British cooking/Britain's food history and reputation

[Wilfrid]

British cooking and British eating habits have had their failings over the years.  I am a Londoner by birth, but I am not going to dispute that fact.  Nevertheless, I am perpetually surprised by the kinds of criticism of British food I read, both in magazines (see Rebecca Mead) and on sites like this.  I have just had an exchange with Steve Plotnicki about this on the French cuisine thread on the General board, but it would seem more appropriate to pursue the discussion here.  Among other things, Steve wrote:

"The reasons that the British ate spam and marmite and the French didn't is that the French upper classes agreed to feed the lower classes in France far better than the upper classes in Britain agreed to feed their lower classes. It is really that simple. How well a population eats is simply a matter of how wealth is distributed. Macrosan touches on it in his post. The French invested in creating high quality ingredients because they set up an internal economic and social system that 1)taught the populace what good food was and 2)provided them access to it by making it affordable to them. There is no reason that a similar phenomenon couldn't have happened in Britain  because it is happening there now. So while I agree with you that the results of the war(s) had impact on both countries, the reason that Britain was on the other side of the boot was that it was well behind in what the governing class deemed an acceptable way to feed the population before the war(s) ever started. What was always amazing about it (and it goes to the Spam, Marmite example,) is why the British population stood for it for so long?"

I don't know what others think, but this take on history is just unrecognizable to me.  Just to keep to a manageable period of history, let's talk about the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up to the Second World War.  In that timeframe, I see little evidence that the public's eating habits were determined centrally by the "upper classes".  Determined to a large extent by economic and social forces?  Sure, but hardly by any one social group in society.  

What forces determine eating habits?  Decisions in agriculture, I guess.  I am sure there are some upper class farmers in Britain, but the farming class has traditionally been overwhelmingly distinct from the aristocracy or even the upper middle class.  Fishing?  Ditto.  Shopkeepers?  What do you think?  The rise of large food-purveying enterprises, such as Sainsburys, where one might detect dominance by the upper reaches of society, is a relatively recent phenomenon.  I am trying to get a handle on just how the upper classes (or the government, if that's what Steve means) were controlling what people grew, hunted, bought and ate.

I do not know whether there were central government programmes or policies relating to nutrition in the 1930s - because of the Depression there might well have been - but I would date central government involvement in the food industry (which was practically effective in terms of surviving a siege, but which created long-term gastronomic damage) from the Second World War.  The war was followed by years of "austerity" - that was the description - as rationing dragged on and the country recovered from its war-time experiences.  Steve, you do realise that Britain had a socialist government after the war, don't you?

It's hard to know what else to say in the absence of more detail:  when was this French system set up and who by?  What was this agreement not to do the same in Britain?  Any historical clues?  (Steve, if it's "as simple as that" can you give any specifics?)

Okay, switch to a period after the war - where I can be more of a first-hand witness.  People seem consumed with fantasies about what ordinary British people ate?  Spam, and other tinned meats?  Sure, a bad habit and a hangover from the war.  But in the pretty ordinary household in which I grew up in the sixties and seventies, almost all meals were home cooked from fresh ingredients.  Most canned foods (there were exceptions), and certainly frozen foods, were looked on with suspicion.  A lot of fresh fish, and both fresh and preserved shellfish were consumed.    Pies, puddings were baked at home; jam was made; vegetables were pickled.  As a toddler I had the job of shelling fresh peas.

Now, my family had no culinary pretensions whatsoever.  This was just normal life, and it was the same for millions.  Convenience food did indeed begin to erode cooking skills, along with the rise of the supermarkets and the huge and rapid increase in women working outside the home (rather than cooking all day).  But I don't detect any master plan to feed people badly there, either.

Let me stop droning on.  What do others think?

[Steve Plotnicki]

Wilfrid-That is a fair recounting of the thrust of my post. It is too bad I do not have my copy of Drew Smith "Modern British Cooking" here because it speaks directly to many of the questions regarding agriculture, including who controlled farming, that you have raised in this post. I also need point out to you that the British are not the only ones I can point to who have a poor history of providing quality food for the population. Look at the story I told about the U.S. in the 60's and 70's and how the government intentionally tried to put small farmers out of business. But I have to admit that I believe that the food the Brits ate was particularly bad. Spam and marmite are merely symbolic of the depths that were hit.

