The author was commissioned to write about British food for an overseas audience in 1946, but piece was spiked amid anxiety about postwar austerity
More than 70 years after the event, the British Council has apologised to George Orwell for commissioning and then rejecting an essay about British food.
The author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm was, the body has revealed, commissioned to write British Cookery in 1946, as part of the organisation’s efforts to promote British culture overseas. But a discovery in the British Council’s archives has revealed that after commissioning the essay, it declined to publish it, telling Orwell that it was problematic to write about food in a time of strict rationing.
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