William Cobbett, pork pies, the Freeborn Englishman & Johnson
Prime Minister has clashed with Melton Mowbray pork pie makers by claiming that they are sold outside of the UK. Like many things Johnson says this is not true. They are perishable products with a limited shelf life:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49470831
It is interesting however that a Tory Prime Minister can manage to get into an argument about something as traditional as a pork pie.
William Cobbett’s Rural Rides didn’t take him into the Melton Mowbray area and he much preferred bacon to pork and pies but he did underline the importance of pig keeping to the Freeborn Englishman, a rural smallholder in the decades immediately before Britain became primarily an industrial economy (broadly from 1850 onwards).
Cobbett wrote in Rural Rides:
A couple of flitches of bacon are worth fifty thousand Methodist sermons and religious tracts. The sight of them on the rack tends more to keep a man from poaching and stealing than whole volumes of penal statutes.. they are great softeners of the temper and promoters of domestic harmony’
This is not a recommendation for meat eating in 2019. Many who do not eat meat or pork for cultural, religious, environmental and other reasons, no doubt keep well clear,
It does however underline that the production of meat, some of which went into pork pies was something that was part of a traditional way of life. One wonders why a Tory Prime Minister is so keen to undermine that and why he doesn’t know the importance of the pork pie to the history of British culture in the first place.
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