Your post also goes onto ask how governments provide for, or ensure that their populations have a sufficient amount of food to eat and that it is of requisite quality. Without naming them all (I'm not competent to) here are a few.

Rules and requirements on borrowing money to purchase and operate farms.

The kitchen sink is in this one. It could be anything from what percentage cash a farmer needs to have before he is eligible to borrow. Or maybe there are riders in his loan agreements that say he needs to produce x amount of kilos of his product a year. Or how about the underlying value of his land cannot fall below the amount of his loan or else the bank can foreclose. And in years where the prices are low because of overproduction, the formula works against him and the bank forecloses. Or how about banning the practice of sharecropping which would force a farmer to invest more working capital into his farm or have to sell it because he doesn't have the cash available to invest. And those are but a few examples of how governments control who gets to do the farming.

And how about examples of how they affect the quality of what is grown. How about the Dutch government buying excess tomatoes to keep the price high in the marketplace. Do you think that Dutch farmers have an incentive to make a better product when the government buys the worst crap they make? Or how about the rules the French government puts on the vineyard operators in Chateauneuf du Pape where they limit the amount of grapes to be grown per hectare to something like the equivelent of 2 1/2 tons per acre. If the producers were to do whatever they wanted to, their yields might be 6 tons per acre. But wines that come from 6 ton yields would be of as worse quality, and would sell for far less than wine that comes from a 2 1/2 ton yield. Is not the French government ensuring the level of quality?

Now I am no expert on this but I know enough to say that while the French started with fertile land, what enabled France to have culinary supremecy was two things. Easy access to money from banks for farmers/food producers and, strict government controls intended to maintain the level of quality that farmers/food producers had to abide by. No pale, mealy tomatoes for the French. No spam or marmite either.

Food is just one more way that information and wealth are distributed to the masses. There was never a shortage of wealth in England, and certainly never a shortage of knowledge. Now who had the wealth, and who was knowledgable, well that is another thing. And I don't deny that in your home you cooked with fresh ingredients. We had fresh ingredients too. In fact those pale, mealy tomatoes are fresh. But quality is the issue. And when I say fresh produce I do not mean supermarket quality. I mean something better.

[macrosan]

OK Steve, now I think you are in serious trouble  

You just described above a system of control of funding, and a system of functional regulation which, as far as I know, has never applied in the history of Britain, and certainly not in the last two centuries. So I deny that could have possibly affected British cuisine.

In your original post (quoted by Wilfrid) you described the causes of poor British cuisine as being "as simple as that". I now challenge you to explain those causes SIMPLY  

[Wilfrid]

That is certainly interesting Steve, and I now understand your point better.  I have the impression that we are talking primarily about the twentieth century.  As you know, British financial institutions are, one way or another, in private hands (with the exception, I suppose, of the Bank of England).  Which leaves us with a couple of factual questions to which I don't have the answer (maybe it's in Smith's book):  to what extent is British farming dependent on support from financial institutions; and, more importantly, how are private financial institutions constrained by government in making loans to farmers?

If banks have been heavily regulated in this sphere of their activities, I am still not sure you have laid a foundation for there being a policy, or even a presumption by the governing classes, that food quality in Britain need not be kept at a high level - although that might be an effect of such regulation.

At the same time, I still feel that big assumptions are being made about just what people were eating over this period.  Let's assume "spam and marmite" is a marker for low quality, unfresh convenience foods, maybe with loads of additives and artifical flavourings.  Do you agree that widespread use of such foods is a phenomenon of the mid-to-late 1960s on, and that it is causally related to a whole range of social changes? - I mentioned women in the workplace, but there are others.  If so, then what about the earlier period?  Was British food before the war really worse than French food - across the board, or was it just different?  What I know leads me to suspect that food in Britain was actually pretty good in the couple of centuries leading up to 1939, and that important culinary traditions were lost, and have only been partially recovered.  Or is it your belief that British food was lousy, whether in 1850, 1890, 1910 or 1950?

[Steve Plotnicki]

Macrosan-I'm confused (not unusual.) All the different ways that money lending can effect agriculture was merely examples of how *any* government can impact the quality available to the population. I wasn't being specific to Britain. The only specific examples I gave were about Dutch tomatoes and French wine.

