Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  105. At least, this rule applied to punk and now to the current ‘blingy’ gangsta/hip-hop fashions, but a relatively high proportion of Goths are middle class, as are most indies, so there are exceptions.

  106. Apologies to those too young to remember Shirley Williams in her heyday, but I could not find a good contemporary example, as all female politicians now seem to dress in a rather lower/middle-middle manner – or at least I have seen none with Williams’s unmistakably high-class brand of unkemptness.

  107. See page 345 for a more detailed discussion of the class-semiotics of shopping at M&S.

  FOOD RULES

  In 1949, the Hungarian George Mikes famously declared that ‘On the Continent people have good food; in England they have good table manners.’ Later, in 1977, he observed that our food had improved somewhat, while our table manners had deteriorated. He still did not, however, seem impressed by English food, and he acknowledged that our table manners were still ‘fairly decent’.

  Nearly forty years on, Mikes’s comments still reflect the general international opinion of English cooking, as the travel writer Paul Richardson discovered when he told foreign friends that he was going to spend eighteen months researching a book on British gastronomy. His Spanish, French and Italian friends, he says, informed him that there was no such thing as British gastronomy, as this would require a passionate love of food, which we clearly did not have. They implied ‘that our relationship with the food we ate was more or less a loveless marriage’.

  Among the litany of complaints, which I have also heard from my own foreign friends and informants, was the fact that we regard good food as a privilege, not a right. We also have no proper regional cookery; families no longer eat together but instead consume junk food in front of the television; our diet consists mainly of salty or sweet snack foods – chips, crisps, chocolate bars, ready-meals, microwave pizzas and other rubbish. Even those with an interest in good food, and able to afford it, tend to have neither the time nor the energy to shop for and cook fresh ingredients in what other nations would regard as a normal or proper manner.

  These criticisms are largely justified, and confirmed by statistics: for example, we consume more microwave ready-meals than all the rest of Europe put together. But they are not the whole truth. The same goes for the opposite extreme – the current fashion for proclaiming that English cooking has in recent years improved out of all recognition, that London is now the gastronomic capital of the world, that food is the new rock ‘n’ roll, that we have become a nation of gourmets and ‘foodies’, and so on.

  I am not going to spend too much time here arguing about the quality of English cooking. My impression is that it is neither as awful as its detractors would have us believe, nor as stupendous as its recent champions have claimed. It is somewhere in between. Some of it is very good, some is quite inedible. On average, it’s probably about fair to middling. I am only interested in the quality of English food in so far as it reflects our relationship with food, the unwritten social rules governing our food-related behaviour, and what these tell us about our national identity. Every culture has its own distinctive food rules – both general rules about attitudes towards food and cooking, and specific rules about who may eat what, how much, when, where, with whom and in what manner – and one can learn a lot about a culture by studying its food rules. So, I am not interested in English food per se, but in the Englishness of English food rules.

  THE AMBIVALENCE RULE

  ‘Loveless marriage’ is not an entirely unfair description of the English relationship with food, although marriage is perhaps too strong a word: our relationship with food and cooking is more like a sort of uneasy, uncommitted cohabitation. It is ambivalent, often discordant, and highly fickle. There are moments of affection, and even of passion, but on the whole it is fair to say that we do not have the deep-seated, enduring, inborn love of food that is to be found among our European neighbours, and indeed in most other cultures. Food is just not given the same high priority in English life as it is elsewhere. Even the Americans, whose ‘generic’ (as opposed to ethnic) food is arguably no better than ours, still seem to care about it more, demanding hundreds of different flavours and combinations in each category of junk food on their supermarket shelves, for example, whereas we will put up with just twenty or so.

  In most other cultures, people who care about food, and enjoy cooking and talking about it, are not singled out, either sneeringly or admiringly, as ‘foodies’. Keen interest in food is the norm, not the exception: what the English call a ‘foodie’ would just be a normal person, exhibiting a standard, healthy, appropriate degree of focus on food. What we see as foodie obsession is in other cultures the default mode, not something unusual or even noticeable.

