by Jay Rayner
‘I really do think the consumer will be ready for this,’ says the academic and food futurologist Morgaine Gaye. ‘We know that meat prices are going to double or more in the future and we’re going to have to look for solutions.’ Gaye has done anecdotal research, interviewing a wide range of consumers from different backgrounds about what foods they thought they would be eating in the future. ‘They all said insects.’ This, she said, was something we could do now. ‘I’ve already made a burger out of insects for a TV programme. It was pretty good.’
So-called in-vitro meat – animal protein grown in the lab from stem cells and nutrients – will take a little longer, but that too will eventually be a part of our diet. The pressure group PETA – People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – has offered a $1 million reward to the first research team that can produce a convincing animal-free burger. Manufacturers of the filthy drek that is Quorn need not apply. Already two major teams are having a go. In California a vegan molecular biologist from Stanford University called Professor Patrick Brown has been at work for a few years now. ‘I have zero interest in making a new food just for vegans,’ Brown told the Guardian newspaper last year. ‘I am making a food for people who are comfortable eating meat and who want to continue eating meat. I want to reduce the human footprint on this planet by 50 per cent.’ Meanwhile, in the Netherlands a team at the University of Maastricht is also having a go. Both teams acknowledge the challenges. Meat is very much more than just protein. It’s a complex web of protein plus fat, nerve endings, plasma, gristle and so on. It contains sugars and amino acids which, when seared, undergo the Maillard Reaction, which gives a steak its intense umami flavour when browned.
As a result a true lab-grown steak may not be achievable. But that’s not the point. It’s about providing a substitute for the animal protein we consume in anything other than prime cuts.
‘At some point,’ Morgaine Gaye says, ‘we will have a device at home, a box like a microwave. We’ll put our stem-cell culture in there once a week and top it up with the various nutrient-rich fluids and we’ll grow our own in-vitro meat at home. There will be hiccups along the way. There will be complications along the way. But it will happen.’ Meanwhile those old-fashioned prime cuts will become luxury objects. ‘In the forties and fifties if we had a roast on a Sunday then we made it last through the week,’ Gaye says. ‘Cold cuts on Monday, pie on Tuesday, a soup from the bones on Wednesday. When it comes to the pieces of identifiable livestock, that is something to which we will return.’
Arguably, futurology is a bit of a racket. Some of it is just knowing what’s going on out there before other people are aware of it. Some of it is merely about having a seriously plausible manner, the sharpest pair of glasses in the room, and a killer PowerPoint presentation. The rest is extrapolation and wanton fantasy greased with the shameless hope that by the time you get to the future you were talking about so convincingly five years ago nobody will really remember what the hell it was that you said would happen.
So take my predictions of insect animal protein and in-vitro meat with as big a pinch of salt as you think the way I have described them deserves. But be in no doubt: these alternatives to meat from animals are just an example of what’s going on out there. The world of food is changing, not because media-hungry celebrity chefs say it should do so or because we’re bored and we crave the next big thing. It’s changing because the world itself is changing: populations are growing, financial might is shifting, new consumer tribes are emerging, every bit as greedy and avaricious as the tribes to which you and I already belong. A lot of stuff will happen whether you want it to or not. Decisions will be made for you, sometimes through changing access to foodstuffs, more often through hard, cruel economics. It is a cliché, but then clichés are only such because they are so very true: the future is already here.
Welcome to the complicated business of dinner in the twenty-first century.
10.
