Food

Once upon a time—1992, to be precise, the first year I lived in England—I entered my college’s dining hall just as dinner was being served. I was hungry, and I dived right in to what was set before me. But after one bite I turned to the student next to me and said, in a voice of outrage and disbelief: “What is this stuff?”

My fellow dinner looked at me quizzically for a moment, then raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “It’s steak and kidney pie.” Observing my continuing consternation—agony, really—he went on: “I’ll eat yours if you don’t want it.” Wordlessly I pushed my plate towards him. Then I gulped some water.

If you’ve never tasted steak and kidney pie—well, some things are beyond words. But take a moment and remind yourself what kidneys do. Yup, that’s right. Now you have a rough idea what steak and kidney pie tastes like.

For years, this little event has lingered in my mind as a symbol of English food in general. (British food, really, since Scotland doesn’t get off the hook here: ever had haggis?) Even the most resolute Anglophile will admit that the English national taste is, well—let’s just say that there’s a country just south of here where they do things a little better. (I’ll give you a hint: it starts with an “F.”)

A few years ago Jamie Oliver, a high-end chef, called English school meals the “laughing-stock of Europe” and went on a campaign to try to get kids to eat better. He got the government to commit millions of pounds to cutting out fat and cholesterol, and offering fresh fruit and vegetables. But at a school in Yorkshire, a number of mums got together and started selling food to students outside. "We go up at break time and take down the orders through the school fence. We then go back at 1pm to deliver the food and give them their change,” said one. "We are now delivering around 50 to 60 meals a day and we have no intention of stopping." The kids’ favorite, aside from hamburgers and fish and chips, is the so-called “Chip Butty:” two pieces of buttered white bread, with chips and ketchup in between.

Anybody who’s stayed at a Bed & Breakfast in this country has encountered one of those breakfasts that the English apparently regard as one of their Major Contributions to Civilization, right up there with Shakespeare and Big Ben. Unless you intervene the night before, and request a “cold breakfast” (and if you do, be prepared for a shocked look from your kind hostess; you might as well have told her you always thought Princess Di was ugly)—unless, I say, you intervene in time, you will be met the next morning by a plate full of the following: two eggs fried until stiff, some sausages, several hunks of bacon (the ham-like stuff we call “Canadian bacon”), some bread that has been toasted and then deep fried in bacon fat and who knows what else until the fibers break down and it looks and tastes like an old sock, a fried tomato (this is the only way the English eat tomatoes; they seem never to have heard of putting one in a salad), and—the pièce de résistance—some canned mushrooms, nuked until lukewarm.

Oh—and instant coffee. Don’t even get me started on the coffee.

Now the first day, or maybe the first two days, you might be feeling game, generous, culturally sensitive, even. So you tuck in. But you’ll notice, if you keep this up for very long, that it really starts to wear you down. You roll out of bed, you swill down some Nescafe, and there, staring up at you, is enough cholesterol to power a small locomotive. With every mouthful you feel your best years slipping away. Every morning there seem to be more mushrooms. And eventually you ask yourself: “must I do this?” And you realize that you’re having one of those existential moments when you’re called upon to stand up for what you believe in. So you stop pretending to like it, and you ask for some cornflakes, and you resign yourself to always being an Outsider. I heard once that Jean-Paul Sartre wrote Nausea after staying at an English B&B for a week. Seriously.

And yet.

We’re eating better here than we do at home. And it’s really quite easy. Every week we get a box of fresh organic fruit and vegetables delivered to our flat. We get this really amazing yoghurt that the kids devour. We get non-homogenized milk, which is remarkably better than the homogenized stuff. We shop at the market in downtown Cambridge, where we can get local produce, fish, fresh bread, and excellent cheese. There’s a butcher five minutes away where we buy our meat. Even the food from the supermarket is better. Because it isn’t pumped full of hormones, a chicken here looks like a chicken, not like one of those Frankenchickens with distended, rubbery chests so typical in the States. None of this is prohibitively expensive—in fact, we spend about the same amount on food here as we do back in New Jersey. As I remarked recently to our friend Katherine when she came to visit, “you don’t come to England for the food.” But, actually, you could.