Laudator Temporis Acti

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), Great Trade Route (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1937), p. 252:

It is no use saying that after a diet of peas grown wholesale in vast fields, forced under electric light, with chemical manure, picked by the ton, left for three days to decay, canned with, let us say, a boric preservative and consumed two years later, a man will be the same as after a diet of the same vegetables grown in the sunlight on a sheltered plot, manured with natural composts or dung, picked by hand and maggoty or inferior pods rejected, the peas themselves not much more than twice as large as a pin head and cooked and on the table twenty minutes after they have left the vines. He won't. He won't be the same either physically or in immediate mentality. Eating dead peas out of a can is a dullness that adds to the slatternly indifference of the mass-worker; eating your own live peas twenty minutes off the vine is a mental stimulant both immediately and during several days of anticipation whilst you watch them coming to the exactly right moment for picking.

Peas from my son's garden (May 2020)