THE SUMMER THEY STOPPED EATING
My mother began dying in the late spring of 2010. Claire had done this before. In 2003 a botched anaesthetic during an operation on a busted tendon had landed her in intensive care for many weeks. A dormant chest infection had turned into pneumonia which in turn had led to septic shock and multi-organ failure. She should have died, and if she had been any other 71-year-old with her medical history – lung problems, a pacemaker – she may well have done so. There were switches that could be flicked, beds that could be emptied to make way for more promising cases. But she was Claire Rayner, the woman who had been agony aunt to the nation and then an ardent campaigner for, and a guardian of, the National Health Service. She had sat on various Royal Commissions looking at the best way to manage care. She had been a non-executive director of the very hospital whose ICU she now occupied. No consultant wanted to lose her on their watch, and they didn’t. It was a long and slow process, but she did what none of her doctors thought she was capable of. She made a remarkable recovery and was eventually able to walk back in to the ICU and thank the staff who had saved her life. She got seven more reasonably active years that many of us had not expected.
And then in May 2010 she began dying again. This time it was a bowel obstruction – she never believed in euphemism or delicacy in matters of health and neither do I – which required emergency surgery. Once more she was back in intensive care; once more my poor father Des, her companion for over half a century, was forced to keep vigil. It had been traumatic enough the first time. The second time it was almost too much to bear. Not that we knew exactly how bad it was then. We were battle-hardened. We had seen her in intensive care before, seen this formidable woman kept alive by the pulse and glow of so many pieces of machinery, attached to her by a seemingly endless umbilicus of shiny plastic tubing. We all knew how to read the vital signs that flashed at us from screens as she lay unconscious and sedated in front of us. Only later would we learn that she came very close to checking out on us that first weekend; she would live on for another five months.
There had been many things that could have killed her over the years. There was the brush with breast cancer in 2001, which she had dealt with via a radical double mastectomy, arguing that, as fond of them as she was, she really didn’t need her breasts any more at her age. She liked to say that she had gone from not having breast cancer to not having breast cancer in fourteen days, the period from before diagnosis to after mastectomy. There were the pulmonary problems, which she blamed on a childhood amid the sulphurous pea-soupers that enveloped the London of the forties and fifties, not helped, I imagine, by a few years of heavy smoking in her youth. There was the cardiomyopathy, a disease causing, in her case, a thickening of the heart walls.
(A brief diversion: cardiomyopathies can be genetically inherited, and it was decided once Claire was diagnosed that her children should be checked out too. I went to a local hospital for an exercise test, at the end of which I was told by the doctor that they would like me to wear a tape machine wired to my chest that would record my heartbeat for twenty-four hours. Only once I had left the hospital, sensors in place, cables snaking out of my shirt, did I recall that I was due that evening to review a restaurant called the Soviet Canteen, which attempted to recreate the food enjoyed by the elite during the years of the Soviet Union. To add piquancy to the review I had invited as my companion a man called Sir Gerald Warner, former deputy Director General of MI6, the foreign intelligence agency. He had recently retired and was edging out into the daylight of normal life. The moment he arrived at the restaurant I had to explain to him that I was wearing a wire, but that the only thing it was recording was my heartbeat. He said very little during dinner. After all that it turned out I had not inherited any form of heart disease.)
None of these things was going to kill Claire. She would survive endless medical procedures, including four knee replacements, which wasn’t bad for a biped. (Two of them failed, on the same knee.) Instead she would die as a result of an operation on the intestine, the o
rgan most closely associated with eating. I wouldn’t call this poetic justice. There was very little poetry in a death like hers. But it did have a certain internal logic for we have always been a family that loves its food. It was my mother who had taught me how to eat. It was my mum who introduced me to my first oyster when I was 10, grinning from ear to ear as the accessories piled up around us on the restaurant table: the frame for the tray of ice, the tiny, flat, two-pronged fork, the muslin-wrapped lemon, the shallot vinegar and Tabasco. Dress it as you will, she told me. Check it’s been released from its sticking place on the shell with the fork, then, whoosh, down the hatch in one. Chew if you like, but not too much. Try it with a sip of this Sancerre. Sniff it. Smells a bit like cat’s wee, doesn’t it? But doesn’t it work well with the oyster? Yes, mother, it does.
