Look what's happened to our food

When I was small, the number of restaurants in my home town was about five. There was the Wimpy bar, a place of great mystery which displayed behind its windows A2-size encapsulated photographs of its weird cuisine. This seemed to consist mainly of a distinctive frankfurter-type sausage.

The pictures revealed this comestible to be long enough to encircle the plate, on which it had been degradingly photographed up against a brown disc and some red matter - possibly tinned tomatoes. The funny thing was that the bending of the frankfurter had clearly been possible only after the infliction of a series of transverse surgical wounds, which had opened like mouths along its body.

There was something of the autopsy about these pictures. The ultraviolet rays of the sun had, over many years, burnt away all the warm colours, leaving a surreal blue-black representation of this vaguely human stuff - cold and forensic looking.

For pudding were pictures of fluted glasses full of stratified semi-liquids such as the soft 'ice cream', intermittently excreted by a machine in the corner, and an elegiac range of blue and black drinks.

The only other restaurant I remember was the Chinese one, close to the bus station, where we went on special occasions - the restaurant obviously, not the bus station. Here I would mistakenly order bamboo shoots (like eating sliced rope) instead of bean sprouts.

That - apart from the department store restaurants - was it.

Today there are more restaurants in a single street than existed in an entire city when I was a boy. In the last thirty years, the quality, range, freshness, preparation and presentation of food have taken off like a balloon. Britain has gone from being the laughing stock of the eating-out world (along with Prague) to become the most creative, cosmopolitan and inventive gastronomic forcing house on the planet.

No longer does a British salad consist of a rectilinear membrane of translucent 'ham' accompanied by an elastic lettuce leaf, factory-extruded potato salad, two dehydrated slices of cucumber, a green boiled egg, a spoonful of spaghetti hoops, half a fermenting tomato and a quarter of a pint of salad cream. No more are carrots and cabbage boiled to within an inch of their lives. You are now likely to be offered a mountain of broccoli, haricot beans, and a delicious mixed salad with your roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.

Historic British grub such as fish and chips, bangers and mash, faggots in gravy, and spotted dick, are all still available. However, good chefs now take much more care to balance the six basic grubular elements: carbohydrate, protein, fat, water, minerals and vitamins. And the munchers chuckle about the old days, when platefuls of skank were the norm; a food-world destitute of cellulose, and exceeding rich in salt, sugar, meat and synthetic custard.

But the pendulum has swung too far; the Church of the Expert Foodies has suffered a schism and two new creeds have emerged. In the Temple of the Mashed Yeast Martyrs, healthier than thou, born-again diners rant from the macrobiotic pulpit. Their acolytes, the hair-shirt nutritionists terrify us daily with the bleak message that, while delicious, the traditional British diet is the yellow brick road to rotten teeth, fat thighs, diabetes, heart disease, haemorrhoids and bowel cancer.

Across the road, in the Church of the Nouveau Poseurs a little learning has become a dangerous thing and the pretend-to-know-more-than-you-doers are getting too big for their hassocks. As they have learned a bit about what they are putting into their mouths, the eaters- and drinkers-out of this exclusive denomination have become snobs, and the doctrine of pretension has developed like a boil on the neck of a choirboy.

There's this wine tasting business for starters. What in the name of glory is that all about? I cannot stand it, watching people who wouldn't know a Haut Brion from Sarson's non-brewed condiment, sloodgy-squiddling a mouthful and then coming out with some daft thing like, 'Yes, that's lovely!' as if they might have sent it back if they didn't like it.

And it's not just the eaters who affect to know more than they do. I ordered a cigar in the famous Oxo Tower restaurant not so long ago and they showed me this board with a range of smokes mounted on velvet or something. I said, 'Oh, I don't know much about cigars, can you tell me the difference between these two little ones?' to which the answer was, 'Er, this one's popular…'. Blige me! as we used to say when I was a boy.

Anyway my tummy's rumbling - I'm going down McDonald's.

Perry Stalsis

1

Nov 2001