  Among the English, such an intense interest in food is regarded by the majority as at best rather odd, and at worst somehow morally suspect – not quite proper, not quite right. In a man, foodie tendencies may be seen as unmanly, effeminate, possibly even casting doubt upon his sexual orientation. In this context, foodieness is roughly on a par with, say, an enthusiastic interest in fashion or soft furnishings. English male ‘celebrity’ chefs who appear on television tend to go out of their way to demonstrate their masculinity and heterosexuality: they use blokeish language and adopt a tough, macho demeanour; they parade their passion for football, mention their wives, girlfriends or children (‘the wife’ and ‘the kids’ in bloke-speak), and dress as scruffily as possible. Jamie Oliver, the TV chef who has done so much to make cooking a more attractive career choice for English boys, is a prime example of this ‘please note how heterosexual I am’ style, with his Cockney brashness and laddish ‘Chuck in a bi’ o’ this an’ a bi’ o’ that an’ you’ll be awright, mate’ approach to cookery. Other English celebrity chefs prove their manliness by shouting and swearing all the time.

  Foodieness is somewhat more acceptable among females, but it is still noticeable, still remarked upon – and in some circles regarded as pretentious. No one wishes to be seen as too deeply fascinated by or passionate about food. Most of us are proud to claim that we ‘eat to live, rather than living to eat’ – unlike some of our neighbours, the French in particular, whose excellent cooking we enjoy and admire, but whose shameless devotion to food we rather despise, not realising that the two might perhaps be connected.

  ANTI-EARNESTNESS AND OBSCENITY RULES

  Our ambivalence about food may be due in part to the influence of the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule. Excessive zeal on any subject is embarrassing, and getting all earnest and emotional about something as trivial as food is, well, frankly rather silly.

  But it seems to me that our uneasiness about food and foodieness involves something more than this. There is a hint here of a more general discomfort about sensual pleasures. Flaunting one’s passion for good food, and talking openly about the pleasure of eating it, is not embarrassing just because it is over-earnest but also because it is somehow a bit obscene.

  It has been said that the English have a puritanical streak, but I’m not sure this is quite accurate. Sex, for example, is not regarded as sinful, but as private and personal and therefore a bit embarrassing. Jokes about sex, even quite explicit ones, are acceptable; earnest or fervent talk about the same intimate physical details is obscene. The sensual pleasures of eating, it seems to me, are in the same category – not exactly a taboo subject, but one that should only be talked about in a light-hearted, unserious, jokey manner.

  Foodies (or foreigners) who dwell too lyrically, too erotically, on the delights of a perfectly executed, voluptuously creamy sauce Béarnaise will make us squirm, blush and look away. To avoid offending, all they need do is lighten up a bit, laugh at themselves, not take the whole thing quite so seriously. Without such ironic detachment, foodie-talk becomes a form of ‘gastro-porn’ (the term normally refers to lavishly illustrated foodie magazines and cookbooks, with detailed, mouth-watering descriptions of each luscious dish – but can equally be ap
plied to over-enthusiastic foodie conversation).

  TV-DINNER RULES

  Although the idea that we are becoming a nation of discerning gastronomes is, I’m afraid, over-optimistic foodie propaganda – well, a gross exaggeration, anyway – interest in food and cooking has certainly increased in recent years. There is usually at least one food-related programme on every television channel every day. Admittedly, some of the game-show-style programmes, in which amateur chefs compete to cook a three-course meal in twenty minutes from five ingredients, are more entertainment than cookery – and most of my foreign informants found this approach to food either amusingly daft or shockingly irreverent. But there are plenty of genuinely informative cookery shows as well.

  Whether this actually translates into much real cooking in English homes is a matter for debate. It is probably true that many English people avidly watch the celebrity TV chefs preparing elaborate dishes from fresh ingredients, while their own plastic-packaged supermarket ready-meals circle sweatily for three minutes in the microwave. (I’ve often done exactly this myself.) It has been estimated that of the 171 million cookbooks we own, 61 million are never even opened, and even from those that are, only a few recipes are ever used.

