The big Mac story

From limpets in Kidnapped onwards, Ian Jack reflects on diet in his homeland

As usual, I spent most of August on the Firth of Clyde, and one Sunday I sailed by steamer all the way upriver from Rothesay to Glasgow. The trip took almost four hours. It was a beautiful evening, the sky turning pink over the Cowal hills, the firth a blue and gold and silver mirror -so lovely that it was possible to forget (for those of us old enough to remember) how busy this river had once been with shipyards, cranes, freighters and liners; so still and warm that we could sit on the topmost deck and look with less than the usual melancholy on the supermarkets and weeds that have replaced the slipways where until the 1970s thousands of men used to work.

It was on the stairs to this top deck that accidents number one and two happened. In the first, which occurred somewhere between Rothesay and Largs, an excitable fat boy tumbled down and lay still on the deck below, where a concerned crowd eventually helped him to his feet. He was holding a couple of bags of crisps. In the second, somewhere between Largs and Greenock, another but unrelated fat boy did the same thing, this time clutching several Twix bars. I didn't see accident number three - it occurred somewhere below deck - but at Greenock the ship was delayed while three paramedics came aboard and stretchered off a woman to an ambulance on the quayside. She seemed to have broken her ankle. She was also, it must be said, very large.

In all my days aboard Clyde steamers, in summers that go back 50 years, I'd never been on such an accident-prone voyage. Perhaps people were both nimbler and more cautious in my childhood. Perhaps they were also thinner. As I stared over the rail at the high-rise flats of Greenock, I thought about the official anxiety over the Scottish diet (too much fat, too much sugar) and Greenock's historical role in its alteration. Greenock was the first Scottish port to import sugar in bulk from the West Indies and a great refining industry grew up there. In the same century, the 18th, it was the birthplace of the great inventor, James Watt, whose improved steam technology changed the face of the world. In the late-20th - o tempora, o mores, etc - the same town was the birthplace, or so it is said, of the deep fried Mars Bar. (I had thought this heart-stopping combination of sugar and fat was a myth created by stand-up comedians. But then at my mother's funeral I met a Port Glasgow cousin who said he'd eaten and enjoyed one - they were freely available. And Port Glasgow is Greenock's neighbour. The case rests.)

Drink and drugs are staples of Scottish fiction. With the recent exception of Andrew O'Hagan's novel, Personality, where the heroine lives in the world of the deep-fryer before dramatically (though understandably, you might feel) rejecting it in favour of anorexia, Scottish literature has not dwelt much on Scottish food. The occasional description of food - healthier food it must have been - in old Scottish novels gave this child reader the Dr Johnson shivers. At the beginning of Kidnapped, young David Balfour is given some porridge by his mean and evil old relation at the House of Shaws. "They're grand food, parritch," says Uncle Ebenezer, and with the plural subject of the sentence I could see all too easily the plurality of the lumps. When, later in the novel, Davie is marooned on a small Hebridean island, it seemed to me that the prospect of a raw limpet dinner was delicious in comparison. In other books there are mentions of herring and oatmeal, none of them appealing to the childhood appetite, which feasted on stories by Enid Blyton and their picnics of sandwiches, cakes, and lemonade.

A hundred years and more ago, working-class Scotland began to exchange this plain fare for food that was, from its perspective, tastier and often easier to prepare. Sidney Mintz, in his excellent history of sugar, Sweetness is Power, records how Dundee's women jute workers stopped the time-consuming business of making soup in the morning, to carry to the factory for lunch, and made jam sandwiches instead. Then dawned the age of the deep-fried potato. My father, who grew up in Edwardian Scotland largely (to hear him talk distastefully of it) on a diet of porridge and boiled fish and potatoes and a few other dull things made with boiling water in pots, was a living testament to the seductive power of sugar, fat and the frying pan. Not in his size - he wasn't particularly big - but in his preference for chips above mash, for fried eggs rather than boiled, for toast above bread, for his pay-day quarter pounds of Duncan's walnut whirls, and for the occasional Sunday morning treat of a hot roll with a Fry's Cream bar as the filling. But even he, I suspect, could never have guessed that sugar and fat would cease being delicacies, exceptional food to be savoured, to become what many people ate all the time.

A study published this month by the West of Scotland Food Group revealed that a new dish called a "hoagie" (chips, cheese, and doner kebab meat) had become a firm lunch-time favourite among school pupils who had handy access to takeaway shops. An average hoagie contains 1224 calories, 136 grams of fat and 9.6 grams of salt.

Fat has more than one way to kill you. Two weeks after the steamer trip, we went as a family to Bute Highland Games where my daughter came back from a tour around the pipe bands, dancers and caber tossers to ask if I'd seen "the Chip Pan Blaze Competition". She was only teasing: it wasn't a competition ("Mrs Flora Smith from Falkirk is wearing the McGregor tartan and wielding a five-pound pan") but a public safety demonstration by the fire brigade. Two firemen heated a pan of fat so that it caught fire and then poured a cup of water over it, which you must not do. Whoosh! The flames leapt 30 feet. It was the most exciting event at the games and it happened every hour.

The firemen said that Scotland had 12,000 chip pan blazes every year, in which an average of 50 people died. They said the primary cause had once been absent-minded housewives; now it was drunk or drugged men. As making chips is a complicated art even when sober - the peeling, the cutting, the drying, the waiting for the first whisps of smoke from the pan - the determination of the drunk man to do it may show the hold that deep-frying has over the Scottish imagination. Forget "A Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle"; "A Drunk Man Forgets to Look at a Chip Pan" may be the poem that Hugh MacDiarmid should have written.

Of course, I am my father's son and my own frame fits this fat landscape rather well. In the writing of this column, my last in this slot, a sugary doughnut and a crumpet from Rothesay's Electric Bakery have helped the composition. Half-a-dozen potato scones still lie innocently in the bread-bin, unaware of their teatime fate.

· Ian Jack is editor of Granta magazine

Today's best video

Today in pictures