treat, and a guilt-free one at that, for many Asda Mums.
The company assiduously targets Asda Mums, through its advertising but also its associations, with its support of football, and tie-ups with Disney and other mass-popular movements. In a study by the think-tank Britain Thinks, undertaken during the summer of 2011, McDonald’s came third in a list of ‘the most working-class brands’ behind the Sun and Iceland and above KFC and Asda. It is revealing that four out of the five brands are food-related.
McDonald’s and KFC owe their place in this list partly to price, but partly to the ideals introduced by Wimpy back in 1954 – fast, quick service of a commoditised food. No one can ever feel as if they are going to be caught out either by their table manners, their pronunciation of a product or the arrival of a shockingly large bill at the end. Tipping and a wine list, two of the most anxiety-inducing social phenomena, are categorically absent from fast food.
The boss may be wrong about the snobs, but she is correct when she asserts that it is a ‘democratising’ brand, a term that Sir Terence Conran used in the 1960s to describe Habitat, his home furnishings shop. Thanks to fast food, eating out was no longer a social minefield.
If Asda Mums are the bedrock on which McDonald’s builds its success, then it is the Hyphen-Leighs who have turned Greggs into the country’s biggest fast food chain – with more outlets than anyone else. Based in Newcastle, Greggs has a range of nice bread, perfectly decent sandwiches and a selection of savoury pastries, selling an amazing 140 million sausage rolls every year – that is 800 every minute. But no food item in Britain, not even a Big Mac, has been the object of so much class debate in the last year. This came about when the Chancellor tried to close a long-standing (and complex) loophole that meant hot pasties, steak bakes and sausage rolls, as sold by Greggs, avoided VAT.
The political elite, many of them Wood Burning Stovers, mocked Gideon ‘George’ Osborne, son of a baronet and owner of a £3 million Notting Hill house, for failing to understand the diet of the hard-pressed working classes. Osborne’s critics had us believe that millions of Britons breakfasted, lunched and dined on pasties, rolls and onion bakes. Cheryl Cole, the Hyphen-Leighs’ pin-up of choice, was wheeled out to invoke the spirit of Oliver Twist, saying: ‘I would have been penniless as a teenager – and hungry – if I’d been taxed every time I had a hot pasty. Pasties, pizza, McDonald’s – we didn’t have a clue about nutrition. It was tasty and it was what we could afford.’
Just as bad was the sight of senior members of the shadow cabinet, including Ed Balls, trying to out-prole Osborne by sauntering into a Greggs (camera crew in tow) and casually ordering some pasties. Until Osborne made Greggs and its customers class martyrs – helped by the chain being championed by the Sun – it was widely derided, particularly by the likes of Asda Mums, for providing the lower orders with fatty, cheap pap. A ‘Greggs dummy’ was a phrase often used in the north east to refer to the sausage roll given to toddlers in their buggies to keep them quiet.
Of course selling £700 million worth of food every year means its customer base is extremely broad. Indeed, a cousin of mine who is an earl is so partial to a Greggs sausage roll that he invested some of the family fortune in the company’s shares. But then many of Britain’s aristocracy have always preferred nursery food over a ballotine de volaille and saffron infusions.
Even within something as seemingly innocuous as the lunchtime sandwich there are clear social distinctions, as evidenced in my own defiantly white-collar office. A fast-food burger or Greggs pasty is clearly unacceptable and only to be eaten ironically when suffering from a hangover. The Boots Shapers meal deal is for secretaries and junior staff in the advertising department only; the M&S sandwich, Pret à Manger wrap the safe option for the mass of mid-ranking reporters; while a box of Itsu sushi or Leon beetroot and horseradish soup is verging on ostentatious and suggests that office work is a tedious impediment to furthering one’s gourmet credentials. Columnists and those on the Arts Desk can get away with that. News editors show off by going to the local Italian delicatessen which whips up an overpriced, rather dry prosciutto and rocket ciabatta, but it comes wrapped in tasteful waxed paper. Of course, the really smart Wood Burning Stovers bring in their own sandwiches, ideally on home-made bread – or, better still, left-overs heated up in a wide-necked thermos flask. Perhaps Ottolenghi’s spiced winter couscous.
One colleague, with quiet pride, brought in home-cured bresaola. I was well and truly trumped and went back to munching on my re-heated mushroom risotto out of the Tupperware box.
These variations all occur within a very tight-knit group of (mostly) graduates, a fair few Oxbridge ones at that, working within a single office. Lunchtime choices are small, subtle public acts that allow you to set yourself apart within the restrictive office environment. Class has never been all about money. The cost of these lunches varies just a little, but the differing messages they send out are loud and clear. The home-made chorizo soup is less expensive than the Subway sandwich, but one is ‘middle class’ and one is not. If we are all middle class now, then we need to strive to distinguish ourselves from the ranks. Tucking into a sandwich from the country’s biggest eating-out operator just fails the test. Your lunch has to come from a more exclusive brand, or better still be completely unbranded.
Portland Privateers, in contrast, would rather slash the tyres on their BMW X5 than be spotted bringing a cellophane-wrapped home-made sandwich into their Mayfair office. They are remarkably unfussy about lunch, as long as it is a reputable brand. Most of them send out their secretary, or the work experience kid, for Itsu sushi or Birley sandwiches. Or they have miserable ‘water lunch meetings’ to prove how macho they are. This consists of bottled water and nothing else.
Finding unbranded food outlets in modern Britain can be a challenge. Expensive high street rents, cautious landlords, unimaginative town planners all conspire to encourage a familiar name over the door. But one of the reasons has been the relentless rise of the Middleton classes, those millions of families who within a generation have navigated their way through the choppy waters to end up at the front of the great class flotilla. If one of the abiding aspects of climbing up the social ladder is a fear of being found out, there is safety in clinging to an established name, a proven formula. The Berni Inns (founded in 1955), and all the chains that came after, allowed people to eat out, to enjoy a dash of glamour with scampi in a basket or lemongrass in the soup, but never be made a fool of. As people holidayed abroad and consumed hours of cookery programmes, restaurants became less daunting and visiting a chain outlet provided you with a failsafe option, whatever town you visited.
Berni’s place as a staging post on the climb upwards was taken by Browns, All Bar One, Pizza Express, Chez Gerard and Loch Fyne. In recent years we’ve reached the sunny uplands of Strada, Wagamama, Ping Pong, Yo! Sushi and Starbucks – all offering a bowl, or cup, of something exotic, all with unpronounceable names, all with strange, almost masonic rituals of how one orders and eats. But once we’ve cracked the formula, we have made it. The insouciance with which one mixes the wasabi into the dish of soy sauce, or orders a skinny Frappuccino, proves that you are a person who knows their mind and won’t be intimidated by any waiter or waitress – even if they have swapped their 1950s bow tie and pinafore for an attitude T-shirt and stud in their nose.
The majority are unable to afford or are too intimidated to eat at the Ivy or Claridges – venues reserved for the Portland Privateers, who like nothing more than a restaurant where a member of the paparazzi waits outside every evening: The Wolseley, Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck, anything associated with Gordon Ramsay (both a Portland Privateer and an Asda Mum pin-up), or Panacea in Manchester.
But high street, upmarket, branded dining chains are the economy-class ticket to a more sophisticated life, burnishing their customers with the vocabulary and grammar of cuisine. They are aspiration on a plate, and a public one at that. This explains why sellers of daily cups of frothy coffee – logically the first little luxury that should have been ditched when money is tight – in fact remained