Now as for your next question, I thought I explained it earlier. The only reason people ate spam is that they didn't know any better. Could the British government have subsidized the purchase of fresh food from foreign countries? I'm not expert enough to tell you. But would they have done so to the detriment of a British company who makes spam?

You know we Americans eat some pretty lousy stuff here. Frozen food, chickens on steroids, non-dairy creamer in our coffee, I can make quite a list.  And I will be the first one to say that the American diet leaves much to be desired and in fact, much of what we eat here is disgusting when it comes to quality. In light of that, one would think that the Brits can accept that spam and marmite were horrible mistakes that should never have happened. And one would think that it would be easy to admit that in Britain, gastronomically the first 80 years of the last century were an amazing failure. And to put emphasis on how much the failure was a function of the fact thar information and wealth were not distributed properly, for some reason it is far, far better now. And the only difference I see between now and then is that now people care. Then for some reason they didn't. Maybe you have a better explanantion but that is how it appears to this outsider.

[Lord Michael Lewis]

This is a post WWII thing. War, social change, rationing, the recovery from what was essentially a seven year blockade, and the logistical impossibility of returning productive land to it's former condition, knocked the stuffing out of our agricultural diversity and island culinary tradition, which although nowhere near as vast in range and sophisticated as the French was every bit as unique.

In fact, if we ignore France and make comparisons with other geographical areas, Britain still comes off pretty well. We have excellent cheeses, excellent meat, excellent fish, excellent fruit and veg and excellent drink. Spam and Marmite are recent usurpers in our cornucopia and besides I don't think I've ever even seen Spam on sale anywhere apart from it's home in the US. But crap food gets served and eaten everywhere and critics who seek to write off Britain as a culinary entity and many British themselves have to overcome the what seems to be the irresistable lure of stale national stereotyping.

[Wilfrid]

Michael Lewis's post was well worth repeating, because of course I agree with it.

Steve, you are very quick on your feet:  I think Macrosan and I were reasonably entitled to assume that your remarks about banks applied to Britain, and Macrosan seems to have answered my questions just before I posted them.  So - no evidence of a government/upper class plot.

I don't believe anyone here is defedning spam and marmite (personally, I like spam, but that is an unfortunate personal eccentricity).  As for the British government adopting a protectivist policy in favour of the Spam company: sorry, won't wash.  Imported corned beef has always been hugely popular in Britain, and I suspect the main competitor for spam and similar local products.  In fact - glancing at the Lewis post again - is Spam not an American company?  It's certainly widely available here  in the States.

No, I think you are taking some recent, albeit yucky, defects in British eating and trying to make them representative of the whole subject.  Now, tell me, you aren;t Rebecca Mead in disguise, are you?

[Steve Plotnicki]

Wilfrid-Just let's say that I believe that governments implement social policies which fuel the betterment and expansion of things or slow them down to a standstill. So I wouldn't describe what happened in Britain as a governmental policy towards food per se, it was generally more about social policies than anything else.

You know it wasn't that the French were so benevolent and the Brits weren't. But the French realized that if they produced lots of good food, and made it affordable when comparing quality to price, there would be less pressure on them to redistribute the wealth of the upper classes. The Brits managed to skip that bit. I'm not quite sure how they got away with it. I know I keep pointing to spam etc. as the evidence, but it isn't only that. I've been traveling to Britain since 1977 and the general quality of food their stank until about 1995 when it started turning around. In fact, and I mentioned it in another thread, it took just one trip out of London recently for me to reexperience the poor quality I was used to for all those years. Now maybe growing up in England, what I find foul you find fair. But that is sort of like an Austrian telling me that the pervasive aroma of lard from it being used as cooking fuel in restaurants smells like roses. Well I assure you it doesn't. In fact it smells foul. But not to those who are acclimated to the smell.

