Please, sir, we want some more

The fortunes of porridge have changed dramatically over the past century. Once the diet of workhouse children and the poor, the grey gruel that had Oliver Twist begging, “Please, sir, I want some more” has become a superfood celebrated for its health benefits around the world.

A side-effect of this has been to propel oat production from a field-rotation staple to agricultural stardom, with more than a million tons being produced in the UK in 2020. “Oats are a British farming success,” says John Latham, chairman of Camgrain. “We have recently come back to growing them and now plant over 800 acres a year.”

This remarkable transformation would have surprised Dr Samuel Johnson, who once defined oats as “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people” (prompting his biographer, James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck, to quip: “Well, maybe that’s why in England