Quotulatiousness

March 19, 2021

QotD: English food

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Food, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

For someone who remembers the old days, the food is the most startling thing about modern England. English food used to be deservedly famous for its awfulness — greasy fish and chips, gelatinous pork pies, and dishwater coffee. Now it is not only easy to do much better, but traditionally terrible English meals have even become hard to find. What happened?

Maybe the first question is how English cooking got to be so bad in the first place. A good guess is that the country’s early industrialization and urbanization was the culprit. Millions of people moved rapidly off the land and away from access to traditional ingredients. Worse, they did so at a time when the technology of urban food supply was still primitive: Victorian London already had well over a million people, but most of its food came in by horse-drawn barge. And so ordinary people, and even the middle classes, were forced into a cuisine based on canned goods (mushy peas!), preserved meats (hence those pies), and root vegetables that didn’t need refrigeration (e.g. potatoes, which explain the chips).

But why did the food stay so bad after refrigerated railroad cars and ships, frozen foods (better than canned, anyway), and eventually air-freight deliveries of fresh fish and vegetables had become available? Now we’re talking about economics — and about the limits of conventional economic theory. For the answer is surely that by the time it became possible for urban Britons to eat decently, they no longer knew the difference. The appreciation of good food is, quite literally, an acquired taste — but because your typical Englishman, circa, say, 1975, had never had a really good meal, he didn’t demand one. And because consumers didn’t demand good food, they didn’t get it. Even then there were surely some people who would have liked better, just not enough to provide a critical mass.

And then things changed. Partly this may have been the result of immigration. (Although earlier waves of immigrants simply adapted to English standards — I remember visiting one fairly expensive London Italian restaurant in 1983 that advised diners to call in advance if they wanted their pasta freshly cooked.) Growing affluence and the overseas vacations it made possible may have been more important — how can you keep them eating bangers once they’ve had foie gras? But at a certain point the process became self-reinforcing: Enough people knew what good food tasted like that stores and restaurants began providing it — and that allowed even more people to acquire civilized taste buds.

Paul Krugman, “Supply, Demand, and English Food”, https://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/mushy.html.

1 Comment

  1. As Vann Boseman pointed out on MeWe,

    While this may be true, it doesn’t fully take into account what Great Britain may have become. It is widely reported even now that Great Britain has the best Indian Restaurants in the world and its probably not even close. I love good Indian food. Otherwise, it is probably great as well, except for the traditional food, which is probably mostly, but not completely awful. If things were different as far as security and the decline of society that the British people allowed, I would crave to go there on a food holiday.

    I responded

    You’re probably right about the Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi/Nepali restaurants in the UK these days … the best Indian food I’ve ever eaten was over there, but that’s not what he’s considering. I think he’s correct in pinpointing just when English food deviated from food in the rest of Europe, but he misses [or underestimates] a few key issues that helped keep the English in that food hell. First is the effects of the First and Second World Wars, the Great Depression in between, and then the dire economic straits that Britain was in for at least a decade after the end of WW2. British wartime food rationing lasted nearly ten years after the war was over, and imported food was highly taxed and difficult to find. Britain only really began to recover economically in the late 1950s … and by the 1970s cheap package holiday trips to sunnier parts of Europe started to be available even to working-class Brits. Exposure to even mediocre Spanish, Portuguese or Italian food must have played a significant part in creating new demands for those foods back home.

    Comment by Nicholas — March 19, 2021 @ 14:01

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