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| Yes, we love ready meals – but Britain is still a foodie nation | Yes, we love ready meals – but Britain is still a foodie nation |
| (30 days later) | |
| There can surely never have been a time in Britain when food was more various, more savoured, more discussed, more enthused over or condemned, more written about, more watched on television. Never before – even when classical statues made of sugar were the centrepieces of Renaissance feasts, or bad acting was rewarded with rotten cabbages – has it provided so much entertainment as well as sustenance. | There can surely never have been a time in Britain when food was more various, more savoured, more discussed, more enthused over or condemned, more written about, more watched on television. Never before – even when classical statues made of sugar were the centrepieces of Renaissance feasts, or bad acting was rewarded with rotten cabbages – has it provided so much entertainment as well as sustenance. |
| Who, seated forlornly before a stale fruit scone in an ABC tearoom in the 50s, could have imagined this transformation? | Who, seated forlornly before a stale fruit scone in an ABC tearoom in the 50s, could have imagined this transformation? |
| Who, seated forlornly before a stale fruit scone in an ABC tearoom in the 1950s, could have imagined London’s present status as the eating-out capital of the world? Which of us could have imagined that a cake-making competition would be watched by a quarter of the British population in 2016? In a nation that since the early Victorian period has been ritually mocked for its poor food, developments such as these suggest a transformation in our attitudes to cooking and eating, sometimes to the point of sickening reverence. | Who, seated forlornly before a stale fruit scone in an ABC tearoom in the 1950s, could have imagined London’s present status as the eating-out capital of the world? Which of us could have imagined that a cake-making competition would be watched by a quarter of the British population in 2016? In a nation that since the early Victorian period has been ritually mocked for its poor food, developments such as these suggest a transformation in our attitudes to cooking and eating, sometimes to the point of sickening reverence. |
| But is it no more than froth? Here to spoil our self-satisfaction is the chef and restaurateur Angela Hartnett, who on Sunday’s edition of Desert Islands Discs contested the idea that Britain was a “foodie nation” that has a “food culture”. | But is it no more than froth? Here to spoil our self-satisfaction is the chef and restaurateur Angela Hartnett, who on Sunday’s edition of Desert Islands Discs contested the idea that Britain was a “foodie nation” that has a “food culture”. |
| “I genuinely don’t think we do,” she said. “I don’t think we’re like the Italians or the Spanish … our food culture is about money. People who have money can afford good food in this country.” She told her interviewer, Kirsty Young, that it was wrong to patronise people on low incomes by telling them they had to have organic chicken, and mentioned her Italian grandmother, who taught her how to make and stuff pasta, and inspired her interest in cooking. | “I genuinely don’t think we do,” she said. “I don’t think we’re like the Italians or the Spanish … our food culture is about money. People who have money can afford good food in this country.” She told her interviewer, Kirsty Young, that it was wrong to patronise people on low incomes by telling them they had to have organic chicken, and mentioned her Italian grandmother, who taught her how to make and stuff pasta, and inspired her interest in cooking. |
| Hartnett’s words made a story in the newspapers, and yet – like sentences in many unrehearsed and unguarded interviews – their precise meaning wasn’t too clear. Many, perhaps most, of us have expressed similar feelings at one time or other. For example, that it’s wrong as well as useless for do-gooders to tell the poor what to eat (the case was vigorously made by Orwell in the 1930s). Or that food in Britain divides, in Kirsty Young’s phrase, into “two tiers” – and that eating well, to judge from the publicity that attaches to chefs and their restaurants, really does come down to money (an idea that has done the Michelin-starred Hartnett, who cooked at the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair before opening her own restaurants, no harm). | Hartnett’s words made a story in the newspapers, and yet – like sentences in many unrehearsed and unguarded interviews – their precise meaning wasn’t too clear. Many, perhaps most, of us have expressed similar feelings at one time or other. For example, that it’s wrong as well as useless for do-gooders to tell the poor what to eat (the case was vigorously made by Orwell in the 1930s). Or that food in Britain divides, in Kirsty Young’s phrase, into “two tiers” – and that eating well, to judge from the publicity that attaches to chefs and their restaurants, really does come down to money (an idea that has done the Michelin-starred Hartnett, who cooked at the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair before opening her own restaurants, no harm). |