She adored the theatre and any food which came with a bit of that was OK with her; even better if it required strict instructions. She loved steak tartare, but needed to be asked how piquant she wanted it, and would brighten further if the final mixing of the egg yolk into the chopped beef happened tableside. A few years ago I lost a bet with her; the winnings were lunch on me at the Fat Duck, the gastronomic temple of that genius of culinary modernism Heston Blumenthal. I wasn’t sure she would like it. For years she had been a regular amid the red velvet plush and certainties of Rules, the oldest restaurant in London, with its brass trim and menu of game; when the Wolseley opened and proved itself reliable at the Mittel-European shtick she quickly embraced it. They did a good steak tartare there. So what she would make of Blumenthal’s exuberant techno-fancies? I had no idea. But if the Fat Duck is anything it is pure theatre. The moment the waiter bathed the foamed green tea palate cleanser in liquid nitrogen, the vapours rolling out across the table, she was sold. Not that she was overly impressed by the gloss and shine of that world. True luxury didn’t need spin, she said.
The night before my mother was to be admitted to hospital for her double mastectomy my wife and I met my parents for dinner. On the menu that evening my mother spotted ‘lobster and chips’. She nodded slowly, in recognition. ‘Now that,’ she said, ‘is class.’ We both ordered it and sat, side by side, bibs in place, the emptied shells piling up around us as we worked. We were happy. My mother was right. It was a special kind of luxury.
And now she lay in a drug-induced coma in an intensive care unit. My father visited every day, reading to her from the poems of John Betjeman that she so loved, uncertain as to whether she could hear; the reading as much therapy for him as for her. We kids visited regularly, trying to make sure Des had as much company as possible. We were told that there were complications, that the wound from the emergency operation was not healing as quickly as might be hoped (or in fact at all). Eventually, though, they did begin to withdraw the sedative and she did wake up. There were a couple of days of elation. There always are. But that, quite quickly, was replaced by something else. Claire was furious. She was livid. She was desperate. Damn it, she had been through this once before and it had been a particular kind of torture. Not again; this couldn’t happen again. She would never really stop being angry.
Late one night, two months after Claire had landed in intensive care, my older son Eddie, then 10, awoke in the night complaining of stomach pains. By the morning he described the pain as a very clear stabbing sensation to the right of his abdomen. He said he felt bruised. I knew immediately what it was; he couldn’t have described appendicitis any more accurately if he had been a medical textbook. We shipped him off to Accident and Emergency at the local hospital, where they gave him painkillers and sedatives, and ummed and aahed as to whether he would need an operation. He was admitted to hospital that morning and after a couple of days they decided they should go in. Whatever drama was unfolding in north-west London, where my mother lay in hospital, was pushed to one side. My brother and sister readily agreed they would now deal with that.
Eddie was taken down for his operation late one evening; I was at home, looking after his younger brother, Daniel. Within an hour I had a call from my wife telling me to come to the hospital. Once under anaesthetic they had used ultrasound to discover a ‘closed’ appendicitis. The infection had been there for so long the body had begun to close around it. They didn’t like operating on those, especially when the patient was having raging fevers as Eddie was. We were told it would be better to treat it aggressively with antibiotics and then bring him back in six or seven weeks when it was more manageable. We asked if there was a chance it could flare up anyway and still require emergency surgery. They said there was that chance but that it was better to try it this way. Eddie was sent home. Five days later he was vomiting and throwing fevers. Very quickly he was back in hospital and they were operating. He came around from the operation a very ill little boy.
We knew immediately how ill he was; he couldn’t even look at a bag of Haribo’s Tangfastics. This was a boy who’d never met a sweet he didn’t like. And as for the sugar-crusted, citric acid-boosted joy of Tangfastics, the apparatus had not yet been devised that could measure the speed with which he could neck a bag of those.
The packet sat on his hospital bedside table, untouched.
