about eating in the street and quite astonished to see school children walking around at lunchtime eating a packet of crisps and some sweets,’ a French Cameroonian engineer told me. ‘The French have a completely different attitude. Either you go home for lunch or stay and eat in the canteen.’ People from other countries are gobsmacked by the food that British children eat. A Dutch mother told me:
‘Until I came to Britain, my children had never been exposed to sweets at all. My kids didn’t even think about them. They liked fruit but it was impossible to keep that up because always when they entered the nursery or playgroup in Britain there were people giving them sweets; not just biscuits – things like sticky sweets and fizzy drinks. In kindergarten in Holland, the kids got fruit and yogurt, but no sweets. It would be unheard of in Holland if the kids brought in crisps and sweets from home. They would not be allowed, a bit like bringing cigarettes into school. Here the kids open a lunch pack and there is at least one packet of crisps, one Mars bar or similar, and then they have these really weird takes on real food like cheese strings or something where they make the food into a funny, dinosaur shape. In order to persuade a child to eat a piece of cheese in Britain they have to make it into a shape!’
A Danish artist told me that when she arrived in the UK, she could not get over the contents of British shopping trolleys:
‘When standing in line I noticed what people had in their shopping baskets, all that sugar and fat in there, and I would be really amazed to see even old people stocking up with junk. Three years later I stand at the checkout here and still can’t get over all those trolleys filled with big amounts of pies, ready-made food, and lots of crisps – but without any vegetables. A Danish trolley, irrespective of social class, would look much different. In a word, “greener”. We eat a lot more green food and our dishes look nicer as a result because we eat more salads, more stewed vegetables, more vegetables on the side as a garnish.’
An Italian teacher recounted her first encounter with prospective in-laws, picking out what she saw as the entirely alien habit of staggered eating, the unceremonious speed of eating, and the lack of effort that goes into food in the UK.
‘I went to my [British] husband’s family for Christmas. It was a huge cultural shock, the saddest Christmas in my life. If somebody had come to my house in Emilia Romagna at any time, not even a festive period, my mum would make an extra effort – a special pasta, a special secondo [meat or fish course], more of everything, a real welcome. But I don’t think his mum is cooking at all. She doesn’t care about that. When it was lunchtime she said “Everything is in the fridge, everybody can help themselves” and off she went. At about 12 o’clock, his dad would go to fridge and make himself a sandwich, at 12.30 his sister served herself and so on. The day after was the same. At the actual Christmas dinner, after half an hour, all the food had already disappeared from the table. I have had to adapt to it, but for me, it was definitely shocking.’
People from abroad are regularly baffled by what they see as a lack of family meals and communal eating. One Austrian arts administrator explained:
‘Now that I live in Britain I still cook every night. We eat together every night and that is a most important time for us. But I see from other British families that this is considered really strange. In the UK, eating together is almost something you do on a Sunday if you are a “good” family. It’s really important to me that we sit properly, half an hour or so – not like in France where they take one and a half hours – and not a fancy meal necessarily, just something that’s properly cooked. We would not sit at the TV and eat either. I notice people do that here. You don’t come across much of what I would call proper, normal eating in the UK.’
For an executive summary of the outsider’s verdict on British food and eating habits, click onto the web pages of ‘Grenouilles au Royaume Uni’ (‘Frogs in the UK’), a reportage by French people living in Britain, and look under the ironic heading ‘The Delights of British Cuisine’:
‘The British no longer consider a meal as a family ritual. That’s a growing trend in France too but it’s more noticeable here. English families cook less in general and rely more on food delivered to their homes. Members of the same family tend to eat on their own when they feel hungry. Hence the profusion of junk food, fast food, takeaway and so on. Direct consequence: 39 per cent of Britons are overweight, 19 per cent are obese.’
Although most Britons view it as entirely normal, Terry Durack, restaurant critic for the Independent on Sunday, has voiced the ongoing incomprehension with which British eating habits are viewed internationally:
‘As an Australian, I often find myself blinking in disbelief at the average Briton’s relationship with food, at how unimportant it is to so many people. But then, I grew up in a country where good food was available to all at a good price. Here [in Britain], eating well is an economic issue, a class issue, and an education issue. Good food is available – at a price. And nobody is going to pay the price if good food is simply not a priority in their lives.’
Whether we like to admit it, Britain is seen abroad as a country that has well and truly lost the gastronomic plot, a food recidivist, demonstrating precious little capacity for improvement.
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