[Andy Lynes]

What I have observed in the UK is an almost complete disinterest in what people eat. You can very easily engage people in this country in converations about the weather, sport,what was on TV last night, the news, in fact anything other than food. Go to Ireland, specificaly Northern Ireland in my experience, and most people will be aware of the good restaurants, will have shopped in the local markets, will have recipes they will be happy to discuss with you and generally and have food as a ready topic of discussion. They love food and see no shame in spending time effort and money on it. In my travels, I have noted this as common to the people of Spain, India, America, France, Malaysia etc etc. What is it about the British that makes us in general so different? There must be something very deep rooted in us that makes thinking and talking about food such a chore, which it most decidedly is for many people.

[SamanthaF]

My contribution to this is issue is that a very useful book to look at for British eating habits in the 20th century is;

Century of British Cooking by Margeurite Patten ISBN1-902304-69-1.  

I know that my grandmother used her recipes during the war when MP was an advisor to the 'food' department, and I know that my mother still uses her bread and scone recipes.

[Steve Plotnicki]

Wilfrid-You have made too much of my original statement about food, most specifically spam and marmite. The only concept I am pushing here is that food culture does not happen by accident. Like anything else it is an amalgamation of economic and social issues. But what I am pointing to is the connection between those two things. How does organized society create an environment that promotes the culture of food? Certain nations are quite good at it. France is the most obvious one. The Netherlands is quite poor at it. even while they share a border with Belgium who is terrific at it. Does not the same fish that is served in Waterzooi swim in the North Sea and doesn't the Netherlands reside on the North Sea? Can you get a good piece of fish in the Netherlands? Not if you speak to anyone who is Dutch.

Why certain countries are good eaters, or as Andy Lynes says, care about food and others don't, has to be a function of the quality of available ingredients and the governmental encouragement to maximize the results from the land. Look at Israel and how they now produce delicious fruits and vegetables from land that used to be considered arid. Is there a more perfect example of what governments can instigate when they take an interest in feeding their population?

So my comment about Britain is that they had resources to offer the people better food than what they ended up with. And as I said earlier, many countires are guilty of the same practice, most notably the U.S. But it is my opinion that the quality in Britain was on the whole inferior to almost anywhere else in Europe and certainly the U.S. up until the start of the 1990's. Why that is I don't know. But all you have to do is look at how good the quality of food is today to realize that if they could do it now, they could have done it back then. And I don't think this is a war thing. This situation existed before either war occured.

[Jon Tseng]

Mmmm. I suspect its very much about the channeling of energies; while the French were busy conquering the table, the Brits were busy conquering the world...

;-)

as an aside there is an interesting theory about the Empire which runs thus:

i) Brits tanked lots of tea from the C18 onwards.

ii) Tea is made with boiled water, which led to a much lower incidence of waterborne diseases than other nations at the time.

iii) Therefore British productivity was higher, the health of the population was better, and this was a contributory factor in Britains industrial superiority in the C19.

[Tonyfinch]

France is such an agriculturalized country, such a high proportion (relatively) earns its living from producing food and wine that the Govt. has always had to be more mindful of the needs and demands of the food and wine producing lobbies-hence farmers blockading and burning everytime the Govt. tries to cut their subsidies,or their product is threatened by cheaper imported products.

The French food and wine industry has also done a fantastic job of marketing their product.French cheeses are NOT superior to English or Italian cheeses.Charolais beef is NOT superior to Scotch Beef,Marches Lamb is NOT superior to Welsh lamb and so on,but the French have developed such a fantastically positive attitude to their product that we,as consumers,are convinced.

The best example of this is Champagne.The French have taken what,in most cases is an ordinary,acidic sparkling wine and marketed it with such genius that it is known throughout the world as a luxury product,worth the money charged and to be associated with the best moments in our lives.They've also done it with cognac(rarely drunk by the French).

Where I disagree with Steve P. is that I don't think this has been engineered by the Governing classes.More it is the Governing classes having to respond to local agriculturalzed interests in order to appease those powerful lobbies and maintain power.

Steve's point is well made if you look atBritain's fishing industry.It is almost a cliche to wonder how,when we're an island nation surrounded by fishing grounds,there are not hundreds of small fish restaurants dotting our coasts selling good value fish and seafood meals,how we are really only interested in eating our fish battered and fried and how vast proportions odf our best fish and seafood are exported to France and Spain.

[macrosan]

Steve Plotnicki wrote:

"The reasons that the British ate spam and marmite and the French didn't is that the French upper classes agreed to feed the lower classes in France far better than the upper classes in Britain agreed to feed their lower classes. It is really that simple."

