Bad Food Britain: How A Nation Ruined Its Appetite. Joanna Blythman

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.

       4 RENAISSANCE RESTAURANTS

      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 – 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 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’. 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 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. ‘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 Pétain 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. 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