Food (Retrospective)

Food

Okay, let’s talk food. The UK has a poor reputation when it comes to food. Does it deserve it?

My Time Out guide to restaurants and pubs for London was not incorrect in noting how much things have changed in recent decades. As globalization increases its heady speed and as dining out becomes more and more in fashion, the English palate has changed dramatically, nowhere more so than London.

So you do get a dizzying array of just fantastic, amazing, diverse restaurants in London – of the highest quality. Hungarian to die for. Indian cuisine that rivals the best restaurants in India. Not to mention, Italian food that actually really is served liked it is served in Italy—not the overly cheesy and fried American-Italian food we mostly get in the States.

But all of this is if you can afford to eat out in a sit-down restaurant, and the prices are really not cheap at all. What if you just want to grab a quick lunch? Or an affordable quick dinner? This was what really mattered to me, since I definitely could not afford to do the former very often.

Here old habits were more durable. At Zara, the corner café on the block near my house, the array of lunch selections were plied with mayonnaise: prawn salad sandwich, loaded with mayonnaise, tuna and corn loaded with mayonnaise, chicken and bacon loaded with… you know what. (It was also popular to have English breakfast for lunch- sausages, beans, eggs, and bacon… or simply bangers and mash.) Same thing at the Juggler, the slightly more upscale café across from my office. Big sandwiches with tons of bread, a little protein, and a lot of butter or mayo.

If you just wanted a salad- that is an American style salad, one with lots of vegetables primarily, and not loaded down with mayonnaise, you were pretty much out of luck. And forget about finding a salad bar, either. That concept had obviously sunk somewhere in transit across the Atlantic ocean. Generally, I could get a couscous salad or a rice salad, or even a potato salad. But a big green leafy salad with tons of veggies and maybe a little protein, but not a lot of starch – forget it. Out of all the food dishes one inevitably misses when one is far away from home, a big leafy salad was what I missed most.

Still, English food in general has a lot to commend itself. For one, it might just be my imagination, but I think the produce in general tasted better, even supermarket produce. It just tasted a bit less genetically engineered. Same thing with the dairy products and cheeses: closer to Europe and hence closer to the original styles of production. And the array of prepared food in the supermarkets- to die for. Great great prepared meals of a much healthier variety than in the states—vegetarian moussaka, salmon with veggies to steam... Lots of great, reasonably priced fish.

England is also way ahead of America when it comes to labeling and socially conscious food. All of the produce is labeled to indicate whether it is conventional or organic, and more significantly, where it was grown, so that you have a better sense of its carbon footprint. And the selection of fair-trade products was far bigger than in the US. For example, most supermarkets had all of their bananas as fair-trade bananas, which I thought was significant.

All in all, a fairly big thumbs up on the food—if only they could lower the prices just a tad….