I'm content at this stage to note that it turns out, after all, NOT to be "as simple as that".

I happen to agree that the British have attached relatively little importance to cooking in the past 100 years. It now seems to be accepted, maybe even by SteveP, that this has nothing to do with governmental policy or a conspiracy of the upper classes. Is it the result of economics ? Or is it a cultural issue ? And how much of culture is determined by economics ? Now I'm pondering those questions, but if I ever come up with an answer I doubt that it will be "as simple as that".

[magnolia]

"What forces determine eating habits?  Decisions in agriculture, I guess.  I am sure there are some upper class farmers in Britain, but the farming class has traditionally been overwhelmingly distinct from the aristocracy or even the upper middle class. etc etc"

I don't have time right now to read through all these interesting responses in full, but this is one of my favourite discussions, and I will do so when I have a moment. But to add my two cents to this discussion, as a reasonably knowledgable student of French culture and a less knowledgable but no less earnest student of British culture, I do think it's actually much more a cultural issue (that's not to say that decisions about agriculture are also cultural...in both senses of the word, growth and nourish after all you can't spell agriculture without "culture") and a simple (not to say simplistic) one. The fact is - and this is not a *judgment* of any kind, just an observation - that food, wine, and the enjoyment thereof (i.e. not just for sustenance) has always been much more important to the French than it has been to the English. At least that's the impression I get. The French attitude, in general,  seems to have been 'we have to eat... so let's make it great and an event and make the best of the ingredients we have, however lowly they may be, they should be the freshest, most quintessential of their ilk - i.e. don't use something if it's out of season, eat something else'...and the English attitude, in general,  has been 'we have to eat'. Full stop. That's not true of every French person, and certainly not true of every English person either. But for whatever reason...this seems to me the core difference between at least those two cultures. Also a difference in attitude which might contribute to this is that French people are much more vocal complainers, and much less tolerant. So in general they will not put up with bad bread, unripe vegetables or fruit, a crummy high priced restaurant. But English people will, they may complain under their breath, or passive/aggressively, or say 'mustn't grumble' ... but they will not vote with their feet/pocket books and they are too "polite" (or shy or whatever!) to direct a complaint, criticism, etc. to the person/people who can address it. This goes not only for food but for lots of things.  

Things are changing on both sides of the Channel, but that's my impression...more later.

[Gavin Jones]

Is there not standard explanation of all this.

Possibly involving clearance of agricultural land in uk for higher yield on capital sheep/extended farming rather than low yield peasants. But leading to industrial revolution.

How long was rationing in uk- 13 years (?) which should screw up most localised delivery systems.

How long was France's rural economy semi-feudal?

What are French equivalent of UK corn laws, Irish Potato famine?

[Steve Plotnicki]

Many good points here but none better than Gavin's which is in line with what Drew Smith wrote if I recall it correctly. Smith attributes the decline in British agriculture as a function of the policy of 'Restriction." Did I say that right? Anyway, whatever it was called, it was a policy that banned sharecropping in order to force people into large cities where they were building factories at the onset of the industrial revolution. Smith goes on to say that because farmers lost their ability to farm the land without having sufficient working capital to hire workers to replace the sharecroppers who were doing it for a percentage of the crop, farming fell into the hands of a half dozen families, competition decreased dramatically and the quality of the produce changed forever for the worse.

Now if this is true, and I have recounted Smith's allegations correctly, the combination of this type of policy combined with strict rules on banks and what types of collateral or working capital a farmer might have needed to borrow sufficient funds to hire all those employees is exactly the type(s) of ways that government, or the upper classes impact the way a nation eats. Smith says that prior to this occurence, the food in England was good, comparable to France's food but that this instance in their history is something the English have yet to recover from.

Supposing that what I have just written is true, or at least it is a fair recounting of some variation of the truth, I think the obvious question to ask is why did the British population stand for the decrease in quality.

