Forget being a foodie... you might just be a food snob
As a top chef slams Britain’s culinary culture, Deborah Robertson explains why it has become unappetising
Hold on to your halloumi. On Desert Island Discs this weekend, Michelin-starred chef Angela Hartnett dismissed the idea that we are a foodie nation. In between Simple Minds and Burt Bacharach, she said: “When people sit there and say we are a foodie nation, we have a food culture, I genuinely don’t think we still do. I don’t think we are like the Italians or the Spanish… Our food culture is about money. If you have money you can afford good food in this country.”
While it would be wrong to suggest there hasn’t been an improvement in British food in the past 20 years, you’d have to be very blinkered indeed to think that across the country we’re all bouncing along happily on a cloud of sourdough loaves and raw artisanal butter, with Spam fritters and dodgy burgers a distant, greasy memory.
Never mind the recherché ingredients that grace the tables of fine homes in London and other foodie hotspots
(waves to the West
Country, posher bits of Yorkshire, the Fens), there are parts of Britain where, through the vagaries of geography or economics, access to fairly straightforward fresh food is a challenge. We live in an era of abundance and of food banks. We exist in a two-tier food culture where, on the one hand, people happily pay £20 for a chicken (and will bore on endlessly about its provenance as though describing their precocious firstborn’s grasp of Mandarin), and on the other, many struggle to feed their families.
In such a climate, some simply tilt their heads empathetically and explain that, of course, we should all be eating less meat and simply ensuring what we do eat is better quality. Which, yes, we all know is true. But as Hartnett went on to say, there is something terribly wrong about patronising people on low incomes and saying they must buy organic chicken.
One of the biggest problems with food in this country – apart from having too much or too little of it – is that it provides another canvas for snobbery. The farmers’ market crowd may dress it up as an obsession with flavour and provenance, but in reality – just like driving a certain car or living in a certain neighbourhood – eating certain foods marks you out as a member of a particular group. Paying over the odds for an aubergine or artisan loaf is as materialistic as buying a ridiculously expensive pair of trainers. It’s about finding your tribe, which is fine as long as it doesn’t give you an excuse to look down on others who make different choices. That, frankly, is unappetising.
We saw this kind of foodie virtue signalling during the horse meat scandal, when some gleefully sidestepped the problem of fraud to jump straight in with the sneer. (Well, if you will spend a pound on four burgers, what can you possibly expect? Clue: I expect it to be what it says it is, just as when you spend £100 on caviar, you expect it to be sturgeons’ eggs, not cods’ roe.)
We saw it again last week, when M&S was chivvied into taking its cauliflower steaks off the shelves. The groundswell of social media criticism began with outrage at the excessive packaging, which, of course, we need to tackle, but quickly morphed into all manner of sanctimonious claptrap about pre-prepared vegetables and endless diatribes on laziness in the kitchen.
The way in which some people jumped on this issue to show off their foodie cred is a true demonstration of how shallow our newfound food culture is. Why should you get into such a froth about what’s in your neighbour’s shopping basket? It’s the worst kind of curtain twitchery and leaves me worried as to whether 2018 will be the year that food intolerances come to mean the food you buy, rather than the food you eat.
Most people are doing the best they can and they aren’t going to improve their habits by being lectured or laughed at. It would be a sign of a real shift if we could get away from this trend for performative Epicureanism, and focus on a simpler, less snooty appreciation of culinary skills and flavours. Would a pea we call a petit pois still smell as sweet? You betcha.
Will 2018 be the year food intolerances come to mean the food you buy?