Fruit smoothies, peppers, small oranges, and muffins are the latest additions to the Office for National Statistics "shopping basket" of commonly purchased goods, whose prices are monitored in order to monitor inflation. I love the attention to detail expressed in these choices. Why "small" oranges - can we no longer handle a giant juicy navel, and would specifying satsumas upset the mandarin promotional board? Fruit smoothies are favoured over ones made from meat, fish or vegetables. The peppers are likely to be capsicum and not the steam-creating scotch bonnet. Lager is bulk-bought in bigger bottles. Top 40 singles and frozen meals have been ejected in order to accommodate computer memory sticks and fresh ingredients.
This is an aspirational shopping basket, with an emphasis on the kind of items you'd find in salad bars and cafés. But its new additions strain towards reflecting the average set of purchases by avoiding bread and meat products at a time when the price and quality of both vary hugely according to their intended markets. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that these two staples are now being produced, packaged and priced to reflect huge inequalities in British people's income, life experience and, by extension, health.
The ONS basket's contents were revealed in the same week as the Department of Health report, Tackling Health Inequalities, which shows that the infant mortality rate among the poorest people is 19% higher than average, and that life expectancy for the same group, while not declining, is only creeping up while that for the richest is galloping.
Not only that, but the children of stressed and anxious parents - most often, those who are poorest and in the least skilled social classes - are more likely to suffer from poor health, affecting their chances of doing well at school and achieving the social mobility that will divert their own children from similar disadvantage. Health inequalities are getting worse at the same time that cheap chicken for those who cannot afford better quality meat is being defended by Delia Smith.
Jamie Oliver infamously called parents who failed to give their children healthy lunches "tossers", showing both an admirable refusal to hold poorer people to a lower standard than himself, and remarkable ignorance at how closely social class, inequality and limited choice are linked. But then it's many years since he had a food budget of £15 a week. Ah, he might say, but chickpeas are "cheap as chips" - to which I'd reply that I had to go to university and become middle-class before I found out what a chickpea actually is.
For many years, the only mention of class, as opposed to inequality (not just social and economic, but the inference of moral) came with the weekly mid-market tabloid declaration that "the middle classes" were being squeezed until the pips squeaked. The inference was that the only class that existed, and mattered, was the middle class, and the rest could go hang. When each claimed "We're all middle-class now", John Prescott and Tony Blair were saying pretty much the same thing.
But while I loathed the implication of the BBC's recent "White" season that the problems of white working-class people were rooted in race and immigration rather than social inequality, the discussion of the programmes has at least, if only temporarily, brought the term "working class" back into use.
David Kynaston's revealing history of the postwar years, Austerity Britain, gives a well-drawn picture of working men deeply conscious of their class position, but without much interest in politics. Sixty years later, a working-class man featured in a White season film declared that any government can keep a working man happy: all it needs to do is to avoid fiddling with his cigs and beer. These days, his cigs and beer are very much fiddled with, through a combination of taxes, bans and unsubtle reminders to "drink responsibly", but the working man is also - as the ONS basket shows - exercising the right to do his own fiddling, particularly in what he chooses to drink.
I still can't get my head around the sight of men chugging from bottles of lager or vodka-pop in a pub when once they'd have their hands stretched around pints. Now that mild has gone the way of the flat cap, bitter is becoming an increasingly middle-class drink. Even my dad, who used to brew his own from solid tins sold at the back of Boots, drinks lager now. Bottles of real ale carry hand-designed labels noting their makers' passion for authenticity, eager to make the buyer feel top-notch, and are sold one at a time, not in bulk.
In Pies and Prejudice, Stuart Maconie's bestseller exploring the north-south divide, the author reveals much of its significance through depictions of food. He, the son of Wigan weavers, describes his horror at realising he owned both a cappuccino maker and a packet of sun-dried tomatoes. The crisis drove him back to Lancashire, where he gorged on pies and burned the roof of his mouth on an egg-filled oven-bottom muffin. Now that's a proper muffin, you can almost hear him saying, none of that poncy southern blueberry muck.
Coming from Birmingham - neither north nor south, but industrial and working-class to its core - I loved Maconie's book, and could recount many variations on the cappuccino-maker story. The seller on my local fruit and veg stall rolls his eyes slightly at his bagging-up man when I present my own shopping bags. Opposite him, an ecstatic queue forms for the returning sourdough bread and olives stall (and this is not north London), with one enthusiastic buyer announcing that she'd felt "desolate" during its absence.
Statistically speaking, she - and I - will live far longer than the fruit and veg man. Does this give him the right to roll his eyes at my choices? Inadvertently, I'm pointing out our differences by waving my hessian bag at him. It's another sign that class and inequality aren't just a cause of sickness, but are a kind of sickness in themselves.