Tony and Cabrales made that point and Andy made it yesterday. There is no better example of English apathy towards food than their non-interest in capitalizing on the seas that completely encircle their country. It is the oddest thing. Every European country that resides on the Channel or the Atlantic has a coastline that is dotted with terrific fish restaurants. And on the North Sea opposite a good chunk of England you have Belgium. But where are the English equivelents? I mean where in Dover is a famous place to eat the sole that gastronomes from the world over are flocking to? I mean it can be done. Look at Rick Stein in Padstow.

And I'm not just picking on the Brits here. Like I keep saying, we in the U.S. are often as guilty. I vacation in Miami Beach each year with my family and considering the geography of the place, it isn't easy to get yourself a really fresh piece of local fish. And to make it even sillier, you can drive 50 miles south to Key Islamorada and wade into the water at midnight, shine a flashlight down and find that you are standing in kneehigh water and 500 shrimp (prawns for you Brits) are swimming around you. And within 5 minutes time and a bucket, you can have plucked dozens of them from the water by hand and a campfire later you have the best shrimp you've ever tasted. But there isn't a restaurant I know of in Miami that doesn't serve frozen shrimp. Now why do the people who live in Miami put up with that?

Not to be specific, but there are counteless ways that governments impact on the type of situation I just described. Maybe the distribution of fish is really controlled by a handful of people and they make more money by trucking frozen fish everywhere from centralized distribution points? And maybe they are large poltiical contributors and the state regulatory commissions and political bodies have put restrictions on shrimping that make it unprofitable? I'm sure we can think of a dozen ways they could impact the situation both in a negative as well as positive way.

But what the French deserve credit for is that they seemed to have removed the needs of special interest groups from diminishing the quality of food that is available to their population (this is of course less true today because of business consolidation,) and somehow they have made a partnership between producer and consumer that is not only unusually free of consumer resentment, the consumers are actually proud of the products. And where the French deserve credit, and it is what Tony attributes to good marketing but I have to tell you as a marketing guy, it is much more than mere marketing, is that they have created an internal system, usually subsudized by the government that holds the great things they produce up to a light for all to see. And whereas the French Minister of Farming might be on TV with the award winning Bresse Chicken, in both the U.S. and Britain that would be merely a function of private industry and they would be not touting the fact that they came up with a top quality chicken, but that they have come up with a system to make a large quanitity of what they would call good, be we eGulleters would call poor, quality chickens.

[Stephen Aldred]

A couple of additional points, economic and social:

(1) Since at least the 1930's the UK has pursued a cheap food policy.  This relied initially on the import of cheap food from the old empire and the maximising of yields from domestic production as opposed to promoting quality.  By way of example, the Milk Marketing Board, established in about 1932 to protect prices paid to dairy farmers in the Depression, paid top price for milk to be sold in bottle and least for milk to be processed into cheese.  As the MMB had an effective purchasing monopoly farmers were reluctant to sell quality milk for cheese which was produced as a 'commodity' product.   It is only since the abolition of the MMB that there has been a real revival in small scale cheese production.

(2) LML makes a good point about the effect of rationing from 1940 to about 1954.  British town dwellers became used to accepting mediocre food.

(3) The destruction of many old town and city centres between about 1955 and 1975 due to misguided planning policies destroyed our old town centre markets.  You can still find these particularly in the North [read Simon Hopkinson in the Independent for his memories of eating black pudding on childhood visits to Bury market] but they are vastly diminished.

(4) Coupled with (3) is the rise of the centralised distribution power of supermarkets which reduced the variety of fresh products available to the consumer.

I could go on.....yawn

[Wilfrid]

Yes, Macrosan, it turns out to be a highly complex story.

Do government policies impact on many aspects of everyday life, including those relevant to producing and consuming food?  Obviously.  Have we found any evidence of a master plan by the governing/upper classes in Britain which had, either as its objective or as a corollary, lowering or keeping low the standard of food?  Can't see any yet.

I'm afraid a lot of things do happen by accident.  There is such a thing as an unintended effect of an intentional action.  I am bit vague about the American term "sharecropping" (my ignorance), but I assume Gavin Jones was referring to the enclosure laws and the massive migration of agricultural workers to the cities.  Subsequent depression of food quality may have been an epiphenomenon, or side-effect of this, but I would need to be convinced that it was something anticipated by the government, or even evident - in the short-term - to the population.  When, Steve, you talk about what the British would "stand for", you are assuming that changes in quality of life which may seem obvious to you, with the benefit of hindsight, were equally obvious at the time.