We spend an awful lot of our time worrying about the state of our food culture in the developed world. Hand-wringing over the fetishizing of food and cooking is always a good standby for a newspaper comment page short on outrage. We watch more than we cook, they say. We have pornified what we eat; as with sex we are more interested in watching other people do it rather than getting involved ourselves. Even allowing for the fact that I have a vested interest in food media – I am involved with an awful lot of food television – this fury has always struck me as a little overblown. A bunch of people on the telly cook something and nobody dies. Is it really such a scandal? The fact is that both the boom in food media and outrage over it are two sides of the same coin. We are able to indulge in both because there aren’t more important things to worry about. There are obvious exceptions but, for the most part, we are affluent compared with other parts of the world and therefore able to turn a necessity into a leisure activity. Likewise, we have the luxury to be cross about it too.
That said, we do sometimes lose sight of just how elemental what we eat is; how much a part of us food becomes. And if there is anything guaranteed to bring that back to you, it is watching your son lie in a hospital bed, suffering with a post-operative infection and declining to eat. Does it need saying that he and his brother are my sons in so many ways? Just as my mother had shown me how to eat my first oyster when I was 10, so I had shown Eddie, one warm New York summer’s day in the legendary oyster bar under Grand Central Station when he was around the same age. I had bathed in the admiring glances of the shuckers behind the bar, these big men with their tree-thick forearms and bald heads and chests like bank safes. One birthday Eddie had asked for a sushi-making kit so he could produce his own maki rolls. He is not afraid of chilli. He likes his steak medium rare. He hates football. He’s that kind of boy.
And now he was languishing in bed with no appetite at all. If anybody tells you appendicitis is always a simple and routine business, tell them they are wrong. Or send them to me and I’ll tell them. In all, Eddie would spend twenty-four days in hospital, going through countless fevers. Twice a week the antibiotics being used to take out the bugs in his belly had to be changed, as the search for the right weapon went on. The only thing that kept our fear at bay was that he was already in hospital, receiving the kind of treatment only the NHS at its very best can deliver. During that time either my wife or I was at his bedside and most of the time we were imploring him to eat.
It would be customary here to bemoan the quality of hospital food, and some of it was awful. Some of what was on offer was a shameful waste of calories. As one senior nutritionist at the hospital told me, they spent more on drugs to counter digestive problems than they did on the food they served which was partly responsible for causing them. But some of it was fine. Still Eddie didn’t want i
t. And so, blessed with the money to do so, we started bringing stuff in: dumplings from the cool Chinese place across the way in Camberwell, steaming bowls of ramen, grilled chicken from the branch of Nando’s up the road. It did the job. He began to eat. The fevers began to subside. Not completely. But enough. One Friday they said Eddie could go home.
The family’s summer holiday to Turkey had been cancelled. There was no way we could take a boy who was still suffering fevers to a country where the temperature regularly hit 40ºC. Instead we booked a chalet on a holiday park in Normandy. We went out for steak frites and for pancakes and for waffles submerged under a cumulonimbus of cream. We ate perfect shellfish and salamis and boudin noir, and slowly but surely Eddie came back to health. Then, one morning during that holiday, my wife got a phone call from her sister. It was about her 88-year-old mother.
My mother-in-law, Denise de Choudens, was born in the French-speaking part of Switzerland in the early twenties, and came to Britain in the forties as an au pair. She married and had three children, the youngest of whom, Pat, became my wife. And so, as one does through marriage, I became inculcated into another culture, with its own codes and traditions. It was exemplified for me by a love for a particular brand of Swiss vinegar. Pat’s family had always carted some back with them in the boot of the car from their biannual trips to the big family house on the mountain above La Chaux-de-Fonds. Kressi vinegar was light and bright and salty and not too acidic, and, as it had been with Pat’s family, it quickly became a cult object for me. In Switzerland it was nothing special. It was a major supermarket brand. Indeed, it would eventually be manufactured by Unilever. No matter. It was just better than any other white-wine vinegar. A salad dressing made with Kressi needs nothing other than olive oil and the crunch of sea salt. It is civilization in a one-litre bottle.