Читать книгу Bad Food Britain: How A Nation Ruined Its Appetite - Joanna Blythman, Joanna Blythman - Страница 10

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 – 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 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 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’ 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. 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 Queen served him a meal – billed as ‘Le Menu’ – consisting of potage Germiny, délice de flétan aux herbes, suprème de poulet fermier au basilica, and bombe glacée 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’s Matthew Fort, 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, 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 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, launched an initiative called British Food Fort-night 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 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, ‘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.

Shortly after this event, the supermarket chain Sainsbury’s ran a ‘Taste of Britain’ 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 – 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 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.