Let Them Eat Mussels

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, estimated personal fortune of £150 million, has been speaking of his struggle to understand poverty in the UK and the liking for ready-meals and wide-screen TVs amongst those on low-incomes.

Without wishing to be judgemental, he encourages the poor in this country to learn from Sicilian street-cleaners how to live happily and eat healthily on a diet of shell-fish, pasta and cherry tomatoes. 

In doing so, he becomes not only front-runner for this years' Marie Antoinette Award, but places himself firmly in a long tradition of self-loathing Brits who drool over all things Italian and wish that England could be a land of lemon gardens, olive groves, and smiling peasants working the soil beneath eternal blue skies. 

Lawrence too would sometimes unfavourably contrast his homeland and his compatriots with the ancient Mediterranean world and the peoples thereof. But, just before he toppled over into romantic idealism, he would pull back and offer solidarity with his native land and the working-class to which, at some fundamental level, he still belonged: 

"I feel I hardly know any more the people I come from ... They are changed, and I suppose I am changed. I find it so much easier to live in Italy. ... At the same time ... They are the only people  who move me strongly, and with whom I feel myself connected in deeper destiny. It is they who are, in some peculiar way 'home' to me."

- D. H. Lawrence, [Return to Bestwood], in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (CUP, 2004), p. 22.

Lawrence might often become exasperated with his own people and rage against their apparent resignation to how things are ordered politically and socially, but he never insults or patronises them. And he would never in a million years dare to say let them eat mussels ...!