  But there are exceptions – people who are genuinely inspired by these programmes, and rush out to buy the TV chefs’ cookbooks and try their recipes. And I’m not just talking about a middle-class, trendy-foodie elite. A small but significant number of my working-class friends and informants have become much more enthusiastic and adventurous cooks as a result of watching television cookery programmes. A bus driver told me he was a ‘big fan’ of Gary Rhodes. ‘I love his recipes,’ he said. ‘I’d never even tried to cook fish before – not real fish, proper fresh fish. Now I can go to the fishmonger and get, oh, red snapper or whatever and make a really beautiful meal. I did roasted sea bass last weekend. It’s very pricey, is sea bass, but it’s worth it. Beautiful, it was.’

  Like most other English born-again food lovers, however, he only does this sort of ‘proper cooking’ once a week, on Saturday nights. There are still very few households in England where fresh ingredients, pricey or otherwise, are painstakingly prepared and carefully cooked on a daily basis. The shelves of the more up-market supermarkets may be full of exotic vegetables, herbs and spices, but the majority of shoppers still have no idea what these ingredients are or how to cook them. I spent some time hanging around the fruit and veg sections in supermarkets, staring at things like pak choi, wild mushrooms and lemongrass, and randomly asking fellow shoppers if they knew what one was supposed to do with them. Most did not, and neither, for that matter, did the supermarket staff.

  THE NOVELTY RULE

  I am, however, falling into a very English trendy-foodie trap here – equating ‘good’ food and ‘genuine’ interest in cooking with novel, foreign ingredients and new ways of preparing them. My foreign friends and informants find the frantic novelty-seeking of English foodies somewhat bizarre, and laugh at our constantly changing fads and fashions – from nouvelle to Cajun to Fusion to Tuscan to Pacific Rim to Modern British. One minute it’s sun-dried tomatoes with everything, the next these are passé and it’s raspberry vinegar, or garlic mash, or polenta, or, oh, I don’t know, confit of black pudding and potato rösti layered into a precarious tower in the middle of a huge white plate, with goat-cheese filo parcels and a balsamic reduction or rosemary jus or horseradish sabayon or something.

  Now the teetering towers are out and the latest fashion is for, say, scallops and chorizo with thin slices of purple and yellow beetroot and some obscure ‘foraged’ wild herbs, arranged in arty patterns on a piece of slate, with an elongated-teardrop smear of shallot purée and a watercress foam, decorated with pea shoots and edible flowers. Oh, and a fiendishly complicated dried and powdered ingredient, or tiny cubes of some equally high-tech jelly, or something theatrical involving liquid nitrogen. ‘Molecular gastronomy’ is one of the latest fads, and seems to be more about playing with big sciencey machines than making nice food – and yet another way for chefs to look manly on television.

  This novelty-obsession is not peculiarly English: the same trend can be observed in America and Australia, but they are much younger nations, composed of immigrants from a variety of cultures, with no traditional indigenous cuisine to speak of, so they have some excuse. We are supposed to be an old, established European culture, with centuries of tradition and a sense of history. Yet when it comes to food, we behave like teenage fashion-victims. Presumably because, when it comes to food, despite our seniority, we are actually in much the same position as these teenage former colonies, having no great culinary tradition of our own. Some historically minded food lovers claim that English food has not always been so undistinguished, citing the great banquets of former times, with rich game pies and exotic spices and so on. But these things were largely the preserve of a very small, wealthy minority – and foreigners have been complaining about the poor quality of most English cooking for centuries. Now they marvel at our indiscriminate mixing and matching of foreign influences.

  ‘I thought the English were supposed to be resistant to change,’ said one of my confused foreign informants. ‘This is not what I see in your restaurants. In Italy, we are much more traditional, much less open-minded about food. And the French are even more . . .’ He curved his hands like blinkers alongside his eyes, in a gesture indicating tunnel vision or narrow-mindedness. He had a good point, I thought. The English have a reputation as sticks-in-the-mud, but our attitude to food suggests that we can be remarkably flexible, willing to try new things and absorb different culinary practices. The wilder extremes of the most recent novelty-seeking trends are mainly confined to the young and fashion-conscious, but Greek, Italian, Indian and Chinese food have been part of the English diet for decades – as familiar and established as meat-and-two-veg. Indian food in particular is an integral part of English culture. Our customs revolve around it. No Saturday night pub-crawl would be complete without a visit to the local tandoori or balti restaurant. And when the English go on holiday abroad, the food they most miss, according to surveys, is not fish and chips or steak-and-kidney pie but ‘a proper English curry’.

