A feast of stories about our changing appetites

These poignant pictures are part of a new exhibition exploring the place of food in British culture. The stories that lie behind what we choose to eat are captured in oral history interviews such as these from the Millennium Memory Bank of the British Library Archives which span the generations.

Norman Macleod (b 1924), interviewed aged 75.

Most of the shopping was done by grocery vans coming around and they didn't keep very good time and for instances in villages such as Thirsk where people had to walk almost a mile up to the road, they couldn't very well wait half a day for the grocery van, so they, women hung their shopping bags with their purses and their money and their shopping lists inside it and collected it afterwards at their leisure when the van had passed.

Frances Soar (b 1952), Sheffield. Interviewed aged 47.

I try very hard to use the dining table and every now and then we would sit at the table and dutifully eat. But I think when there are only two of you the eating bit is such a small part of the whole activity.

By the time you've set the table, cooked the meal, laid it out and taking into account the clearing away again and washing up and folding up the table cloth and putting it all away again, the eating bit only takes up about three minutes in the middle and it hardly seems worth it, so it is a lot easier to just get the stuff straight out of the kitchen onto a plate and go sit down on a comfortable chair and eat it on your knee.

Anon, Sheffield. Recorded by Museums Sheffield, 2009

My father was Allen Goodall and he was born in 1917. He trained as this food chemist and then progressed onto industry, in the food industry. We moved to Sheffield in 1953 to go to Bachelor's Peas which in later years was Batchelor's Foods. The pea season was hectic. I mean this is going back now into the sort of mid, early-mid 50s, when really if you wanted to see him you'd have to follow him, so at the weekends we would go off with him to the pea fields in Lincolnshire where all the hive of activity was and they had these places called a "vining station". The main thing that all of us actually remember was the smell because a freshly vined pea has a very sweet but fairly strong, not unattractive smell, and it sort of stays in your memory.

George Aberdou (b 1930s), Rochdale

I think we had table-manners. I think that was part of my mother's upbringing, that we ate like Little Lord Fauntleroys.

Interviewer: And what about if you didn't like the food?

Oh then there was trouble, and I think that was a left-over from their, well, Victorian upbringing. You ate what was put in front of you and liked it. There were a number of things that as a child I was sick at the thought of what was coming.

Teachers, Lydgate Lane Infants School, Sheffield

We try and do a lot with the school. We are a cooking school so we try more to teach them about where these foods come from. The chickens been great because now we have eggs coming everyday and it's a bit more hands on. And we're growing food and fruit in the garden so again they can see from the very beginning the seed or the small trees seedlings that have been planted and hopefully will flourish. So asking children where things come from, where it starts is a good idea and also we try to encourage them to be healthy, do healthy eating, choose healthy fruit and drinks.

Pupil, Lydgate Lane Infants School, Sheffield

Interviewer: What sort of things does your mum like you to eat, that she thinks are healthy?

Carrots, they make your eyes see better in the dark, and…

Interviewer: And is there anything that your mum doesn't like you to eat, because she thinks it's not healthy?

Snails.

Food Glorious Food, admission free, to November 28, at Weston Park Museum, Sheffield.