Bad Food Britain: How A Nation Ruined Its Appetite

Bad Food Britain: How A Nation Ruined Its Appetite Joanna Blythman Award-winning investigative food journalist, Joanne Blythman turns her attention to the current hot topic – the state of British food.What is it about the British and food? We just don’t get it, do we? Britain is notorious worldwide for its bad food and increasingly corpulent population but it’s a habit we just can’t seem to kick.Welcome to the country where recipe and diet books feature constantly in top 10 bestseller lists but where the average meal takes only eight minutes to prepare and people spend more time watching celebrity chefs cooking on TV than doing any cooking themselves, the country where a dining room table is increasingly becoming an optional item of furniture. Welcome to the nation that is almost pathologically obsessed with the safety and provenance of food but which relies on factory-prepared ready meals for sustenance, eating four times more of them than any other country in Europe, the country that never has its greasy fingers out of a packet of crisps, consuming more than the rest of Europe put together. Welcome to the affluent land where children eat food that is more nutririonally impoverished than their counterparts in South African townships, the country where hospitals can sell fast-food burgers but not home-baked cake, the G8 state where even the Prime Minister refuses to eat broccoli.Award-winning investigative food journalist Joanna Blythman takes us on an amusing, perceptive and subversive journey through Britain's contemporary food landscape and traces the roots of our contemporary food troubles in deeply engrained ideas about class, modernity and progress. BAD FOOD BRITAIN JOANNA BLYTHMAN DEDICATION (#ulink_a0da2101-b5c9-59b1-9c4a-cf91be3fccce) For Derek Cooper CONTENTS Cover (#u45fc3cf5-954f-588e-b8c5-e13b85afa2cc) Title Page (#u882ceb52-4212-5daf-b116-8c22cdc0042b) Dedication (#ulink_60693d32-6c65-5d1d-8d15-01fc7b5a2eb1) Introduction (#u7aefb0cb-bb57-5e8f-87b4-87c209299bf4) Bad Food Britain in Numbers (#ua5cdb24d-76b4-521e-802d-748c001fc688) Britain’s Top 10 Bad Food Beliefs (#u73a6bc80-a9db-5d01-8308-1dac548f95dc) 1 Fantasy food (#u2fd6b9fb-4e0d-565d-ae38-51bcb7259ef5) 2 How others see us (#ua1bf26be-cc7e-5147-bcd1-1edf4bafcb2e) 3 Brit food (#u84990acd-6826-5c02-91b8-06fbff5396b3) 4 Renaissance restaurants (#ufae1d4f8-fbcc-5673-8131-e4518b6e0b30) 5 No time to cook (#ufc0bbda0-f364-5898-9638-f6548b111931) 6 Disappearing dinner tables (#litres_trial_promo) 7 ‘This is not just food …’ (#litres_trial_promo) 8 Good food is posh (#litres_trial_promo) 9 Lawful prey (#litres_trial_promo) 10 We hate shopping (#litres_trial_promo) 11 Fear of food (#litres_trial_promo) 12 The yuck factor (#litres_trial_promo) 13 Safety first (#litres_trial_promo) 14 Kids in white coats (#litres_trial_promo) 15 Kiddie food (#litres_trial_promo) 16 Britain makes you fat (#litres_trial_promo) 17 ‘No bad food …’ (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo) References (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) INTRODUCTION (#ulink_1d840aba-efad-5b9f-b54a-b61516aaeb81) One afternoon in early 2006, my phone rang. It was a fellow journalist looking for quotes for an article he was writing about the significance of Britain’s doyenne of food writers, Elizabeth David. “Was it thanks to her that we have become a nation of foodies?’ he wanted to know. The next morning, the Today programme on Radio 4 was repeating a story about how sales of olive oil in Britain were now outstripping those of all other cooking oils put together, a phenomenon attributed to Britain’s increasing sophistication in food taste – yet another manifestation of the nation’s much-vaunted food revolution. Nation of foodies! Food revolution! Who are we kidding? British eating habits are getting worse, not better. In reality, Britain is second only in notoriety to the United States in the bad food stakes. Of course, this flies in the face of the perceived wisdom that we are in a ‘You’ve Never Had It So Good’ phase of British gastronomy, in the throes of a dynamic food renaissance. After all, isn’t London’s restaurant scene the envy of the rest of the planet? What about all the farmers’ markets, regional food festivals, and new artisan food products that are popping up left, right and centre, the length and breadth of the land? And how about our regiment of chef celebrities? Isn’t cool Food Britannia a runaway success? At last, after all those decades of cringing on the world food stage, surely we can now strut our stuff with conviction, and show off our new-found gastronomic credentials. This is how Britain likes to see itself nowadays, as a fully functioning, participatory food culture. In truth, this vision is a chimera, an unconvincing construction built and talked up by the media, the chattering classes, the hospitality, tourism and food industries, and TV chefs on the make. It is a delusion that selectively ignores the gaping discrepancies that don’t fit the story: • Our growing incompetence in the domestic kitchen and the endangered status of home cooking – surely one of the most telling indicators of a nation’s culinary health. • Our inability to feed our children on a diet of life-sustaining, healthy food, either at home or at school. • The stifling of an independent local grocery sector or small food commerce under the hulking boot of supermarket monoculture. • Our addiction to industrial techno-foods. • Our growing resistance to devoting any time to food shopping or preparation. • Our unwillingness to take the time to eat a meal. • Our bulging waistlines. • Our city centres studded with chain eateries and ‘gastropubs’ where everything on the menu comes straight out of a lorry into the freezer, and from there to the microwave or deep-fat fryer. • Our near dependence on foreign cuisines because of the weakness of our own native one. And that’s just for starters! This book explores all the contemporary manifestations of Britain’s unhappy relationship with food; the embedded ideas, patterns and practices that keep us locked in a Bad Food mindset and which feed the nation’s profound gastronomic illiteracy. Not the least of our current troubles is our inability to admit that something is wrong. Like an alcoholic who can’t accept that he or she has a drink problem, Britain is in denial that it has a Bad Food problem. Yet such an acceptance is a necessary preliminary to identifying creative solutions that might enable us to appreciate the pleasure we might derive from better food, and in the process transform the quality of our life. Bad Food Britain is not a history book, although the roots of Britain’s current difficulties with food would richly reward such an approach. Perhaps the weak food culture in Britain is due to early industrialization, and a consequent rapid growth of an urbanized population divorced from the countryside and food production? Religion may play its part in the form of a Protestant work ethic which spawned a breed that would rather build an empire or factory than waste hours preparing and eating food; a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon form of Puritanism which holds that it is immoral to enjoy or cherish food too much, parsimony and abstinence being the higher goals. Other factors might include our grey northern climate, the legacy of post-war rationing, our close identification with the United States and ‘time is money’ American capitalism. Or might it be a matter of simple xenophobia, complicated by a fine overlay of class; the notion that food is something fancy that only foreigners, or those who ape them, enjoy? Whatever the historical explanation, the fact remains that food never has been a British priority and shows no signs of becoming one in the near future. One of the most amusing but telling insights I happened on in the course of writing this book was the following letter, published in The Times during the wave of concern that flowed through Britain in the wake of the transmission of Jamie’s School Dinners: Sir, A letter from my daughter’s primary school in Essex reads: Change to the School Menu In response to recent publicity, ‘Turkey Twizzlers’ have been taken off the school menu and replaced by ‘Chicken Teddies’. What is it about the British and food? We just don’t get it, do we? Well, it’s time that we did. BAD FOOD BRITAIN IN NUMBERS (#ulink_78ab4834-5711-5ad6-9255-6a5c731d45bb) BRITAIN’S TOP 10 BAD FOOD BELIEFS (#ulink_189863f2-3bc1-5fef-957f-a7f722b4b4f7) * Eating is about refuelling, not pleasure. A part of life’s routine, just like going to the lavatory. * Home cooking takes too long. Successful Britons buy ready-made food instead. * Food is not important. Pretty much everything else in life matters more. * A dining table is a redundant item of furniture. * The single most important thing to know about food is what it costs. * There is no point in giving children good food. They won’t appreciate it. * There is no such thing as bad foods, only bad diets. * British supermarkets stock such great food, there is no need to shop elsewhere. * You can live on a diet of processed food and still stay healthy and slim. * A microwave is the only piece of kitchen equipment you really need. 1 FANTASY FOOD (#ulink_35cc51f2-2359-5cd1-ab81-5df1d6466225) Britain lives in a fantasy food world, a virtual food state. Our shelves are laden with cookbooks. Books about eating or cooking are never out of the bestsellers lists. In 2005, cookbooks – already one of the book trade’s richest earners – reached new money-spinning heights. Sales of food and drink books grew by 22 per cent, (#litres_trial_promo) while fiction grew by only 5 per cent. Our television schedules are studded with programmes about food: Ready, Steady, Cook, Full on Food, You Are What You Eat, Jamie’s this, Gordon’s that, Nigella’s this, that or the other … there is no avoiding them. Newspapers and magazines spew out a diet of recipes, discussions of ingredients, restaurant and cookery book reviews. The number of column inches and amount of air time given to food in Britain dwarfs that in every other comparable country. According to Vogue magazine: ‘How we cook, what we cook with, where we last ate, what our children are eating … is an obsession (#litres_trial_promo) that has stretched its sticky, lickable hands across society.’ The pages of weekend supplements are populated by beautiful people plucked from a nation of lip-licking gastronomes, a nation that grows food, cooks food and rejoices in the eating of it. They live in lofts and stylish townhouses, or – depending on the newspaper’s readership profile – in covetable country houses and holly-hocked cottages. Wherever they are located, these people are ultra-literate in food and gastronomy. They take a great interest in foodie arcana, soaking up articles on items such as shade-grown peppercorns and salted, sundried Sardinian tuna roe, like children devouring the latest Harry Potter book. They weigh up the pros and cons of Lacanche ranges versus Agas. It matters to them that their cr?me brul?e is correctly caramelized, so they give each other blow torches as Christmas presents. They are endlessly fascinated with the contents of famous people’s refrigerators. Their own capacious American-style, double-door fridges are filled with organic goat’s milk yogurt, juice squeezed from English heritage apples and Toulouse sausages made from rare breed, acorn-fed porkers. They savour obscure cocktails dreamed up by someone purporting to be the world’s most innovative mixologist. Their shelves are stacked with at least six different estate-bottled extra virgin olive oils. Their drawers are filled with expensive Japanese knives as recommended by Bad Boy chef, Anthony Bourdain. These people constantly give dinner parties or, more fashionable these days, informal, relaxed ‘suppers’ for foodie friends. They are tuned into every little nuance of food provenance, seeking out products of impeccable pedigree as they navigate their way around farmers’ markets, specialist food shops and mail order companies supplying everything from samphire to smoked eel. When you see the picture of them sitting around their craft-made dinner table, hewn from a vast trunk of fallen oak or elm by a local architect who downshifted to the country, they are surrounded either by adorable, food-appreciating offspring weaned on pur?ed allotment parsnips, or by stimulating food enthusiast guests. Attentive readers of Heat or Hello! magazines may even be able to spot the odd celebrity peeping out from their assembled ranks. And you know what? They don’t exist. Correction – they account for a vanishingly small percentage of the British population. Anyone from abroad who skims through these supplements or switches on UK television could be forgiven for gaining the impression that Britain is a country that celebrates matters alimentary, one that devotes huge swathes of its waking time to living and breathing food. In fact this is merely a construction of how the British like to see themselves, as a switched-on, fully-participatory food culture. Our diligently prepared diet of ‘what to eat, where to buy it’ foodie lifestyle is engineered and highly accomplished, but the edifice is all the more audacious because of the scale of the lie it sells. Welcome to the peculiarly British world of food pornography, where watching other people cooking food or talking about cooking food has become a substitute for doing it yourself. Chef Simon Hopkinson (#litres_trial_promo) put his finger on it when he wrote: ‘Something seems to be ever so slightly rotten in the state of the British kitchen just now. I sometimes feel that we have all but lost the grasp of how to cook nicely at all. We watch endless cookery programmes, but prefer, finally, to spend lots of money on supermarket ready-meals while idly turning the pages of spotlessly clean cookery books until the microwave pings.’ The more media space food and cooking occupies in Britain, the less it reflects any grass roots practical activity. We have become a nation of food voyeurs. The broadcaster Jeremy Paxman (#litres_trial_promo) provided an explanation for this apparent contradiction when asked if he was interested at all in food. ‘Well, I would be if I had more time, but it’s one of those things that’s gone to the wall as life has got busier,’ he explained. ‘I might read a recipe and think “That sounds absolutely delicious”, or “That seems an interesting idea”. So I tear out the page but never make the recipe.’ Mr Paxman speaks for the nation in this respect. It has a theoretical interest in cooking and earnestly means to get around to doing it at some point. But when time is at a premium and there is too much to do, then cooking, being an optional extra as opposed to a core British activity, is the first thing that must go. And yet the British continue to turn out one glossy cookbook after another. As the Evening Standard’s Literary Editor, David Sexton, (#litres_trial_promo) observed, their marketability is more to do with the generous dollop of lifestyle with which they are garnished, than the recipes. ‘Such incessant activity is only achieved, of course, by emphasizing everything but the food … We are sold instead the personality of the cook, the romance of the foreign journey, the superior lifestyle that somehow the food is supposed to supply. Recipes become almost irrelevant. Now the cookbook is not a manual at all but rather an aberrant species of literary composition, one of the most baroque products of the age.’ Britain has now built a lovingly-assembled, reassuring image of itself as a country that has undergone a second coming on the food front, but unfortunately this is not predicated on any day to day reality. Quite the opposite. We have become detached from reality by persuading ourselves that the frequency of practical cooking is no longer the most telling indicator of a country’s culinary health. Just as agony aunts will advise that in their experience, infrequent sex is often a sign of a relationship in terminal decline, Britain’s reluctance to cook suggests that all is not well in its relationship with food. But the British are in denial. Rather than face this unpalatable truth and do something about it, we have preferred to buy into the myth that a diet of well-chosen ‘tried and tested’ processed meals and savvy eating out is a viable substitute for hands-on cooking. The last time significant sections of the British population actually showed any signs of seriously improving their cooking skills, and hence the quality of the food they ate, was in the heyday of Delia Smith. Delia caught the BBC’s eye at the end of the 1960s with cookery columns in the Daily Mirror, the Evening Standard and the Radio Times. Her television career began in 1973 with the BBC series Family Fare, a title which now would be dismissed out of hand by commissioning editors because of its in-built assumption that viewers might be interested in cooking family meals. Family Fare proved so popular, however, that after running for two years, it was followed in 1975 by the mega-series Delia’s Cookery Course. The aim of this major series, which was broadcast repeatedly over more than a decade, was systematically to take viewers through the basics of cooking and teach fundamental techniques to home cooks. The goal was unashamedly educational – Delia’s series came under the auspices of the BBC’s education programming – and what she taught on screen was backed up by affordable paperback manuals filled with easy-to-follow, well-tested recipes which, if instructions were followed, would guarantee sound results. It became the model for other influential series in the same education slot: Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cookery in 1982 and Ken Hom’s Chinese Cookery in 1984. These presenters all shared the same neutrally pleasant but essentially functional approach: We are here to teach a practical skill. You are watching because you want to learn so that you can try it out. Delia’s style of presentation was that of an ever so slightly glamorous domestic science teacher: encouraging, straightforward, business-like and not at all show-offy. She assumed the traditional female cookery demonstrator’s pose, face on to the camera, standing behind a worktop covered with basic kitchen equipment and a small sea of glass bowls, and she took viewers through a few recipes with thoroughness and detail, flagging up possible variations on the theme. She communicated her knowledge of cookery in a factual way, taking nothing for granted, stopping regularly to explain or introduce a new ingredient or the usage of a less common item of kitchen equipment. Her attitude was not a patronizing ‘Poor you, haven’t you heard of balsamic vinegar? Oh do keep up!’ but an unthreatening ‘Here’s an interesting Italian vinegar that I like and I think you might like too’. Delia came over more like an approachable member of the local Women’s Institute than a scion of some elite society of food connoisseurs. She did not fit the mould of the distinguished, upper-class, English cookery writers, such as the wonderfully acerbic memsahib Elizabeth David, or the erudite, well-travelled Jane Grigson. They had performed a stalwart service by helping to drag British food out of its post-war austerity, but they influenced a select audience of people rather like themselves. Whether or not she consciously set out to do so, Delia Smith became a food democrat whose mission was to broaden the food knowledge and cooking capability of the great mass of ordinary Britons. As such she developed a strongly female following who found her recipes realistic and do-able. Out there in Middle Britain, the Delia effect was tangible. In the 1980s and early 1990s, it was always a great relief when visiting family, friends and acquaintances with a less than impressive record on the cooking front to hear the phrase ‘I didn’t know what to make so I just made a dish from Delia Smith’. That usually ominous introduction from the nervous, unconfident cook ‘I’ve never made this before … I hope it’s all right’ was instantly less perturbing when followed up with ‘… It’s a Delia recipe’. By the late 1990s, the Delia brand increasingly became seen as old-fashioned, a bit plodding, in need of lightening up, and out of touch because of its patronage of the unglamorous, primarily female realm of home cooking. Delia had been upstaged by a new generation of TV cooks who fitted in with broadcasters’ notions that food now belonged not in an education, but light entertainment slot. Keith Floyd was the vanguard for this new genre of TV food entertainment. His recipes were rough and inexact, unlike Delia’s meticulously weighed centilitres and grams. An ageing, rakish bon viveur with a diverting line in banter, he appealed to male viewers, to the kind of man who likes to show off his cooking skills at high-profile events but doesn’t like to muck in with everyday domestic cooking. The efficacy of Keith Floyd’s recipes was considered by broadcasters to be secondary to his entertainment value. They liked him because he rescued cookery from what they considered to be a female ghetto. He got out of the studio and cooked up impromptu feasts on boats, in fields, on beaches. He supplied excitement and added value. He did something more than just cook. Keith Floyd provided a prototype for a new breed of TV cook or ‘celebrity chef’. It was no longer good enough merely to teach people to cook. Celebrity chefs had to offer the viewing public something different, because – and here’s the irony – they now had to appeal to people with little or no interest in food, people who quite possibly had no intention to cook. Consequently, Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson-Wright were not allowed to be just two patrician, middle-aged women with a formidable knowledge of food, but had to be portrayed as PG Wodehouse stereotypes, Two Fat Ladies travelling around, Biggies-style, with a motorbike and side car. The gimmicks abounded. Jamie Oliver had to keep up a constant stream of chippy barrow-boy prattle and slide down banisters to boost ratings figures amongst younger viewers. Nigella Lawson had to look eternally gorgeous and seductive and spout a script heavily overlaid with sexual nuance. These added-value cookery shows demonstrated, yet again, Britain’s traditional lack of conviction that food in its own right merits intelligent interest. The underlying thinking was that cooking is a chore which, in its unadorned form, could not be expected to appeal to British people. It had to be spiced up with a series of innovations if ratings were not to flag. Food and cooking needed something else to sell it: sex, travel, eccentricity, adventure, farce, incessant swearing – anything. The success of these new-wave food programmes created a mass delusion, the idea that British people were already so sophisticated in their appreciation of good food, and accomplished in the cooking of it, that they had no more elementary lessons to learn. In 1998, Delia Smith had launched a new series, Delia’s How To Cook, a back-to-basics cooking primer aimed at reintroducing Britons living on processed food to the pleasures of cooking. This was blatantly at odds with the assertion that Britain was in the throes of a good food revolution and provoked an outburst from chef Gary Rhodes (#litres_trial_promo) who attacked How To Cook as ‘Offensive’. ‘I don’t need to be shown what boiling water looks like and I tend to think that the rest of the population don’t need to be shown it now,’ he said. ‘It is insulting to their intelligence.’ Soon after, chef Antony Worrall Thompson (#litres_trial_promo) jumped on the anti-Delia bandwagon dubbing her ‘the Volvo of cooking’ because he considered that she was reliable but dull. Delia Smith (#litres_trial_promo) retaliated, voicing her aversion to celebrity chefs and the whole ‘food as light entertainment’ approach, laying into BBC2’s prime-time popular food show in particular. ‘I will never, ever know, as long as I live, how the BBC or the general public can tolerate Food and Drink,’ she said. Food and Drink was the progenitor of a new strand of live audience programmes in the game show mould. It was made to be undemanding and unintimidating, so presenters who actually knew anything about their subject had to pretend that they were just punters. Those who knew no more than the average citizen were awarded the status of idiot savants and charged with talking garrulously and hyperactively, so reinforcing the British suspicion that anyone who goes on about food is either mad, irrevocably pretentious or downright ridiculous. It was geared to viewers with the attention span of a flea. Then, in 2003, after selling ten million books, Delia Smith announced her retirement (#litres_trial_promo) from cookery. She said that she was ‘reciped out’, but fired one last salvo at the massed ranks of celebrity chefs before she went. ‘What’s happened to the amateur cook in the country house? Or that lady down the pub who only the locals knew about and cooked up a storm?’ she asked. Delia’s retirement marked the consignment of any serious attempt to teach Britain practical cooking skills to the dustbin. The balance of culinary power in Britain has now swung away from the domestic zone, where its keepers were women who passed on their accumulated knowledge with their egos held well in check, to the male zone, where its new luminaries are a bunch of flashy performance artists. The success of these performers is not measured by whether the woman along the road successfully cooked one of their dishes, but by their ratings and book sales. The focus of food fashion has become more rarefied, arcane and preoccupied with the endless pursuit of novelty; in fact, it is entirely detached from most Britons’ domestic cooking experience. A lot of media attention has been given to Heston Blumenthal, chef of the Fat Duck at Bray and his particular style of cooking – ‘molecular gastronomy’. Mr Blumenthal’s gastronomy is complex, and is best contemplated only by the most seriously skilled chefs, yet his recipes turn up with regularity in programmes and magazines aimed at ordinary people, most of whom seem impressed. Writing in the Evening Standard, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (#litres_trial_promo) declared herself to be perplexed by the whole Blumenthal phenomenon: ‘I watched him on TV last week making mashed potatoes – twelve steps, one and a half hours, eight different pots and utensils and an end result that looked like thick soup. Is he taking the mickey?’ Food as a spectator sport has now become a huge industry in Britain. In countries that are feted for their cuisine, such as Italy and France, food has a much lower profile in the media. Weekend newspapers carry a restaurant review, perhaps a profile of a chef, a diary of local food and wine festivals, and the odd recipe. News-stands sell a number of cheap, practical magazines filled with seasonal recipes for everyday cooking. Commonly these recipes are not authored, since the object of the exercise is to show what the dishes look like and explain how to make them, not sell the lifestyle of food celebrities. When chefs appear on French and Italian television, viewers do not get a through-the-keyhole snoop into their lives to see their children, homes or long-suffering partners. They simply stand up, demonstrate a recipe and leave it at that. If you talk about ‘celebrity chefs’, Europeans look blank and are not sure what you mean. The justification advanced for the Great British Media Food Circus with its clowns, acrobats and survival artists is that it has helped Britain catch up with established food cultures and rekindled the flame of British gastronomy. Jamie is turning on young people to cooking by making it seem trendy and youthful. Gordon is drumming up recruits for the catering profession by reducing B-list celebrities to tears in front of the camera. Paul and Brian are supplying stressed-out housewives with barnstorming 15-minute menus using hideously incompatible and unfamiliar ingredients that will invigorate their lacklustre cooking. The only problem with this noisy and ever more attention-seeking circus is that it has had the opposite effect. As the food writer Tamasin Day-Lewis (#litres_trial_promo) has commented: ‘What strikes me is the number of perfectly competent cooks who say they have become frightened of cooking. They feel that what they once cooked with confidence is no longer fashionable. Restaurant and television food has added to their insecurity.’ A case in point is comedienne Arabella Weir, (#litres_trial_promo) who confesses: ‘All that plethora of cookery shows really does is make me feel insecure. They don’t make me think, “Oh what a great thing to do with scallops and chives.” I just think, “Oh God! I’m just a fat oaf who lives in a horrible kitchen!’” As far as the media is concerned, food and cooking in Britain should be viewed similarly to advertising. Its job is to sell us an aspirational lifestyle in which food occupies its time-honoured place in British society as a way of defining class, status and refinement. But, like parading a line of skinny supermodels before a local Weightwatchers group, its effect is not empowering but paralysing. The people who are apparently showing us how to cook are asking too much of us. They offer a menu of incessant choice, seasoned with a perpetual stream of possibility. But they are not like us, they do not represent us, and we can never be like them. They live in a world glossy with food fashion, rich with knowledge and busy with perpetual novelty. We watch them, talk about them, and let ourselves be entertained by their antics as a form of diversion and escapism, but we know that all this has little or nothing to do with real life. 2 HOW OTHERS SEE US (#ulink_201d5f79-b463-532d-aa7b-e2f1bd61d63b) Just days before the 2005 G8 Summit meeting at Gleneagles in Scotland, French President Jacques Chirac put his diplomatic foot in it. At a high-level meeting in Russia to celebrate the 750th anniversary of the founding of Kaliningrad, (#litres_trial_promo) and in earshot of reporters from the French daily newspaper, Lib?ration, President Chirac entertained the Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder by mocking British food. ‘We can’t trust people who have such bad food,’ (#litres_trial_promo) he was quoted as saying, compounding the insult with, ‘the only thing they [the British] have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow.’ President Putin and Chancellor Schroeder seemed to appreciate his humour, laughing and joining in with the banter. Britain, on the other hand, was not at all amused. Rather than brushing it off as might a country confident about its food culture, and cuisine, the UK rose to the bait – big time. ‘Don’t talk crepe, Jacques!’ (#litres_trial_promo) bellowed the Sun.‘How would Mr Chirac feel (#litres_trial_promo) if others descended to this level of argument and called him a snob and a has-been who pongs of garlic?’ asked the Daily Telegraph.Egon Ronay, (#litres_trial_promo) publisher of the eponymous restaurant guide, accused the French President of being ill-informed. ‘A man full of bile is not fit to pronounce on food. There’s no other country in the world whose food has improved so greatly and more quickly in the last 15–20 years than this country,’ he said. In the Evening Standard, Fay Maschler, (#litres_trial_promo) doyenne of British restaurant critics, denounced President Chirac’s ‘ignorant, witless remarks’, retaliating with a tirade against French food: ‘The simple little restaurant run by maman and papa straight off the pages of Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking, where a carefully composed meal made from local produce was sold for a song, exists no more. Or at least it needs a Sherlock Holmes detective to find. Menus in various departments of France are repetitive and monotonous … Restauration in its homeland (France) has become a depressed and cynical exercise … Even getting a good cup of coffee and a noble loaf of bread is nowadays easier in London than in Paris.’ The rivalry between the French and the British is historic. France and Britain have been best of enemies for centuries. Cross-Channel insults are nothing new, and the French President’s remarks were bound to provoke a certain amount of retaliatory flag-waving and chauvinism. Back in 1999, a light-hearted article published in the New York Times in which the critic William Grimes (#litres_trial_promo) said that Cornwall ‘probably offers more (#litres_trial_promo) bad food per square mile than anywhere else in the civilized world’ and likened the Cornish pasty to a doorstop, actually provoked one pasty maker into burning an American flag in protest. But the strength and stridency of the reaction to President Chirac’s comments demonstrated that he had wounded our national pride in a fundamental way. But why such vulnerability? The French President had exposed our long-standing Achilles heel. However much commentators try to promote a rehabilitated image of British food with inspiring tales of booming farmers’ markets, new-wave artisan producers and innovative restaurants, the unpalatable fact is that other nationalities either just don’t buy it or, at best, they judge any improvement to be minimal. For instance, in 2001 the New Yorker magazine talked of ‘the baby steps the British are taking away from their tradition of gruesomely bad cooking’. The United States enjoys being rude about Britain’s food. Thinking Americans feel embarrassed about their own fast-food diet which is universally hailed as unhealthy and obesogenic. Britain gives them a country to which they can feel superior, one with worse food than their own. Even high-profile ambassadors for Britain’s revitalized food culture such as Jamie Oliver can’t escape the sneers and curled lips. Mr Oliver complains that when he travels abroad, he frequently ends up listening to people bad-mouthing British food. ‘You go on Jay Leno (#litres_trial_promo) [a US talk show] for the third time and he’s still making cracks about shitty English food.’ The British take it particularly badly when Americans criticize our food. It feels like a best friend swapping sides and ganging up with the enemy – that’s France, Italy and any other country that outshines us on the gastronomic front. Britain becomes tetchy very easily when negative comparisons are made with countries that have thriving food cultures, using attack as a form of self-defence. This sideswipe at Italian food, from the Daily Telegraph’s restaurant critic, Jan Moir, (#litres_trial_promo) is a classic example. She took exception to chef Antonio Carluccio pointing out that Italian labourers eat truffles – an illustration of how good food in Italy is regarded as a democratic entitlement, enjoyed by all social classes. ‘Really, stuff like this does get tiresome. We all know about the excellence and seasonality of Italian food, but every time I go to Italy, the supermarkets there are full of the same old rubbish that they sell here, but we’re always led to believe that every grotty little shepherd is dining like a king on heavenly risottos and garlic-infused baby lambs, while ignorant John Bull has to make do with boiled hoof and carrots because he knows no better.’ In contrast to such defensiveness, our king in waiting, His Royal Highness, Charles, Prince of Wales, (#litres_trial_promo) has accepted that Britain does have a serious problem with what it eats: ‘Over the last two generations we have managed to create a nation of fast food junkies to whom food, often processed by industrialised farming systems, is nothing but fuel. The result is a growing obesity and health problem and a disconnection in the minds of too many people between the food on their plate and where and how it is produced.’ Whether or not we choose to face up to it, Britain has always had a particular credibility problem in convincing the rest of the world of its culinary credentials, and that perception has not substantially shifted. Viewed from outside its borders, Britain is a strange and aberrant country, a cultural exception in Europe, and second only to the US in its capacity to shock outsiders with its eating habits. As one Chinese writer, (#litres_trial_promo) looking forward to his first trip to London, told the Guardian: ‘I’ve tasted an English breakfast but otherwise I’ve heard the food is awful.’ (#litres_trial_promo) So common are the negative perceptions of British food abroad that bodies charged with attracting visitors to the UK are well-rehearsed in fielding them. The British Council in Japan, for instance, has a website aimed at students who are considering studying in Britain. The site has a Frequently Asked Questions section: Question number 3 (following questions about the cost of study and the weather) deals with what is clearly one of the biggest disincentives to people contemplating visiting, studying or working in the UK: Q: ‘I’ve heard that British food is boring. Will I be able to find the sort of food that I like?’ A: ‘Britain used to have a bad reputation as far as food is concerned. This has changed dramatically. Britain is a land of lovers of good food. As well as traditional British food which is currently seeing a revival after years of neglect, Indian, French, Greek, Chinese, Italian, Malaysian, Turkish, Mexican and many other ethnic restaurants can be widely found. Japanese food has become popular in Britain during the last few years. There are even kaiten-zushi bars in London!’ While more optimistic potential students might feel reassured, the more cynical might interpret the sub-text as follows: ‘Take it on trust from us that the ghastly things you have heard about British food no longer apply, but just in case you don’t believe us, let us reassure you that there are lots of other cuisines to go for. And if you don’t fancy those, there’s always sushi – in London at least.’ Foreign students contemplating taking a course at the University of Oxford are likewise pre-warned (#litres_trial_promo) as to what to expect: ‘British food does not have a good reputation overseas. However, there is in fact a very wide variety available, both traditional British food and international cuisine, especially in bigger cities. There are many fresh ingredients which are delicious when cooked well. However, many busy people don’t pay much attention to preparing food well and prefer instant meals.’ Of course, it is only natural for foreign nationals to be attached to their own cuisine, to cling on to what they know and even be somewhat suspicious of the food they might encounter when they travel abroad. But the fact remains that British food continues to be notorious worldwide. When Malaysia Tatler (#litres_trial_promo) magazine sent a reviewer to sample the British food at the Ivy restaurant in Kuala Lumpur (no relation to the eponymous London establishment) in 2005, she enjoyed chicken with Stilton and leek, but queried whether it could really be a British dish, as she was ‘surprised that something as tasty could come from there [Britain]’. As Malaysia Tatler pointed out: ‘The British have given many things to the world – television, the steam train, even the internet … But nowhere, on any listing of the island’s achievements will you find the phrase “culinary finesse”.’ In 2003, the results of a survey of Polish attitudes (#litres_trial_promo) towards British food were almost universally negative –108 out of 111 responses. A great many critical comments were recorded, including: ‘tasteless’, ‘unhealthy’, ‘lot of fat’, ‘not many vegetables’, ‘cheap’, ‘industrial’, ‘no specific cuisine’, ‘no traditional food’, ‘not nutritious’ and ‘no good bread’. Indeed, there was repeated amazement at the state of British bread. ‘They [the British] don’t eat normal bread, only tosty’ [white sliced bread],’ one respondent expanded. The existence of vinegar-flavoured crisps raised eyebrows too. Many people commented on the proliferation of fast food and the lack of home cooking in the UK. The problem, concluded one respondent, was that ‘the British don’t really know what good food tastes like’. Another opined that ‘if British people can survive their cooking they can survive anything’. Speak to people of diverse foreign origins (#litres_trial_promo) who live or work in the UK, and it will quickly become evident that food is one of their biggest obsessions. Wherever they come from, they pick out habits and customs that strike them as incomprehensible and strange, even though they are considered unremarkable by many natives. Most preface their opinions diplomatically with the things they really like about Britain – more personal freedom to live your life as you want being the compliment that crops up most frequently. But when it comes to food, the floodgates open. One German student told me: ‘When I moved to London from Berlin, my first experience of British food was on the boat from Dunkirk to Ramsgate. We wanted to eat something and waiting in the queue I saw them serving lasagne with chips and peas. I just felt so shocked by that, I left the queue and didn’t eat anything, thinking that I really couldn’t cope with this kind of food. The idea of eating chips with lasagne!’ That hoary old stereotype – chips with everything – still crops up regularly in outsiders’ images of British food. The traditional fish supper, (#litres_trial_promo) in particular, described by Egon Ronay as Britain’s ‘most distinctive contribution to world cuisine’, finds few admirers; on the contrary, most people from abroad are bemused by Britain’s fondness for what they see as an unappetizingly greasy meal, served without knives and forks and eaten from dirty newspaper. Others cannot get over Britain’s addiction to food consumed on the hoof. ‘When I first arrived I was surprised to see how people walk about eating in the street and quite astonished to see school children walking around at lunchtime eating a packet of crisps and some sweets,’ a French Cameroonian engineer told me. ‘The French have a completely different attitude. Either you go home for lunch or stay and eat in the canteen.’ People from other countries are gobsmacked by the food that British children eat. A Dutch mother told me: ‘Until I came to Britain, my children had never been exposed to sweets at all. My kids didn’t even think about them. They liked fruit but it was impossible to keep that up because always when they entered the nursery or playgroup in Britain there were people giving them sweets; not just biscuits – things like sticky sweets and fizzy drinks. In kindergarten in Holland, the kids got fruit and yogurt, but no sweets. It would be unheard of in Holland if the kids brought in crisps and sweets from home. They would not be allowed, a bit like bringing cigarettes into school. Here the kids open a lunch pack and there is at least one packet of crisps, one Mars bar or similar, and then they have these really weird takes on real food like cheese strings or something where they make the food into a funny, dinosaur shape. In order to persuade a child to eat a piece of cheese in Britain they have to make it into a shape!’ A Danish artist told me that when she arrived in the UK, she could not get over the contents of British shopping trolleys: ‘When standing in line I noticed what people had in their shopping baskets, all that sugar and fat in there, and I would be really amazed to see even old people stocking up with junk. Three years later I stand at the checkout here and still can’t get over all those trolleys filled with big amounts of pies, ready-made food, and lots of crisps – but without any vegetables. A Danish trolley, irrespective of social class, would look much different. In a word, “greener”. We eat a lot more green food and our dishes look nicer as a result because we eat more salads, more stewed vegetables, more vegetables on the side as a garnish.’ An Italian teacher recounted her first encounter with prospective in-laws, picking out what she saw as the entirely alien habit of staggered eating, the unceremonious speed of eating, and the lack of effort that goes into food in the UK. ‘I went to my [British] husband’s family for Christmas. It was a huge cultural shock, the saddest Christmas in my life. If somebody had come to my house in Emilia Romagna at any time, not even a festive period, my mum would make an extra effort – a special pasta, a special secondo [meat or fish course], more of everything, a real welcome. But I don’t think his mum is cooking at all. She doesn’t care about that. When it was lunchtime she said “Everything is in the fridge, everybody can help themselves” and off she went. At about 12 o’clock, his dad would go to fridge and make himself a sandwich, at 12.30 his sister served herself and so on. The day after was the same. At the actual Christmas dinner, after half an hour, all the food had already disappeared from the table. I have had to adapt to it, but for me, it was definitely shocking.’ People from abroad are regularly baffled by what they see as a lack of family meals and communal eating. One Austrian arts administrator explained: ‘Now that I live in Britain I still cook every night. We eat together every night and that is a most important time for us. But I see from other British families that this is considered really strange. In the UK, eating together is almost something you do on a Sunday if you are a “good” family. It’s really important to me that we sit properly, half an hour or so – not like in France where they take one and a half hours – and not a fancy meal necessarily, just something that’s properly cooked. We would not sit at the TV and eat either. I notice people do that here. You don’t come across much of what I would call proper, normal eating in the UK.’ For an executive summary of the outsider’s verdict on British food and eating habits, click onto the web pages of ‘Grenouilles au Royaume Uni’ (#litres_trial_promo) (‘Frogs in the UK’), a reportage by French people living in Britain, and look under the ironic heading ‘The Delights of British Cuisine’: ‘The British no longer consider a meal as a family ritual. That’s a growing trend in France too but it’s more noticeable here. English families cook less in general and rely more on food delivered to their homes. Members of the same family tend to eat on their own when they feel hungry. Hence the profusion of junk food, fast food, takeaway and so on. Direct consequence: 39 per cent of Britons are overweight, 19 per cent are obese.’ Although most Britons view it as entirely normal, Terry Durack, (#litres_trial_promo) restaurant critic for the Independent on Sunday, has voiced the ongoing incomprehension with which British eating habits are viewed internationally: ‘As an Australian, I often find myself blinking in disbelief at the average Briton’s relationship with food, at how unimportant it is to so many people. But then, I grew up in a country where good food was available to all at a good price. Here [in Britain], eating well is an economic issue, a class issue, and an education issue. Good food is available – at a price. And nobody is going to pay the price if good food is simply not a priority in their lives.’ Whether we like to admit it, Britain is seen abroad as a country that has well and truly lost the gastronomic plot, a food recidivist, demonstrating precious little capacity for improvement. 3 BRIT FOOD (#ulink_cac3da2a-52e2-5cf0-8bec-277a136c06b1) Any country with a healthy food culture has a distinct body of ingredients and dishes that that can be recognized widely as constituting a national cuisine, but in Britain even the native population has some difficulty agreeing on such a definition. Expatriate Britons, on the other hand, seem entirely clear. Scan the catalogues of companies that purvey distinctive British foods to Britons in the diaspora, such as Best of British (#litres_trial_promo) – a chain of stores throughout France – and you will be left in no doubt about what they crave. Their mission statement reads: ‘It is good, from time to time, to be able to have some of those traditional British foods we so enjoyed in the UK; a good fry-up with bacon, pork sausages and beans, steak and kidney pies, battered cod with mushy peas, proper curry, syrup sponge with real custard, trifle, etc. You will find them all at Best of British.’ To French people who happen on Best of British, the stock must appear bizarre. For the most part, the goods on offer represent a drab, sad testament to Britain’s addiction to over-processed, industrial food: Plumrose pork luncheon meat, Jackson’s white sliced bread, Tunnock’s marshmallow snowballs, Cadbury’s Curly Wurlys, Bisto gravy granules, Walker’s prawn cocktail crisps, Angel Delight, Spam, Pot Noodles, Heinz tinned coleslaw, spaghetti hoops and salad cream, Princes Hot Dogs, Campbell’s condensed mushroom soup, Hula Hoops, Fray Bentos tinned steak and kidney, frozen sausage rolls and Birds Dream Topping are just a few of the treats in store. For some Britons based abroad, these are delights to seek out and savour. Wherever they go in the world, Britons like to uphold their food traditions and remain loyal to an unedifying portfolio of industrial products whose main selling point is that they make cooking more or less redundant. An internet search for ‘British food’ will find a bevy of other companies – Brit Essentials, UK Goods, The British Shoppe, British Delights, Brit Superstore, British Corner Shop, amongst others – with a flourishing trade in much-loved, quintessential British foods. Branston pickle, Daddy’s Sauce, Bovril, Twiglets, Ribena, Bird’s custard powder, Oxo cubes, instant coffee, Heinz tomato soup, Ambrosia creamed rice, Coleman’s Cook-In sauces, tinned meat paste, Paxo sage and onion stuffing, fruit-free fruit-flavour jellies, Burton’s Wagon Wheels, ‘fun-size’ confectionery, and Yorkshire pudding mix are all typical offerings. Far from being food best left back in Blighty, these products are very much in demand, as one company that sends them to customers’ doorsteps (#litres_trial_promo) all around the world explains: ‘As ex-expats ourselves, we fully understand your frustrations in obtaining a taste of Britain in your new country. It seemed like Christmas when we did find a shop selling British (#litres_trial_promo) products.’ Frequently, these much-missed British foods are on show at social events run by Britons living abroad. Bemused local guests might be invited to British ‘curry suppers’ (#litres_trial_promo) or parties where a common offering is the nominally Mexican chilli con carne, made in the British style using mince and served with rice, to be eaten from a bowl while standing up – followed by mini Mars bars. Back in the UK, those intent on promoting the idea that Britain has lately undergone a food revolution and developed a food culture that can hold its head up, not only in Europe but in the world at large, would hasten to point out that many of these products are reminiscent of the stock list of a 1960s convenience store, and not at all representative of the way most British people now like to eat. If this is the case, then what exactly is ‘British food’ nowadays? In reality, this is a bit of a puzzle, both to the British and to other nationalities. Up until the 1970s, we had something that amounted to a national cuisine, a repertoire of commonly eaten dishes which most citizens would agree were British; toad-in-the-hole, roast meat with roast potatoes, Lancashire hotpot, boiled beef and carrots, mince and potatoes, bangers and mash, tripe with onions, boiled ham with parsley sauce, broths and hearty soups, shepherd’s pie, oxtail stew, cauliflower cheese, potted shrimp, steak pie, kippers, raised pies, steak and kidney pudding, jellied eel and any number of stick-to-the-ribs puddings. Depending on who you listen to, this cuisine was either a) monotonous and almost invariably badly cooked or b) straightforward, appetizing and wholesome. Either way, at least it was based on native raw ingredients – give or take a few billion packets of gravy powder. Even then, a certain confusion reigned. In countries with consolidated eating traditions, ‘national’ is the sum of the ‘local’ parts. In Britain, on the other hand, what was once ‘local’ – Cumberland sausage, York ham, Melton Mowbray pie – becomes a ‘national’ dish, which may be a reflection of the absence of regional food pride, or perhaps a sign of desperation about the thinness of Britain’s food culture. In 1998, the food writer Sybil Kapoor made a valiant attempt to map out a newer, more relevant definition for British food in her evocative book Simply British. (#litres_trial_promo) She abandoned any attempt at classification based on a body of popular dishes or culinary techniques, in favour of a collection of intrinsically British ingredients. ‘In my opinion,’ she wrote, ‘there is only one thing that unifies and defines British cooking and that is its ingredients.’ But while the book was an appetizing and much-needed reminder to the British that good cooking starts with fresh, indigenous materials, any territorial claim to ingredients is bound to be subject to counter-claim. For all we may try to assert the gastronomic equivalent of intellectual property rights over ingredients such as lamb, beetroot, lavender and greens, neither the Greeks, the Russians, the French nor the Chinese, respectively, will accept it. In 2004, the author and chef William Black set out on a tour around Britain to seek out the country’s traditional specialities for his book The Land That Thyme Forgot. (#litres_trial_promo) He wanted to taste ‘enigmatic, mysterious dishes’ like Hindle Wakes (boiled fowl stuffed with prunes served with a rich lemony butter sauce and herbs), Clanger (a suet crust pastry with meat in one end and jam in the other) and Salamangundie (a sort of salad made with eggs, anchovies, onion, chicken and grapes). At the beginning of his journey, Mr Blake was ‘absolutely convinced that somewhere there was a vibrant regionalism just waiting to blossom’, but he never did get to taste most of the dishes he wanted to because they had simply dropped off Britain’s culinary map. In the spirit of an archaeologist hastily excavating a site before the developers move in, he catalogued a list of British specialities or GODs (Great Obscure Dishes), appealing to readers to adopt a dish as a contribution towards nursing British food back to culinary health. Into this sanatorium he put regional specialities that one might have expected to be in a more healthy state, such as Yorkshire Fat Rascals (a fruit scone/rock cake hybrid), Syllabub (wine sweetened with whipped cream) and Liverpool Scouse (meat and potato stew). His conclusions made gloomy reading: ‘As I travelled around the country I did get a sense of a revival in regional food but it seemed a very one-sided, haphazard affair indeed, Yes, farmers’ markets are springing up all over the place, and these arenas at least allow us to talk to producers and begin to amass a degree of awareness about food, nutrition and seasonality, but at a price. Much of the produce seems so insanely expensive to most of us when compared to the mass-produced pap we are accustomed to buying in the local supermarket that we often find it hard to get it into perspective. In other words, any good food movement is perceived as elitist … Is it too late for us ever to revive this disappearing gastronomy? Quite possibly. But we can nag. And rootle around and search for this golden grail, a renascent food culture that has to be more than just the ability to buy carrots with mud on them, and the odd farmhouse cheese.’ Slowly but surely, over the last 20 years, as our food shopping tastes have been shaped and increasingly dominated by supermarkets, Britain has abandoned its native gastronomy and become the culinary magpie of the world, raiding other countries’ gastronomic heritages and stockpiling their offerings for its nest. Although we live in a globalized age where true diversity is ever more elusive, most countries, both rich and poor, can still point to dishes that are more or less uniquely their own and perceived by outsiders as such. Germans eat sauerkraut; Vietnamese enjoy pho; Czechs are loyal to goulash and dumplings; Sri Lankans won’t go long without eating a stringhopper. The British? Well, that will be lasagne, moussaka, chicken kiev, pizza, fajitas, baltis, Thai red curry, hummus – basically, anything other than British. The British actively project this magpie persona abroad. Every two years, different countries proudly showcase their cutting-edge food wares at the Anuga trade show in Germany. In 2005, smiling staff at the ‘Best of British’ section were pictured by The Grocer (#litres_trial_promo) magazine standing proudly in front of displays, not of Lincolnshire chine or Bakewell tarts, but of pot noodles and crisps with ‘authentic British flavours’. What the word ‘authentic’ meant in relation to laboratory flavourings was not made explicit, but it was evidently thought to be a selling point that these crisps offered six months’ shelf-life, and labelling in eleven foreign languages. Britain’s weakness for junk food is now so longstanding, that our taste for it can almost count as traditional. In the same article, The Grocer noted that while other countries focused on traditional products normally associated with them – pasta and olive oil from Italy, cheese from Holland, and so on – ‘the 63-strong Food From Britain section was a real cornucopia of world cuisine with Indian and Oriental brands putting on a strong show’. This is what Britain’s food industry does best these days: snack-bar sushi, instant noodles, frozen pizza, gloopy stir-fry sauce, long-life Peking duck wraps … We are now the international specialists in making inferior industrial copies of other countries’ favourite foods. No one jumped to contradict the Foreign Secretary Robin Cook in 2001 when he hailed chicken tikka masala (#litres_trial_promo) as the most popular British dish. Chicken tikka masala (#litres_trial_promo) is a British ‘Indian’ dish, unrecognized in India, invented by a Bangladeshi cook. Mr Cook hailed it as ‘a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences’ on the grounds that the masala sauce was devised to ‘satisfy the desire of British people for gravy’. But this dish is really a symbol of the weakness of the indigenous cuisine in Britain, and is a demonstration of the British tendency to fill this vacuum by importing and traducing misunderstood foreign dishes. At a more nostalgic, emotional level, the British do still want to cling on to a more coherent, traditionally British food identity. However, an attempt to unite our culinary past with our eclectic culinary present is not without difficulties – witness the marketing pitch for chef James Martin’s (#litres_trial_promo) 2005 book, Easy British Food: ‘Typically when asked about British food, thoughts turn immediately to a plate of good old fish and chips followed by the less inspiring meat and two veg. This is just not the case anymore – Britain is jam-packed with a diverse and delicious variety of food … James has packed the book full of classic dishes you thought only your mother had the secret to from homemade Cumberland sausages to Welsh rarebit, from jam roly poly to raspberry Pavlova, Easy British Food does not disappoint.’ That is the British bit of the sell, but everyone from the editor to the sales manager knows that a volume of straight, traditional British cooking is not commercial enough or sufficiently seductive to market to Britons sceptical about their own culinary heritage, so it needs a hint of foreign promise added: ‘Inherited British favourites from overseas have not been overlooked – Margarita pizza, lamb curry, salmon risotto and cr?me brul?e are all now firm favourites in the heart of the British nation, all of these and more are made easy in this delicious collection …’ This voices the almost pathetic British need to make foreign dishes our own in order to compensate for what we consider to be the inadequacies of our own native cooking tradition. This is our new food identity, dipping into cuisines from all over the world and trying to unite them in a new composite product that can plausibly be regarded as British. While Queen Elizabeth II (#litres_trial_promo) may still represent a more conservative British palate – she is said not to like garlic or long pasta – market research has shown that Britain is the country in Europe most fond of foreign tastes. Seven out of ten Britons say that they ‘like foreign food’ (#litres_trial_promo) compared to 29 per cent of Spaniards. One survey of European eating habits (#litres_trial_promo) remarked on how Germans were ‘conservative consumers’ favouring traditional German food. The same applied to Spaniards whose eating habits remain ‘still very much based on a Mediterranean-type diet’. While Britain likes to commend itself, quite legitimately, on its openness to foreign culinary ideas and influences, there is no escaping the fact that this taste is powered by lack of belief in our indigenous gastronomy. The British lack of culinary confidence was demonstrated rather spectacularly (twice) during US President George Bush’s 2003 visit to the UK. (#litres_trial_promo) At Buckingham Palace, the Queen served him a meal – billed as ‘Le Menu’ – consisting of potage Germiny, d?lice de fl?tan aux herbes, supr?me de poulet fermier au basilica, and bombe glac?e Copelia, which was French both in language and concept. Dining at Downing Street with Tony Blair, eating a menu created by Nigella Lawson, the American President was treated to roast pumpkin, radicchio and Welsh feta salad, braised ham with honey and mustard glaze, creamed potatoes and seasonal vegetables, followed by double-baked apple pie with cheddar crust and vanilla ice cream. The Guardian’sMatthew Fort, (#litres_trial_promo) for one, was unimpressed: ‘You might have thought that the occasion of the state visit of an American president would herald a little tub-thumping of our own, for the culinary fireworks which we have been so busy claiming for ourselves … It sounds quite tasty and homely … but I can’t help feeling that Queen Nigella may have gone a bit far in the hand of friendship direction in an effort to make Citizen Bush feel at home. Pumpkin has a greater following in America than it does here … and what is more American than apple pie, with or without the cheddar crust? … Come to that, when has radicchio been a British vegetable of choice? And why feta cheese, Welsh or not? What’s wrong with Caerphilly?’ When ambassadors for Britain are so half-hearted about serving British food, it is no surprise that ordinary people feel the same way. By 2004, only 63 per cent of the food eaten in Britain was home-produced, (#litres_trial_promo) down from 75 per cent in 1994. We seem to be eating less native produce, not more. This situation is in part a reflection of the preference of British supermarkets for global sourcing which leads to diminishing amounts of British food on British shelves. In 2005, a survey by Friends of the Earth (#litres_trial_promo) found that two-thirds of the apples sold in the height of the UK apple season came from overseas. Some of the apple varieties being offered had travelled more than 12,000 miles. The reliance of supermarkets on cheap imported foods means that Britons who do want to buy British food find it difficult to do so. For decades, British consumers have been exhorted by numerous food industry marketing bodies such as the Meat and Livestock Commission and the National Farmers Union to support British farmers, but this has fallen mainly on deaf ears. In countries with a thriving food culture, consumers feel connected to those who produce food, not least because many of them have a producer in their extended family or circle of friends. In Britain, on the other hand, few consumers have any connection with farming or primary food production, largely because it has now become so intensive, industrial and factory-based, that fewer and fewer people are engaged in it. The vast majority of Britons are divorced from the countryside and know little or nothing about what it can produce. Indeed, the urban masses tend to see farmers in an unsympathetic light as potential chisellers and fiddlers of European Union subsidies, people who are not to be trusted. Consequently, they do not get a sympathetic hearing. In recent years, a slight but significant resurgence of interest in smaller-scale, less industrialized food amongst opinion formers has opened up a more positive dialogue between producers and consumers. In 2002, the chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, Richard Burge (#litres_trial_promo), launched an initiative called British Food Fort-night (#litres_trial_promo) and took the opportunity to appeal to consumers, using the term ‘producers’ rather than ‘farmers’, and emphasizing pleasure rather than patriotic duty: ‘The time has come to stand up for British food and its producers! We have to remind consumers of the great pleasure which comes from eating locally-grown, high-quality foods, and just how important it is to the British countryside at this time that we eat its produce.’ Now an annual event each October, British Food Fortnight aims to make everyone in the UK more aware of the diversity and quality of home-grown, locally-sourced British produce. Consumers are urged to seek out seasonal produce, cook a British meal for friends and explore British regional cooking. This may be a surprisingly tall order: according to a survey carried out by the Institute of Grocery Distribution (#litres_trial_promo) just before British Food Fortnight 2005, only one in five Britons will go out of their way to buy British food if it means paying more for it, while over half of all shoppers polled said that they didn’t care where their food came from. The Institute pointed out that while 87 per cent of respondents considered farming to be an important part of British heritage, the challenge was to translate this patriotism into purchasing British food because Britons did not generally ‘see the connection with food production and the countryside’. By 2005, British Food Fortnight was still being run as a cottage industry. Despite pressure on the government from both Houses of Parliament, the media at large and the farming press, the government’s contribution was actually reduced in 2005 from some ?46,000 to ?45,000. The event went ahead on a paltry budget of ?108,000, cobbled together from sponsorship from the Nationwide building society, retailers Booths and Budgens, and other supportive organizations. ‘The sad reality,’ commented organizer Alexia Robinson, (#litres_trial_promo) ‘is that there is no overall body representing British food producers and, therefore, there is no consensus, no unified marketing and no easy mechanism for raising funding on behalf of the industry as a whole … Asking the public to buy British food because they feel sorry for farmers will not cut it.’ As always in Britain, any attempt to have small food businesses – or anything that smacks of the artisan – taken seriously turns out to be a lonely battle. The relevant government departments in successive government administrations have put their efforts into pleasing the captains of the processed food industry, and have continued to dismiss small-scale food producers as marginal – and therefore irrelevant – to the country’s food effort. There is a persistent strand in British regulatory thinking that views the existence of anything akin to peasant farming as retrograde because it might be taken as an indicator of economic backwardness. More recently, small food projects have begun to attract a little support from government and local authority departments charged with regeneration and tourism. Some city centre management teams are beginning to wake up to the fact that independent shops and farmers’ markets can increase the number of people who use the town centre by making them more interesting and lively places to visit. In British cities dominated by supermarket monoculture, a thriving business has sprung up in ‘Continental markets’ – imported, highly stereotyped, usually French-themed markets – because they appear to inject some gastronomic life. Tourism authorities have latched on to the idea of culinary tourism and have begun to promote small food operations, such as farm shops, that help create a new, more favourable image of Britain in the visitor’s mind. But, again, this new-found enthusiasm does not stem from a belief in good food for good food’s own sake, but derives from the realization that it can bring other social and economic benefits. Indeed, small-scale British food is in danger of turning into a heritage industry. Stately homes, garden centres, museum and farm shops are filling their shelves with edible souvenirs made to an antique recipe – real or imagined – loading their shelves with jars of jams, jellies, chutneys, sweets and endless cakes and biscuits, masquerading as something you might pick up at a Women’s Institute market. Most such enterprises are run by well-intentioned people who are naive enough to believe that by buying local and British, this is automatically some guarantee of quality. In fact, there is a danger that purchasing home-produced food is being transformed into a quaint, nostalgic Sunday afternoon leisure activity instead of a viable everyday alternative to the tedium and uniformity of the supermarket. The local food shops that actually improve shopping choice are the small minority that take risks with really fresh meat, fish, and seasonal fruit and vegetables; these are places where you can buy the raw ingredients for a meal, not just a jar of redcurrant and rose petal jelly for your elderly auntie. Medium-sized food companies, struggling to make ends meet because of the crippling low returns they receive from their supermarket masters, are keen as English mustard to come up with new ‘British’ products that cash in on the vogue for British food. Large industrial creameries are inventing more profitable ‘speciality’ cheeses, basically the same old push-button cheese, tarted up in gimmicky forms with stripes and swirls of colour. Take your pick from white Stilton with a raspberry and strawberry ripple, added ‘orange crumble’, apricots or cranberries, or rubbery cheddar with pizza, ‘Mexican’, or even tandoori flavour. At the same time, the ‘Big Food’ interests that are inimical to the development of any genuine grass roots British food culture based on diversity in retailing and food production are also getting in on the ‘Fly the Flag for British Food’ act as a self-promotional tool. In the autumn of 2005, a government quango, the Sustainable Farming and Food Implementation Group, organized a conference to discuss what might be done to reconnect British consumers with British food. The event was chaired by Tesco’s director of corporate affairs. Many farmers blame this retailer for the downturn in their fortunes because it demands such low prices from its suppliers that it makes food production unsustainable for all but the very largest farmers and growers. The Tenant Farmers’ Association refused to attend the event because of Tesco’s involvement. ‘Tesco is simply not interested in allowing farmers to communicate with consumers,’ said the Association’s chief executive, George Dunn. (#litres_trial_promo) Shortly after this event, the supermarket chain Sainsbury’s ran a ‘Taste of Britain’ (#litres_trial_promo) competition in conjunction with the Daily Telegraph to find the best suppliers of British food and drink. This provided another platform for exaggerated claims about the UK’s food revival. ‘British food and drink has gone through somewhat of a renaissance in recent years, after decades of ridicule from our European contemporaries,’ read Sainsbury’s advertorial, ‘so much so that we can now compete with the best of them within the gastronomic world.’ It also gave Sainsbury’s a chance to associate itself with Britain’s struggling small producers. All British supermarket chains now seize every opportunity to be seen hand in hand with these ‘food heroes’ because they occupy the moral high ground in the eyes of British consumers – even if few of us actively support them with our purchases. At the same time as this competition was running, farmers across the UK – led by the campaign group Farmers For Action (#litres_trial_promo) – were either throwing out or giving away their produce in protest against the unfair trading practices that had led to hundreds of farms going out of business while supermarket profits soared. On paper, it is possible to mount a reasonably convincing argument that in the last few years, we have moved towards a clearer, saner definition of what British food should mean; a vision of a new, modern British food culture. The buzz words are now ‘local’ and ‘small-scale’; farmers’ markets go from strength to strength; more towns have a specialist food shop selling some handmade, regional food; organic box schemes have waiting lists; increasing numbers of artisans are scraping a living by dealing direct with the public using mail order. But these are little green shoots in an otherwise bleak and homogenous British food landscape where globalized industrial food and supermarket monoculture is the order of the day. A tiny, dedicated band of Britons actively seeks out and encourages high-quality, independent, locally-produced food. Such people are probably even more committed to their cause than food-loving citizens in other countries who tend to take the availability of good food for granted. A slightly bigger fringe in Britain sees such food as an interesting and desirable minor accessory to the main business of shopping in supermarkets and living on a mass-produced, industrial diet. As the food writer Tamasin Day-Lewis (#litres_trial_promo) put it: ‘We’re in a very different place in this country, food-wise, from where we were 20 years ago. And it’s mostly disadvantageous. Industrialization of food production, the supermarkets persuading us that it’s OK to eat things that have been imported thousands of miles with no regard to seasonality … we’re totally losing our heritage. There’s a dwindling band of people growing rare apple breeds or planting traditional tomatoes, but they’re regarded as rather eccentric.’ Our attitude to food in Britain has certainly moved on, but it has not improved. 4 RENAISSANCE RESTAURANTS (#ulink_8259fc79-79c3-5f43-a1ff-f3dcb7c42afe) A loose coalition of interest groups in Britain likes to suggest that British cuisine has been so thoroughly overhauled and improved that it can now be considered as one of the most dynamic and exciting in the world. This is a rainbow alliance, composed of Fly the Flag patriots, perpetual optimists who believe that our tendency to self-deprecation is more worrying than our cooking, Little Englanders who resent the mere suggestion that Johnny Foreigner might eat better than we do, and food processors, restaurateurs, hoteliers and assorted tourism experts who have spent too much time reading their own marketing propaganda. People attempting to mount a convincing case for Britain’s supposedly rehabilitated food culture have become adept at drawing a veil over the cooking (or lack of it) that goes on in the domestic sphere. They prefer not to focus on the nation’s growing daily dependence on push-button industrial food and quickly skip to what appears to be firmer ground – Britain’s Great Restaurant Renaissance. Where Britain once had to cringe when its food was under discussion, nowadays its restaurants have allowed it to assume a cocky swagger. At some point in the 1990s, London began to be hailed (#litres_trial_promo) – in Britain at least – as ‘the restaurant capital of the world’, a grandiose claim attributed to design guru and restaurateur, Sir Terence Conran. It is a theme to which many people, some with vested interests, others without, have since warmed. The small, London-based Restaurant magazine (#litres_trial_promo) picked up the ball and ran with it in 2002 when it took it upon itself to run a competition to judge nothing less ambitious than ‘The World’s 50 Best Restaurants’. (#litres_trial_promo) Now held on an annual basis, it habitually locates British restaurants at the forefront of global gastronomy, thereby generating fulsome media coverage. In 2005, the Fat Duck, run by the much-lauded chef Heston Blumenthal, scooped both the ‘Best in the World’ and ‘Best in Europe’ awards. British restaurants in general were awarded 14 of the 50 illustrious slots, with 11 of these in the capital. England had four restaurants in the top ten, France just one and Italy none. According to its editor the awards represented a combination of ‘commonsense’ and the considered, informed opinions of ‘our contacts in the industry’, some 500 judges in all – chefs, food journalists, people from cook schools and academies and top companies. Their precise identity and nationality, however, remains confidential to Restaurant magazine. Not everyone was convinced by this top 50. Irish chef Richard Corrigan (#litres_trial_promo) dared to suggest that Britain did not deserve to be judged any better than France, Italy or Spain. ‘There is a slight bias in the list,’ he said. ‘You have to take it with a very big pinch of salt.’ Yet this vision of Britain as being in the vanguard of world restaurant culture has become firmly embedded. It feeds our almost pathological need to shake off our Bad Food Britain image and display some good food credentials on a world stage while simultaneously rubbing our rivals’ noses in it. ‘The world has had enough of red-checked table-cloths and fat cheerful men called Carlo ladling gloops of choleric ragout atop plates of overcooked pasta,’ wrote Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times. (#litres_trial_promo) ‘It has wearied very quickly too of the rough‘n’ready Piedmont and Tuscan peasant cuisines that kept our increasingly capricious palates briefly engaged in the 1990s. And meanwhile, classic French cooking with its epic hauteur has become about as fashionable as Marshal P?tain or Johnny Halliday, which is why the French are desperately trying to reinvent their whole cuisine.’ Britain is now convinced that London is firmly ensconced as the planet’s restaurant capital. ‘The city fizzes with gastronomic challenge and enthusiastic, knowledgeable customers,’ wrote the London Evening Standard’s highly respected restaurant critic, Fay Maschler. (#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, London does have some exceptionally fine restaurants with serious, accomplished chefs who would attract recognition anywhere, but any suggestion that they constitute the glittering pinnacle of a solid, broad-based restaurant culture, rather than beacons of hope in a predominantly bleak British food landscape, amounts to wishful thinking. Tellingly, it is hard to think of any restaurant of note in the UK that willingly brands itself as ‘British’ pure and simple, because of the negative connotations that adjective has when attached to the noun ‘cookery’. In the words of the Harden’s London Restaurants (#litres_trial_promo) guide: ‘As the capital of a country which, for at least two centuries, has had no particular reputation for gastronomy, London’s attractions are rarely indigenous. By and large, only tourists look for “English” restaurants.’ Traditionally, Britain has a pub culture, rather than a restaurant culture, which is why, according to Harden’s, there are ‘very few traditional restaurants of note and even fewer which can be recommended’. The nearest you might get to most people’s idea of traditional British food would be Rules in London’s Covent Garden, a venerable establishment commended by the Tatler restaurant guide in 2005 as the place ‘to impress visiting American friends’ with its ‘age-old but not old-fashioned dishes in an atmosphere of Edwardian exuberance’. Diners at Rules can savour dishes such as dressed crab, smoked venison with juniper, roast Lincolnshire rabbit with bacon and black pudding, leeks Mornay, steak, kidney and oyster pudding, and roast beef with Yorkshire pudding. Rules (#litres_trial_promo), remarked Field (#litres_trial_promo) magazine, ‘fills a vital role in educating an increasingly ignorant public who have lost touch with what their countryside can provide’. Otherwise, apart from brewery-owned chains of provincial hotels which serve up something approximating to the traditional Sunday lunch ‘roast dinner’, most serious and ambitious chefs prefer to describe their cookery as ‘modern British’. The ‘modern’ delineates what they serve from the negative connotations attached to ‘British’ and leaves ample room for manoeuvre when it comes to using foreign cooking techniques and ingredients. Fergus Henderson, (#litres_trial_promo) chef-owner of St John restaurant in London, who serves dishes that might reasonably be construed as British, such as nettle soup, ox heart and chips, and marrow bones with parsley salad, avoids any ‘British’ tag. ‘I prefer to see myself as a modernist who happens to be cooking good, indigenous food,’ he has said. Gary Rhodes, the chef widely credited with promoting the joys of traditional British food, called his television series and book New British Classics – surely a contradiction in terms – but the ‘new’ in the title distances it from unreconstructed ‘British’ cookery. Just how British are the most highly-rated ‘modern British’ restaurants? Many could just as easily be categorized as French. Naturally, they use the finest British ingredients, but their cooking techniques and kitchen organization pay homage to Escoffier. Chef Tom Aikens (#litres_trial_promo) was reportedly ‘quite miffed’ when the Independent on Sunday’s food writer, Sybil Kapoor, said that she considered his Michelin-starred food British. He himself saw his food as ‘more French than anything’. In the top British kitchens, a Franco-British patois is frequently the order of the day with diligent ‘sous’ and ‘commis’ chefs barking out ‘Oui, chef!’ countless times in one service. Their menus are dotted with French words such as ‘nage’, ‘jus’, ‘velout?’, ‘tranche’ and ‘confit’ for which British chefs can find no suitable simple English translation. The Good Food Guide 2006 (#litres_trial_promo) awarded its top rating to four restaurants – Gordon Ramsay, the Fat Duck, Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons and Winteringham Fields – all of which are essentially French in approach. But it also acclaimed the emergence of ‘Food Britannia’, which it characterized as more chefs using local and seasonal produce and boasting about it. The guide commended restaurants such as the Three Fishes, at Mitton in Lancashire, for serving dishes such as heather-reared Bowland lamb, and Lancashire hotpot with pickled red cabbage, and the Buttery in Glasgow for its Isle of Mull mussels with Finnan haddock and bacon. This encouraging trend was instantly seized on by The Times as more evidence of Britain’s new, reformed food culture. ‘No longer will the maitre d’ at Maxi be able to curl his lip in quite such supercilious disdain at the mention of British cuisine … The Good Food Guide has made it official: British food, like British art, music and sport, is now at Europe’s cutting edge.’ A more circumspect conclusion, against the larger backdrop of Britain’s restaurant and catering industry, would be that native food is still a rarefied minority experience amongst British catering establishments. A quick head count of British restaurant menus will reveal thousands of establishments that continue to serve ‘roasted Mediterranean vegetables’ made using Dutch hydroponic vegetables as a winter staple, or seared, imported Sri Lankan tuna as the fish of the day, in preference to the local foods on their doorstep. Britain’s accommodating, some might say globalized, attitude to food is reflected in the capital’s restaurant scene which is rich in flavours and techniques that are not indigenous. London is one the world’s most diverse and cosmopolitan cities with an array of eating-out possibilities – everything from Peruvian, Ethiopian and Indonesian through to Korean, Ghanaian and Afghani – that reflects its lively, multicultural personality. ‘Where London does score – and score magnificently – is the range and quality it offers of other national styles of cooking. Always an entrepot, London is now a culinary melting pot too: in terms of scale and variety, its only obvious competitor is New York,’ says Harden’s London Restaurants. (#litres_trial_promo) Outside the metropolis, Indian, Chinese and Thai restaurants throw a much-needed lifeline to the cause of restauration on every small shopping parade and obscure outpost throughout the British Isles, where otherwise there would be little else in the air apart from the distinctively British odour of deep-fat frying. Just how good or representative of their parent cuisines many British ‘ethnic’ restaurants are is a moot point, but we love to talk them up anyway. ‘I would argue that in London you will find better Thai, Indian, Chinese, Italian and French cooking than you would in the indigenous countries,’ proclaimed Rod Liddle. (#litres_trial_promo) This is a ludicrous proposition but it exemplifies the new-found British ability to pontificate confidently on matters gastronomic from a basis of colonial-style ignorance. It is true that many Indian restaurants have now ditched their flock wallpaper 1960s curry-house image and adopted classier names that evoke tourist board images of India. Some are excellent, but many more continue to serve little more than pre-cooked cubes of meat in a ‘variety’ of chameleon sauces derived from a small number of bought-in, factory-made spice pastes, served with chemically-coloured rice. Many of these meals are cooked by the children of first generation immigrants who consider themselves British first and foremost. Their appreciation of mother-country cooking is often limited. In the biggest British cities, where there is a local population of Chinese extraction, one can find restaurants serving quite authentic Chinese food. Commonly, these restaurants operate two distinct menus. One is written in English and offers Westernized ‘Chinese’ staples designed to please the British market. The hallmarks here are super-real flavours based on megadoses of salt, sugar and vinegar, and lots of deep-frying. Another, written in Chinese, offers an authentic, healthy repertoire of traditional Chinese dishes considered to be too real and too daunting for the British: everything from fish-head soup through braised chicken feet to rice congee. British diners are rarely able to eat from a true Chinese menu unless they are fortunate enough to speak a Chinese dialect fluently or are in the same party as a Chinese friend. Generally, the Chinese community likes to keep real Chinese food to itself. Staff will positively steer non-Chinese customers away from more authentic dishes because they worry that they will not go down well. Timothy Mo’s novel, Sour Sweet, (#litres_trial_promo) which follows two first generation Chinese immigrants, Chen and Lily, who set up a takeaway restaurant in Greater London, gave an insight into the thinking behind it. ‘The food they sold, certainly wholesome, nutritious, colourful, even tasty in its way, had been researched by Chen. It bore no resemblance at all to Chinese cuisine. They served from a stereotyped menu, similar to countless other establishments in the UK. The food was, if nothing else, thought Lily, provenly successful: English tastebuds must be as degraded as their care of their parents; it could, of course, be part of a scheme of cosmic repercussion. “Sweet and sour pork” was their staple, naturally: batter musket balls encasing a tiny core of meat, laced with a scarlet sauce that had an interesting effect on the urine of the consumer the next day. Chen knew because he tried some and almost fainted with shock the morning after, fearing some frightful internal haemorrhaging … “Spare ribs” (whatever they were) also seemed popular. So were spring rolls, basically a Northerner’s snack, which Lily parsimoniously filled mostly with beansprouts. All to be packed in the rectangular silver boxes, food coffins, to be removed and consumed statutorily off-premises. The only authentic dish they served was rice, the boiled kind; the fried rice they sold with peas and ham bore no resemblance to the chowfaan Lily cooked for themselves …’ Although Britain’s willingness to embrace world cuisine – albeit in bogus forms – is admirable, the huge success of non-British restaurants in the UK reflects the relative weakness of our indigenous cuisine. The natives of Bremen, Bruges, Bratislava, Bologna, Barcelona and Bordeaux feel less need to eat foreign food and remain largely immune to its charms quite simply because they are more content with their own home-grown offering. For them, a restaurant specializing in a foreign cuisine represents a potentially interesting novel addition to native cuisine, but it is not a substitute for it. Because there is nothing much to defend in the way of a British restaurant tradition, our new-found claim to gastronomic distinction lies in our eclecticism, our willingness to break rules and invent new traditions. We have no baby to throw out with the bath water. We start with a clean sheet of ideas and a healthy openness to ingredients and culinary approaches from all over the world. But the pitfalls are obvious – a mongrel mish-mash of misunderstood foreign cuisine, cooked by amateur chefs and served to naive and inexperienced diners. As Jonathan Meades, (#litres_trial_promo) the most authoritative of all recent British restaurant critics, pointed out, this is not a recipe for success, but a culinary Tower of Babel: ‘Instead of repairing or reinventing its own cooking, it has crazes: French, Thai, Swedish, Cantonese … There is no kitchen in the world that is safe from the depredations of the British cook exhibiting both a denial of confidence in national identity and the dumb conviction that the grass is always greener.’ Britain’s globetrotting culinary tastes reach their nadir in the country’s secondary cities, where restaurants strive to show sophistication by their bold synthesis of diverse ingredients and cooking styles. Here is a typical menu from a ‘modern British’ brasserie in one of Britain’s largest cities: STARTERS Thai fishcakes with sweet chilli sauceFrench onion soup and toasted cheeseBlackened Cajun chicken Caesar saladChicken liver parfait, toast and spiced fig chutneySeared scallops, sunblush tomato, potato and rocket saladMoules marini?resKing prawn tempura and ponzu sauceRoast field mushroom bruschetta, pesto and parmesanSeared squid with rocket, chilli and limeCrispy duck, beansprouts and watercress with soy and sesame dressingTiger prawn salad with mango MAIN COURSES Shepherd’s pie and peasCalves liver and bacon, mash and onion gravyTuna burger with wasabi mayonnaise and chilli friesBraised lamb shank with mint, garlic and root vegetable couscousFive-spiced duck with sweet potatoes, pak choi and shitake mushroomsSteak fritesNasi Goreng with roast chicken supremeSalmon fishcake with spinach, lemon and parsley sauceFish and chips with mushy peasSeabass fillet with hot and sweet sour vegetable noodlesSmoked haddock, mash, poached egg and Mornay sauceRisotto with sweetcorn, peas and mushroomsRoasted shellfish spaghetti with lemon, garlic and parsleyJumbo macaroni three cheeses, roast tomato and toastRigatoni, tomato, spicy sausage and mozzarella bakeRed onion and mulled cheddar tartCoq au vin DESSERTS Tarte Tatin and vanilla ice creamSticky toffee pudding and custardWhite chocolate chip brownie with chocolate sauceLemon cheesecake with strawberriesWarm chocolate brownie with vanilla ice creamPannacotta with spiced poached pear If they were so minded, diners in this type of establishment could construct a meal with some territorial integrity – French onion soup, say, followed by steak frites and tarte Tatin. They might head East and feast on tiger prawn salad with mango and five-spiced duck. In an Italophile mood they could tuck into roast field mushroom bruschetta, rigatoni and pannacotta. But more than likely, most British diners will find themselves eating a combination like prawn tempura and ponzu sauce, followed by risotto, followed by chocolate brownie. In other words, it is a mongrel menu that cannibalizes world cuisine and spawns meals that do not gel into a coherent whole because they lack any sound unifying principle. The existence of such menus might cause the trusting diner to suppose that the kitchen has mastered a repertoire of diverse skills and tastes, when, in reality, these are far beyond the reach of the average second division city bistro or brasserie. Nonetheless, many British people will turn up and pay for this type of package and go away pleased with what they are given because they lack the experience to know whether of its type it is any good or not. Once again, we are putting ourselves at a disadvantage by overlooking what is familiar and on our doorstep, instead dabbling with exotica we rarely understand. Italians have strong ideas about what constitutes a good risotto. Indians recognize a fine masala dosa when they see one. Japanese people know when their sashimi is truly fresh and refuse to settle for less. Back in Britain, any undertrained, ill-equipped outfit can trade on the advantage that if it serves foreign food, then few people – the chefs included – will be equipped to judge it. It is a case of the blind leading the blind. Bill Knott, editor of Caterer and Hotelkeeper, (#litres_trial_promo) likened it to a game of Chinese whispers where the original message gets more and more distorted in the transmission. ‘The average menu [in the UK], even in restaurants proudly describing themselves as “modern British”, is written in a curious mixture of French, Italian, Spanish and just about any other language that doesn’t involve hieroglyphs. Even worse, many of the foreign terms used are thoroughly inaccurate and deeply misleading. Millefeuille of aubergine, cappuccino of white beans, chicory tarte Tatin … the game of gastronomic Chinese whispers, in which a modish, foreign-sounding dish goes through so many incarnations that it becomes completely meaningless, is all the rage.’ Study the restaurant reviews in national newspapers and you will notice that some 80–90 per cent consist of restaurants in central London. Indeed, restaurant critics frequently get it in the neck from readers for overlooking restaurants outside the metropolis. Claims that newspapers are London-centric in this respect do have some basis, but it overlooks the plight of the British restaurant reviewer. Although it is entertaining to read the occasional excoriating review, readers mainly look for recommendations from critics. The minute they travel beyond the M4, however, the critics have a problem because there are simply not enough establishments worth writing about, and those that are have already been reviewed ten times over. So the critic faces an invidious choice: step outside London and face the risk of having to write a negative review of the ‘elitist London critic attacks popular local institution’ variety – certain to incense the locals – or leave well alone and court criticism for lazily ignoring ‘The Regions’. The Observer’s restaurant reviewer, Jay Rayner, (#litres_trial_promo) attracted a large mail bag, many letters using language ‘ripe enough to make a navvy blush’, amounting to ‘string the bastard up’, when he wrote a scathing review of a Desperate Dan-style pub lunch in the West Midlands wherein he lamented the absence of decent restaurants in the area. ‘I sit down with guidebooks and scan furiously, hoping, with each new study, that somehow, something might have changed since the last time I looked. I scan the net. I beg for recommendations. But nothing.’ In response to the heated post bag, Mr Rayner countered accusations of London-centrism by clarifying that he had in fact reviewed establishments from the Isle of Wight to Edinburgh and from the west of Devon to the easternmost tip of Norfolk, and he remained recalcitrant. ‘London really is the best place in Britain in which to eat out, and I refuse to pretend otherwise. There are so many more restaurants here. The food is better. The variety is better. The inventiveness is greater … I’m not claiming that it is always the best value … Nor am I claiming that there are no good restaurants outside London. Obviously there are. Certain cities – Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh – are serious contenders. But still nothing matches the capital’s range. One virtue of a crowded city like London is that it forces everyone to raise their game.’ Such candour is refreshing. However much Britons living outside London attempt to deny it, there is a dearth of good eating places outside the capital. Londoners may well have a terrific choice of restaurants on their doorstep, but their good fortune is not shared by the would-be eating-out public elsewhere. It is no surprise that top British chef, Gordon Ramsay, chose to make a television series entitled Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares: (#litres_trial_promo) the only surprise is that no one thought up such a project sooner since there is no shortage of ailing restaurants in Britain to provide ample fodder. Nor is it a coincidence that the establishments featured were all outside central London in places where evidence of the much-vaunted British Food Revolution is often thin on the ground. Mr Ramsay’s thumbnail sketch of one Essex Kitchen Nightmare might easily apply to thousands of other aspiring eateries throughout the UK: ‘With over 40 dishes to choose from, Philippe’s menu is global both in size and choice – everything from the traditional all-day English breakfast to Hoisin noodles and Mexican platters. And 70 per cent of the food is bought-in, ready-prepared then often reheated and not cooked to order – an expensive, false economy … The Ramsay take? Definitely more confusion than fusion.’ Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares identified the key shortcomings of too many British restaurants: inadequately trained chefs with ridiculously large, over-ambitious, globalized menus, relying on bought-in food that can be either deep-fried or microwaved. Anyone who takes a stroll past a parade of British catering establishments between 10.00 and 12.00 on a weekday morning can count on seeing fleets of ‘food service’ chilled vans delivering supplies. Short cuts for chefs are not unique to the UK – in every affluent country lesser restaurants do buy in labour-saving items such as pre-cut chips – but in Britain such companies can provide a total service for the caterer, to the extent that if you scan the public notices in local newspapers, it is now common to see catering licences that have been granted on a ‘microwave-only’ basis. When he wrote his Bad Food Guide in 1967 – a book in which he lampooned low standards in British restaurants – Derek Cooper (#litres_trial_promo) noted the growing trend towards a uniform blandness or ‘untaste’, a consequence of the creep of convenience food into restaurants, and he predicted more to come: ‘The era of technical development that the catering industry in Britain is undergoing will inevitably mean more standardization, less and less food will be cooked in the kitchens of small restaurants, and more and more will be prepared in factories under conditions of the utmost hygiene, and deep-frozen for consumption hundreds of miles away and months later.’ His comments proved prescient. These days, British chefs don’t need to cook at all. There is no need to do a catering course or serve your time as an apprentice in a reputable kitchen. No need to pay professional wages that will interest a serious young chef. All it takes is someone with half a brain who can be relied upon to turn up each shift and not run out of food; someone whose job it is to reheat, deep-fry, plate and assemble. Like lazy domestic cooks who pop out to Tesco or Marks & Spencer for a boxed ready meal, the chef only needs the catalogue and phone number for catering suppliers who will do all the work for him: delivering to the kitchen door every short cut from pre-balled tri-colour melon, hand-tied bundles of frozen haricots verts, olive oil mash, through to ready-poached egg and ready-to-use Hollandaise sauce. In 2005, complete dishes supplied by two such companies – Brakes and 3663 – included paella, Malaysian beef rendang, lamb with dumplings in cider sauce, asparagus and lemon risotto, braised lamb with flageolets, three-cheese pasta and broccoli bake, char-grilled vegetable and mozzarella timbale, pre-cooked omelettes, cod and pancetta fishcakes, moules marini?res, peperonata terrine, char-grilled chicken with mango salsa, Mediterranean vegetable bake, Moroccan lamb tagine, pork hock with fruit compote, Thai ginger fish brochettes and mushroom, brie, rocket and redcurrant filo bundle. They were doubtless consumed with reasonable enthusiasm by millions of diners who remained blissfully unaware that they were not fully prepared from scratch on the premises. The one area where British restaurants really do push the boat out for their consumers is children’s food. Britain is unique in Europe in that it likes to make a fuss of children by offering them an especially bad menu. A separate ‘children’s menu’ is an alien concept in any other country except the US. Restaurateurs elsewhere take the attitude that children will eat the same sort of food as adults, the only concessions being that dishes may be offered in smaller portions, or produced more promptly to pre-empt outbursts from hungry toddlers. Foreign restaurateurs do not live in fear of hysterical children throwing tantrums in the dining room because they can count on the fact that the children have been socialized at home by family meals and can usually be relied upon to sit round a table and eat alongside others. Britain, on the other hand, believes that a dining room is a hostile and foreign environment for a child, a potential war zone. Before contemplating a restaurant visit with their children, the British seem to believe that children must be pacified with a distinct repertoire of ‘child-friendly’ foods (for which read ‘junk’) and bribed with free, non-food gifts. Otherwise, how else can they be expected to sit through an exclusively adult dining experience that is widely considered to be intolerable for a British child? Viewed from abroad, when it comes to food Britain’s treatment of children amounts to neglect, a national embarrassment, even to the British. One Englishwoman told me: ‘We often go to this seafood restaurant in Marbella. We like it because it is chilled and laid-back. You can sit on the balcony and eat fantastic prawns and squid while you look out at the sea. The people who eat there are very international: Dutch, Germans, Belgians, Swiss, Austrians, Canadians, Scandinavians. When they come in a family group, you notice how the kids just sit down and eat the same food as their parents, no nonsense. The British families stand out because the children won’t eat this or that, and so their parents start asking the waiters for something different for them that’s not on the menu. Why can’t they just appreciate food like European children seem to?’ In 2003, the Parents Jury (#litres_trial_promo) – a group that campaigns for better children’s food – surveyed the food in British restaurants that commonly serve to children, based on responses from 1,400 parents. The judging panel concluded that, because the standard was so low, the idea of children’s menus should be done away with altogether. The children’s menu in one prominent chain was summarized by a judge as follows: ‘No fresh food. Everything is out of the freezer and into the fryer or microwave. I bet they haven’t got a chopping board in the kitchen.’ The Parents Jury went on to highlight one typical children’s menu with a prehistoric dinosaur theme. It consisted of heavily processed foods: ‘Raptor hot dog’, ‘Jungle chicken’, ‘Jurassic sausages’, ‘Bronto burger’, ‘T-Rex pizzas’ and ‘Big Dino breakfast’. All these were served with chips and a refreshing ice lolly with ‘fruit-flavour’. To make the package more attractive, it was available in a larger or super-size version for 50 pence extra. Good children who finished up this assembly were rewarded with a free lollipop. A subsequent survey of 141 children’s meals (#litres_trial_promo) served in caf?s and restaurants in London found that every one failed to meet even the basic nutritional standards set down for school meals. Almost 40 years ago, Derek Cooper summed up his conclusions (#litres_trial_promo) about the state of Britain’s eating-out scene. ‘There is, alas, no optimism on the eating front. For the minority prepared to pay for the privilege there will always be a small number of good restaurants. The majority of us will continue to put up uncomplainingly, perhaps even with a sort of masochistic pleasure, with bad food.’ Four decades on, his remarks still seem extraordinarily apt. 5 NO TIME TO COOK (#ulink_09f2f25b-96fb-594c-a0e9-c0b4f32505f5) Britain has become a nation that steadfastly believes it no longer has the time to cook, except for Christmas Day and the odd weekend when we dabble in the ancient art of cooking and try to work up some enthusiasm for the pleasures of the table. As little as 20 years ago, we used to look on cooking as part and parcel of daily life, then reports came from the United States of the emerging trend towards ‘no-cook’ eating. It was said to have started in Manhattan, where apartment kitchens were tiny and the possibilities for eating out were rich and varied. ‘Grazing’ became a new buzz word as consumers took to roaming fertile foodie pastures, eating what they felt like, when they felt like it. So the modern myth was born that it is possible to abandon cooking entirely but still continue to eat great food every day of the week. The British had their doubts about no-cook eating. To start with, few neighbourhoods in the UK have a dazzling food emporium such as Zabar’s or Dean & DeLuca on the street corner. Then there were those tales – possibly apocryphal – of Americans who stood over their toasters in the morning shouting ‘Faster, faster!’ at a slice of bread, just so they could jog off to work at six in the morning to work a ten-hour day. It all sounded a bit manic. But at the beginning of the 21st century, Britain seems determined to follow in the footsteps of the US when it comes to eating habits. While it would be an exaggeration to say that home cooking in Britain is dead, it is most certainly in a chronic state. In 2001, the average British household cooked from scratch (#litres_trial_promo) – that is, prepared a meal from mainly raw ingredients – just 3.36 times a week. By 2002, 45 per cent of Britons agreed (#litres_trial_promo) with the statement ‘I am so tired in the evening, I don’t have the energy to do anything’. Many British people are now convinced that they don’t have the time or energy to cook and they are acting upon that conviction. While in 1980, the average meal took one hour to prepare, (#litres_trial_promo)now on average it takes 13 minutes. (#litres_trial_promo)On current trends, (#litres_trial_promo) it is predicted that by 2010, this will shrink to 8 minutes. Cooking is now widely seen in Britain as an optional activity, a reflection of how little importance the country gives to food. Why would one want to cook, so the thinking goes, when nearly everything else in life is potentially more interesting and rewarding? 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