Ever nervous about their manners and place in the world, they were the ones who taught their children not to put their elbows on the table and not to talk loudly in restaurants. Hardly the picture of a society at ease with itself and certainly not one sure of its culinary heritage. Recent decades spent in the dying light of a fading empire offset with the rise of the jet age and our love of cheap package holidays abroad have meant that we ve developed a magpie food culture. A bit of this, and a bit of that, appropriating ideas from around the world. The upshot of all this is that food in Britain today is big business.
Chefs are no longer preparers of food but celebrities.
They no longer inhabit kitchens but now crop up visiting floating markets in Bangkok one minute and glitzy TV studios the next. Spin-off recipe books sell by the truckload. Food has become Fashion and it s become Lifestyle. But what we Brits seem to have lost in this transition is an understanding of the fundamentals of how food should underpin a society. After all, why bother to make something simple and delicious for you and your family to eat when there are restaurants to bask in and quick ready made meals to eat.