| Or, finally, that other European societies are naturally, almost mystically, connected to their food in a way that the British can never be (see Hartnett’s granny). | Or, finally, that other European societies are naturally, almost mystically, connected to their food in a way that the British can never be (see Hartnett’s granny). |
| The last carries an implication: that food in these countries is better understood because, generation after generation, people have learned to cook locally grown produce at their mother’s knee. This idea of permanence and continuity, however, is often false. Was Hartnett’s grandmother cooking the same food, in the same way, as her own grandmother had done? Possibly not. “What is known today as Italian food is a recent creation … and bears little resemblance to the abstemious and even inadequate diet endured by much of the population in the 19th and 20th centuries,” writes Carol Helstosky in Garlic & Oil, her revealing account of food and politics in Italy. | The last carries an implication: that food in these countries is better understood because, generation after generation, people have learned to cook locally grown produce at their mother’s knee. This idea of permanence and continuity, however, is often false. Was Hartnett’s grandmother cooking the same food, in the same way, as her own grandmother had done? Possibly not. “What is known today as Italian food is a recent creation … and bears little resemblance to the abstemious and even inadequate diet endured by much of the population in the 19th and 20th centuries,” writes Carol Helstosky in Garlic & Oil, her revealing account of food and politics in Italy. |
| That country’s rocky terrain and uneven soil meant wheat was hard to grow; its price made white bread a sign of gentility and wealth. Peasants and industrial workers subsisted on rough bread and polenta made from rye, chestnut and cornflour, usually garnished with some combination of oil, peppers, onions, garlic, sardines and anchovies. Pasta, cheese and fresh vegetables were less common. Wine was watered, meat confined to the most special occasions. Only when the state intervened, in the first world war, to subsidise cheap wheat imports did this diet begin to change. | That country’s rocky terrain and uneven soil meant wheat was hard to grow; its price made white bread a sign of gentility and wealth. Peasants and industrial workers subsisted on rough bread and polenta made from rye, chestnut and cornflour, usually garnished with some combination of oil, peppers, onions, garlic, sardines and anchovies. Pasta, cheese and fresh vegetables were less common. Wine was watered, meat confined to the most special occasions. Only when the state intervened, in the first world war, to subsidise cheap wheat imports did this diet begin to change. |
| Hartnett’s granny and my mother (born 1907) were probably around the same age, and witnesses therefore to a similar widening in food choice over their lifetimes. By 1960, our household menu must have seemed cornucopian to a woman raised in a Fife mining village 50 years before. A random list of the food set before my adolescent self includes lentil soup, beef mince, steak baked between plates, haddock fried in breadcrumbs, liver and onions, potted meat, black pudding, brassicas, boiled root vegetables, chips, toasted cheese and salads. Out of tins came spaghetti, beans, salmon, sardines, Spam, corned beef, peas, mandarin oranges and peaches. From the oven were brought forth lemon meringue pies, steak pies, potato pies, shepherd’s pies, apple crumbles, fruit slices (awarded prizes by the Scottish Women’s Rural Institute) and, on Sundays, jam sponge. In the larder little jars, almost fit for a doll’s house, held meat paste. | Hartnett’s granny and my mother (born 1907) were probably around the same age, and witnesses therefore to a similar widening in food choice over their lifetimes. By 1960, our household menu must have seemed cornucopian to a woman raised in a Fife mining village 50 years before. A random list of the food set before my adolescent self includes lentil soup, beef mince, steak baked between plates, haddock fried in breadcrumbs, liver and onions, potted meat, black pudding, brassicas, boiled root vegetables, chips, toasted cheese and salads. Out of tins came spaghetti, beans, salmon, sardines, Spam, corned beef, peas, mandarin oranges and peaches. From the oven were brought forth lemon meringue pies, steak pies, potato pies, shepherd’s pies, apple crumbles, fruit slices (awarded prizes by the Scottish Women’s Rural Institute) and, on Sundays, jam sponge. In the larder little jars, almost fit for a doll’s house, held meat paste. |
