Boris Johnson reminds us of state school dinners in the 1970’s:
The truth is that there was one menu that I found a bit of a trial. There was one distinctive pre-prandial smell, which, when it wafted through the school, used to make me whimper with dread. It was liver. When I say liver, I don’t mean the kind of liver you get in restaurants these days, pink and tender and derived exclusively from contented calves, and swaddled in bacon and onions. I don’t know what manner of cows supplied the livers to state schools in London in the early 1970s, but they must have been very old and suffering from advanced alcoholism. These livers had the texture (and something of the aroma) of an old Green Flash gym shoe. They were knobbly with cysts and evidence of bovine cirrhosis, which no doubt explained the mortality of the cow.
I’m fond of liver today but that passage brought back some unpleasant memories.