Finally, as someone who lived in various locations in England in the 1970s and 1980s, I totally disagree with the claim that British food "stank" until 1995.  You could eat bad food in that period, sure, and of course you can today.  But first-rate produce was available- readily available - in regional towns and cities as well as in London - certainly by the late seventies/early eighties.  I know: I was buying it.  And it's nothing to do with you and I having different tastes.  I just wish you had been around Bristol in the 1980s, and I could have offered you some of the best cheeses in the world, fine feathered and furred game, high quality meat, fruit and vegetables, and an unbelievable range of "artisanal" pies and pastry products.  Washed down with good beer and cider (no, we certainly ain't a wine country).  

[macrosan]

I could go on.....yawn

... and surely that's the whole point. There are at least 16million hypothetical causes of the current state of British food. We haven't even started to talk about the weather, global warming, the abdication of King Edward, Queen Victoria's love-affairs with India and Scotland, the loss of the colony of America, Robert Burns' Ode to the Haggis, the importation of the potato from the West Indies, smoking, Chinese and Indian immigration ....

...I could go on, yawn ....

An argument could be made for any of these, just as strong as the conspiracy theory. Personally, I think it's just an accident of history and culture. What really matters to me is that there are clear indications of improvement in the last 20 years. Long may that continue.

[Steve Plotnicki]

Wilfrid-You are trying to pigeon hole my assertion that what happened in Britain was "intended" by the government or that they realized that the net result of the enclosure laws (thanks for that) would be a diminution of the quality of food. I have made no such statement. But what I have said is that those are the types of ways that governments influence how well we eat. Whether it is on purpose or by accident, it makes no difference. The issue isn't whether the policies had a negative impact, the issue is that if it did have a negative impact (and that appears to be the case,) why the population stood for it? One wonders why when the quality was lowered the English working classes didn't rise up and complain? Would governmental authorities have tried to remedy the problem if factory workers went out on strike because the bangers had more cereal than meat (just an example, keep your hat on)? Possibly so. But that isn't what happened. The Brits just queued up and ate what they were given.

As for the availability of fresh ingredients as well as good ingredients before 1995, I am sure you are correct. But once again you are trying to make my allegations more specific than they were. I made a statement about the general level of quality before 1995. In my opinion that is when there was a significant increase in quality across the board. And my opinion is based on the fact that I have owned a business in the U.K. since 1988. And even prior to that I visited on a regular basis..

You know there was rationing in France too. Both during and after the war. Potatoes which are probably the staple ingredient of their cuisine were rationed. But the replacement wasn't an artificially created substance like spam or marmite, it was topinambours (jerusalem artichokes,) fresh food.

I honestly do not know why Brits are so defensive about this issue. Prior to the last decade, their food culture was pretty crappy. But again they are not alone. Many countries had and still have poor food cultures, the U.S. being as guilty as anyone. But it is just that the popularity of spam and marmite are particularly heinous examples of the ways it can go all wrong, and what people will stand for. I guess margarine is the American equivelent in some ways though it isn't a primary ingredient in a dish. It was developed to be a cheap butter substitute and became popular when it was considered a way to get the benefits of butter without the cholesterol. Only to find out that it was worse for you than butter was.

[Steve Plotnicki]

Stephen-I hadn't read your response before I posted my last one. Thanks for the contribution here. Those are the types of things that I was describing. Clearly if the availability of top quality food was of importance to the British government, as it was to the French government, the policies would have been different and the result would have been different. I can hear Steve Shaw saying that this is a good idea for a new thread and if there is anyone out there who has specific knowledge about government regulations and how they impact what we eat, please post something on the General Board or on a national board if it is specific to a country. But for example, there are many cheeses which are fabricated in France that one can't import into the U.S. which results in the cheeses available to Americans being inferior. And we can't bring Bresse chickens in here either. Would it be fair for me to say that the quality of chickens that U.S. farmers produce is inferior because they do not have to compete with chickens from Bresse ot the Landes at the high end?

[Wilfrid]

Wilfrid-You are trying to pigeon hole my assertion that what happened in Britain was "intended" by the government or that they realized that the net result of the enclosure laws (thanks for that) would be a diminution of the quality of food. I have made no such statement.