| The UK is not a 'foodie nation', says chef Angela Hartnett | The UK is not a 'foodie nation', says chef Angela Hartnett |
| A working-class Italian of the same generation would surely have marvelled at such an eclectic menu, so rich in sugar and animal fat, and apparently so loosely tethered to the simpler meals of my mother’s Scottish ancestors, with their stress on oatmeal, herring and cheese. But how were we to know, as we forked up our baked beans on toast, that this disconnect went all the way back to the enclosure acts, which by turning peasants into landless workers began to wipe out England’s rural cuisine? Then the industrial revolution got going, country people moved to squalid towns, and the memories and skills of traditional cooking further shrank. Britain embraced the new and the bland: canning, packaging and freezing, and a fear of any flavour that was judged too strong. By the time Victoria died, these and other factors had combined, in the words of the food historian Colin Spencer, “to wreak their havoc upon the British kitchen, without the British people being quite aware of what had happened”. | A working-class Italian of the same generation would surely have marvelled at such an eclectic menu, so rich in sugar and animal fat, and apparently so loosely tethered to the simpler meals of my mother’s Scottish ancestors, with their stress on oatmeal, herring and cheese. But how were we to know, as we forked up our baked beans on toast, that this disconnect went all the way back to the enclosure acts, which by turning peasants into landless workers began to wipe out England’s rural cuisine? Then the industrial revolution got going, country people moved to squalid towns, and the memories and skills of traditional cooking further shrank. Britain embraced the new and the bland: canning, packaging and freezing, and a fear of any flavour that was judged too strong. By the time Victoria died, these and other factors had combined, in the words of the food historian Colin Spencer, “to wreak their havoc upon the British kitchen, without the British people being quite aware of what had happened”. |
| This amnesiac tendency still survives – arguably the convenience foods of the past few decades have only increased it – which is presumably why Hartnett can say that Britain has no meaningful culture of food. Certainly, the story in Italy is different. Italy was poorer, and by the time it grew richer, in the 1950s, it had developed a defensive pride in its cooking that kept other cuisines and Anglo-American temptation at bay. But to make a binary division of British attitudes to food, the Connaught on the one hand and the microwave (and the food bank) on the other, is far too crude. Multitudes of people, many of them not especially prosperous, pay much more attention to food than ever before. | This amnesiac tendency still survives – arguably the convenience foods of the past few decades have only increased it – which is presumably why Hartnett can say that Britain has no meaningful culture of food. Certainly, the story in Italy is different. Italy was poorer, and by the time it grew richer, in the 1950s, it had developed a defensive pride in its cooking that kept other cuisines and Anglo-American temptation at bay. But to make a binary division of British attitudes to food, the Connaught on the one hand and the microwave (and the food bank) on the other, is far too crude. Multitudes of people, many of them not especially prosperous, pay much more attention to food than ever before. |
| You can see it in the restaurant districts of Glasgow and Manchester as well as London, and in home-cooked food everywhere. It may be essentially middle class, but then so is the theatre, the literary novel and the audience for Desert Island Discs. And should we decide that Britain has no culture of literature because too few people read books? | You can see it in the restaurant districts of Glasgow and Manchester as well as London, and in home-cooked food everywhere. It may be essentially middle class, but then so is the theatre, the literary novel and the audience for Desert Island Discs. And should we decide that Britain has no culture of literature because too few people read books? |
| • Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist | • Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist |
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