thought you had to do it without your mother seeing - since they, pods & all, were sweet to eat whilst raw; the idea that we should pay a premium price for mangetout lay in the future
Sometimes, most pleasing of all, the peas were fresh-picked from the sun-drenched summer garden, but more often than not they came from the greengrocer or the market. If it had been a wet week a proportion of the pods were slimy & totally unpoppable; then extra sheets of newspaper were required for wiping the gloop from your fingers as you grappled to salvage a usable number of peas from the pulpy mass of their covering
In winter however, vegetables - especially green ones - were both harder to come by & unappetising. Revolting slimy cabbage (why did nobody know how delicious it could be if briefly cooked or lightly steamed? Was it because the ribs needed to be boiled for half an hour to make them tender, the black slimy leaves just the price you had to pay?) Or sprouts, after the first frost had got to them; the varieties we had then needed frost to ameliorate the bitter taste. Given these choices, winter Sunday dinner often relied on dried peas for that necessary touch of green
The blue sugar-paper bag of shrivelled, alas NOT sugar, peas from the grocer usually contained a flat wrapped tablet of sodium bicarbonate. You had to soak the peas in plain water overnight; then the bicarb would, if added during the boiling, restore a pleasing shade of green & stop them from turning yellow & sulphurous; some argued that this came at the price of destroying the flavour
Tasty or not, dried peas were spectacularly fart-inducing, especially in the dog, whose own Sunday treat consisted of the scrapings from our plates - cold roast potatoes (the hard bits), congealed gravy &, overwhelmingy, bullet peas
Then came the day we were introduced to frozen peas. As is the case with so many innovations, especially the convenient ones, they were attacked as depraved, immoral, not nearly as good for you as those communally shelled ones which we had before (from time immemorial). It did not help that frozen peas were the favoured accompaniment to that other invention of the devil which was corrupting our childrens tastes & eating habits - the fish finger. In vain, at least in those early days, did the manufacturers protest the nutritional superiority of peas picked & frozen within hours compared with peas which sat for days on the market stall or in the greengrocers shop, albeit in their pods. Uniformity, green intensity, MUST be less natural, & therefore less good than, the spectrum of variety from fat/warty/yellow to thin/flat/green
But we got used to frozen peas, & fish fingers would now, in some quarters at least, be considered infinitely superior to anything MacDonalds has to offer. Their familiarity perhaps explains why they are now faintly out of fashion. On the other hand it may be just that the difficulty of eating peas, in these days of finger foods, has led to their decline
Peas have not totally had it however. They have subtly gone upmarket in these days of ready-prepared. I still remember how decadent I felt when I bought my first plastic tray of 'fresh' shelled peas from M&S. They cost about £1, itself a sinful sum. They allowed me to avoid the physical labour of shelling & the intellectual labour of deciding which were edible; they lacked variety, were uniformly green, round & perfectly formed. They tasted delicious
Is there a moral to this story? it certainly tracks important changes in society since I was a child in the 1940s & 50s. Division of labour, for one; instead of growing peas in your own garden or buying them in their pods from the market, then shelling them as a communal family activity, they now come grown & harvested, selected & shelled, prepared (probably in Africa), ready for 5 minutes cooking, or less in the microwave. This new division of labour has been made possible by the development of air transport & concomitant expansion in methods of communication - supermarket managers need fairly instant methods of making known how much & how many they want & where they want them
Women work outside the home & cant, or dont want to, waste time shelling peas. And then there is the matter of choice; all of us, even very young children, have got used to deciding, almost then & there, what we want to eat, rather than being told to eat up - for the sake of starving children in Africa! - whatever Mum has decided to cook for tea at 5 o'clock. Its like having servants, without the stress of havimg them there to observe your sins & foibles
Should we worry about all this? What about the pollution from the planes busily transporting these peas? What happens to all those empty pods, haulm, peas which are the wrong shape or colour? Is their disposal better or worse - for the planet, for gods sake - than what happened when we used to put all the bits in the dustbin & send them to landfill? If waste is minimised, for example by ensuring that the peas all grow to the requisite shape & size, are we interfering dangerously with Natures variety? Even if we dont use GM methods?
Are we exploiting African labour, or do jobs in the pea fields & factories offer a more dignified way of life than that which the workers had before, or than that which used to be on offer to domestic servants in this country? Is it better to serve others at a (maybe considerable) distance, in return for a wage or salary, rather than serve them intimately, responding to their instant whims?
Has anything good replaced that communal pea shelling?
Well yes, if you live in the present & look to the future. The Sainsburys in Hazel Grove is open late, cafe & all, fresh peas in plastic trays & all, bus stop outside, easily accessible to those without cars, gives us many more options in the way we live our lives. I just hope that, by some process of symbiosis, this will also help improve the lives of others employed in the process. It seems better, less condescending, simply to enjoy the peas than to gush over 'their' wonderfully crafted textiles for which I pay more than I would in a commercial shop because I want to give them a slightly greater proportion of what would otherwise be 'profit', thus giving them less opportunity to build a life, dependent on divided labour, such as the one I lead