Steve, I just had to go back and check up on my reading skills.  Some of your earlier points:

"The reasons that the British ate spam and marmite and the French didn't is that the French upper classes agreed to feed the lower classes in France far better than the upper classes in Britain agreed to feed their lower classes."

"(T)he reason that Britain was on the other side of the boot was that it was well behind in what the governing class deemed an acceptable way to feed the population..."

"Could the British government have subsidized the purchase of fresh food from foreign countries? I'm not expert enough to tell you. But would they have done so to the detriment of a British company who makes spam?"

If you weren't addressing the intentions of the governing/upper classes, then I misunderstood you, but I think from the above you can see why.  I think we all agree that government policies can affect what people eat.

One other substantive point.  Steve, the British "working class" has repeatedly risen up against the effects of government policies on their food supply.  It happened repeatedly in the nineteenth century.  In the twentieth century, I would just point to the Jarrow Hunger March.  But their main issue has always been getting enough food at prices they could afford; not whether there is too much cereal in the sausage.  I think Stephen, Gavin and Macrosan have given excellent examples of historical/economic conditions which have influenced British food history, and I don't wish to add anything.  I really think anyone reading your early posts would have thought you were giving a different explanation - the one I found so implausible.

Why make such a fuss?  I do acknowledge, Steve, that  - unlike some media commentators - you are being very fair in accepting that the States has had its problems too.  It's not so much your post that set me off, as a stream of at best ignorant, at worst wilfully dishonest, media comments about British food (and I point to Rebecca Mead in the New Yorker again*), which have inflated the clear deficiencies in British gastronomy to the level of a myth, in which the British have been so stupid over the years that they have eaten nothing but gunk (spam and marmite, perhaps) and only found out about good food last week.  I do get annoyed about this, because it dismisses the real life experiences of myself, my family, and millions of ordinary fellow countrymen.

Not letting off steam at you, Steve, I promise - more at the Ms Meads of this world.

*And let's assume Ms Mead is ignorant rather than dishonest.

[cabrales]

And we can't bring Bresse chickens in here either.

Steve P -- You mean Bresse chickens are prohibited in the US? I had thought it was a matter of expense that rendered Bresse chickens effectively invisible on US menus.  

I can't meaningfully speak to any aspect of British culinary history, but wondered how you see the role of the Roux Brothers within the context of this thread. In other words, are they pioneers with respect to French cuisine in the UK (a great contribution itself), or did they contribute more than that?

[Steve Plotnicki]

Wilfrid-Regardless of misdrawn inferences, I feel confident when  I say that no matter how you want to describe British food culture during the last century, the Brits have eaten much worse than they had to. And as to the quality of what they have eaten and whether it has been any good or not, to outsiders, the quality of the food has been pretty horrible. Now that might be a function of a difference in taste, or it might be a function of people in Britain just not knowing, or even not caring about the difference beween good and bad tasting. I'm not exactly sure why. But it was, and in many instances, especially outside of London, still is horrible. Why you are so hestitant to admit that is puzzling to me? Because I have no qualms about admitting to you that here we here in the U.S. practice many ridiculous, stupid and garish food custom that are embedded in our culture and which are passed off as good and delicious when they are in reality foul.

Cabrales-I'm not sure what you mean? Is your point that the Roux brothers are French and the Brits needed the French to help guide them from their malaise? Or is it the opposite point and do you think that the point is the Roux brothers were able to find ingredients of a sufficient quality within the U.K. in order to create 2 star cuisine?

I have a general question for the board. Considering its close proximity to France, how come the bread in England is different (I am refraining from saying inferior) to what they have in France? I have noticed the same phenomenon in Spain. The bakeries in Barcelona, a mere 100 miles from the French border sell bread that is nowhere as good as what you can get in France. London is a mere 100+ miles away from Calais or Boulogne. One would have though that someone would have created an import system that delivers fresh bread. I guess I am asking the following. Considering how much better French bread is than almost all English bread, it is a wonder why Boulangeries didn't replace English bakeries. I mean they have in many ways if you are in a posh neighborhood. But not in the middle. A matter of taste? Cost? What is it?