  MOANING AND COMPLAINING RULES

  In restaurants, as elsewhere, the English may moan and grumble to each other about poor service or bad food, but our inhibitions, our social dis-ease, make it difficult for us to complain directly to the staff. We have three very different ways of dealing with such situations, all more or less equally ineffective and unsatisfying.

  The Silent Complaint

  Most English people, faced with unappetising or even inedible food, are too embarrassed to complain at all. Complaining would be ‘making a scene’, ‘making a fuss’ or ‘drawing attention to oneself’ in public – all forbidden by the unwritten rules. It would involve a confrontation, an emotional engagement with another human being, which is unpleasant and uncomfortable and to be avoided if at all possible. English customers may moan indignantly to their companions, push the offending food to the side of their plate and pull disgusted faces at each other, but when the waiter asks if everything is all right they smile politely, avoiding eye contact, and mutter, ‘Yes, fine, thanks.’ Standing in a slow queue at a pub or café food counter, they sigh heavily, fold their arms, tap their feet and look pointedly at their watches, but never actually complain. They will not go back to that establishment, and will tell all their friends how awful it is, but the poor publican or restaurateur will never even know that anything was amiss. Despite claims that we have become more assertive and litigious, this pattern is still standard consumer behaviour in England: recent surveys show that nearly three-quarters of us never complain about poor customer service, and of those who do, many now just vent their frustrations on online social media or anonymous review-sites such as Tripadvisor, which is simply another version of ‘telling all your friends’ – a wider circle of ‘friends’, perhaps, but still not a direct complaint to the actual
restaurant.

  The Apologetic Complaint

  Some slightly braver souls will use method number two: the apologetic complaint, an English speciality. ‘Excuse me, I’m terribly sorry, um, but, er, this soup seems to be rather, well, not very hot – a bit cold, really . . .’ ‘Sorry to be a nuisance, but, um, I ordered the steak and this looks like, er, well, fish . . .’ ‘Sorry, but do you think we could order soon? [This after a twenty-minute wait with no sign of any service.] It’s just that we’re in a bit of a hurry, sorry.’ Sometimes these complaints are so hesitant and timid, so oblique, and so carefully disguised as apologies, that the staff could be forgiven for failing to grasp that the customer is dissatisfied. ‘They look at the floor and mumble, as though they have done something wrong!’ an experienced waiter told me.

  As well as apologising for complaining, we also tend to apologise for making perfectly reasonable requests: ‘Oh, excuse me, sorry, but could we possibly have some salt?’; ‘Sorry, but could we have the bill now, please?’ and even for spending money: ‘Sorry, could we have another bottle of this, please?’ I am guilty of all of these, and I always feel obliged to apologise when I haven’t eaten much of my meal: ‘Sorry, it was lovely, really, I’m just not very hungry.’

  The Loud, Aggressive, Obnoxious Complaint

  Finally, there is, as usual, the other side of the social dis-ease coin – English complaint-technique number three: the loud, aggressive, obnoxious complaint. The red-faced, blustering, rude, self-important customer who has worked himself into a state of indignation over some minor mistake – or, occasionally, the patient customer who eventually explodes in genuine frustration at being kept waiting hours for disgusting food.

  It is often said that English waiters and other service staff are surly, lazy and incompetent. While there may be some truth in these accusations – we lack the professionalism and servility of some cultures, and cannot bring ourselves to adopt the gushing over-friendliness of others – one should look at the nonsense English servers have to put up with before casting stones. Our inept complaints alone would try the patience of a saint, and our silent ones require an understanding of non-verbal behaviour that would tax many psychologists, particularly if they had to fry chips or carry plates at the same time.