Bad Food Britain: How A Nation Ruined Its Appetite. Joanna Blythman
book Simply British. 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. 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 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 as the most popular British dish. Chicken tikka masala 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 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 crème brulée 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 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’ compared to 29 per cent of Spaniards. One survey of European eating habits 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. At Buckingham Palace, the