I remember the first moment this struck me. It was the mid-nineties and I was on holiday in the Yorkshire Dales. We took a day trip to Blackpool. I’m not sure why. I think we just wanted to feel cheap and dirty for an afternoon. It worked. In a good way. On the way back I decided we should stop off at the big supermarket – I think it was an Asda – on the edge of town to pick up some stuff for dinner. I had a double rack of lamb back at the cottage we were renting and I wanted to stuff it with a mixture of breadcrumbs and basil, olives, anchovies and caramelized onions. In those days my credentials as an urbane young man, who understood the imperatives of a Mediterranean diet, rested on that thing I did with the double rack of lamb. It was something I made quite often at home, but to caramelize the onions I needed a bottle of deep, dark, sour-sweet balsamic vinegar. In London, getting hold of some of that was no problem at all. There was always a well-stocked deli somewhere nearby, ready to do the business. But on the edge of Blackpool? I trudged moodily around the aisles, my face fixed in a sneer of pure metropolitan disdain. In short, I had my normal face on.
Soon the expression was gone. For there, on the shelf, was not just a bottle of balsamic vinegar. There was a choice of balsamics. Oh my.
This story looks ludicrous, doesn’t it? It’s quite clear that I’m a patronizing schmuck. What’s so amazing about balsamic vinegar in a Blackpool supermarket? But that’s the thing. In the nineties – less than twenty years ago – everything was amazing about this. I left that Asda clutching my bottle of balsamic – and my fresh basil, and my glistening anchovies – feeling like the country in which I lived was suddenly a better place. And it was suddenly a better place because a supermarket had decided to stock the things I wanted to eat.
Why had this happened? Because food media in Britain, as elsewhere around the world, had exploded.
A SHORT HISTORY OF A FOOD REVOLUTION
Just as we have to acknowledge the part that the supermarkets have played in revolutionizing the way we eat, so we also have to swallow hard and accept that the key people responsible for changing the way we eat in Britain are those renowned gourmands Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch.
I’ll say that again: Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch. Or, to give them their full job descriptions, arguably Britain’s most divisive post-war Prime Minister, and a media mogul now generally regarded as having been at the head of a company whose employees routinely engaged in phone hacking.
Let’s go back a bit. Whenever you hear Britain’s Dordogne-loving middle classes engage in eye-rolling about the state of food culture in their own country and extolling the virtues and marvels of France, where every small town and village supports a perfect restaurant, and where they do not object to spending reasonable sums of money on food, and a family bonding experience involves slaughtering a whole pig and butchering it down so that everything other than the oink can be eaten, it is worth reminding them of this: during the Second World War the French quickly decided the game was up, laid down their arms and got on with their lives. Or lunch, as they called it.
When that great historian and social commentator Bart Simpson described the French as ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ he was obviously being shamelessly provocative.
On the other hand, as with all great gags, there was more than a grain of truth in it. The French do eat an awful lot of cheese. Witness General de Gaulle’s great gastronomic boast, disguised as despair, about the impossibility of successfully ruling a country that has ‘246 different kinds of cheese’. And, well, they did actually surrender. Quite a lot.
Britain, meanwhile, locked in a war of national survival, industrialized its food-production system and introduced rationing on a vast scale. (And yes, of course, there was also some rationing in France during the twentieth century, but nothing like on the scale of that in Britain.) It is hard to overstate the damage that this war did to Britain’s food culture. A whole generation forgot how to cook. Likewise, a genuine fight for survival, combined with an ingrained Puritanism which regarded the spending of anything more than necessary on food as plain wrong, made completely redundant any sort of interest in food beyond its importance for basic nutrition.
There were, of course, torch-bearers in post-war Britain who fought the good fight. Raymond Postgate launched The Good Food Guide in 1951, identifying the few places worth eating in by soliciting reviews from diners around the country; it was an early example of the kind of crowdsourcing the web would make de rigueur half a century later. A few chefs and restaurateurs – George Perry-Smith at the Hole in the Wall in Bath, for example, Joyce Molyneux at the Carved Angel in Dartmouth, or Brian Sack and Francis Coulson at Sharrow Bay in the Lake District – worked hard to introduce a select band of people to a better way of eating. But it was a minority sport for what was regarded as a decadent, over-indulged minority. Hell, in the early seventies most people had to live with the lights going off half the time. Against that a dish of salmon en croute with a sorrel sauce wasn’t merely a luxury; many people thought it was nothing less than an obscenity.
It took Margaret Thatcher’s second election victory in 1983, and the boom that followed, to solve that problem. Suddenly having money was OK. It was better than OK. In the famous words of Oliver Stone’s creation Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street, greed was good. So we spent money on houses and on cars and on shares, and on awful double-breasted suits with big shoulders and sleeves baggy enough so we could roll them up. Oh, the shame.
Eventually we were going to need something else to spend our money on, and food was the solution. It is no coincidence that some of the key restaurants of Britain’s first restaurant boom – Bibendum, Kensington Place, The River Café and Harvey’s, with a young chef called Marco Pierre White at the stove – all opened in 1987.
At the same time something else happened, something absolutely vital. Rupert Murdoch went to war with the print unions, to free himself from the labour restrictions that were stopping the introduction of new technology. Others had been involved in this struggle, most notably Eddie Shah, who finally launched the all-colour Today tabloid newspaper in 1986. But it was Murdoch’s decision later in the same year to lock out the unions and move production of his papers – the Sun, the News of the World, The Times and the Sunday Times – from Fleet Street to a wholly new computerized plant in Wapping which changed everything for the newspaper business. It made the industry cheaper. It made it quicker. And it made the newspapers bigger. Suddenly, printing multiple sections was not only doable. It was necessary. After all, the economy was booming and advertisers were gagging to buy space. There was only one problem: what the hell to put in that space?
The success of glossy magazines like ID and The Face, launched in the early eighties, alerted older national newspaper editors to something their younger magazine brethren had long known: there was this thing called lifestyle, and it sold copies. These newspaper supplements quickly filled up with pages of property, fashion and, of course, food. There is an assumption that there have been restaurant critics on Britain’s national newspapers for decades. It’s not so. Jonathan Meades was one of the first to be appointed, to a column on The Times, but not until 1986. Likewise, today the profession of restaurant PR is firmly established. However did we get by without them? Presumably restaurants used to just unlock the doors and wait for people to come and be fed.