Watching the English

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 thirty 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. But they are not the whole truth. The same goes for the opposite extreme - the current 'Cool Britannia' fashion for proclaiming that English cooking has in recent years improved out of all recognition, that London is the 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.