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.
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.
