Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy

by David Mitchell

  And our ambassador betrayed weaknesses in our cooking, even as he spoke up for it: “The idea is to combat the stereotype about British food and drink and promote the idea that we take ideas from around the world and we adapt them for this cosmopolitan cuisine we know today.”

  What does that mean? Despairing of our grim native fare, we steal dishes from other countries and slightly ruin them? Put chorizo in the paella and cream in the bolognese and make baguettes with the consistency of sponge? Or was he saying that our comparative dearth of culinary excellence has allowed us a greater open-mindedness to other cultures’ food traditions, which has now dragged our own food standards slightly closer to par?

  If you work in the catering industry, you may well be screaming at me for unjustly perpetuating this country’s no-longer-deserved reputation for shit grub. I’m sorry, and I almost certainly don’t mean you: there is, as I say, brilliant food to be had in Britain. There always has been, I suppose, but I’m sure there’s more of it now.

  But the stereotype bemoaned by the ambassador has its basis in truth: delicious food has never been a cultural priority. In our collective national soul, we don’t believe that the niceness of meals is that important. Perhaps on special occasions, but not every day. So we get more crumbs in our keyboards than European neighbours such as France and Italy, which the 12% of Spaniards looking for gastronomic holidays would be well advised to visit first.

  The fact that food has improved in Britain is a sign not of a major change in those cultural priorities, but of two other factors: how international we’ve become and our competitive spirit. The food has been brought up to standard, for the same reasons that we’ve put in proper coffee machines and wifi – to show we’re keeping up. We proudly note how highly the restaurants of chefs like Heston Blumenthal come in international rankings, even as we peel the film off our microwave dinners. In food, as in cycling, Britain can now win.

  As most Spaniards noted in the survey, there are better reasons to go to Britain than the food: the history, the castles, the stately homes, the museums, the countryside, the coastline, the concerts, the theatre, the cities. We have an interesting country, an interesting past and we’re an interesting people: no nastier than most and hard to ignore. And, for better or worse, what we are, what we have, and whatever it is that our culture represents, come from centuries of working through lunch.

  * * *

  Slates have been getting a slating. Get it?! Slates? Getting slated? What a lovely great big apposite yet unenjoyable pun. Stick that on your slate and eat it. Perhaps using some sort of gooey reduction as a gum, just to keep all the wrong-coloured tomatoes in position.

  Actually, I stole the idea from the headline of a Daily Mail article which read “Slated! Plates back on menu”, although there’s a chance that, unprompted, I could have thought of it myself. I don’t think it’s ridiculous self-flattery to suggest that. It’s just a pun on slate – it’s not the Dyson Airblade. Though both are products of Eurosceptic creativity. Maybe they can make Brexit work if they maintain this level of output. Though some claim it just makes an unpleasant noise and blasts microparticles of excrement all over the place, poisoning the atmosphere. And I’m not that keen on the Airblade either.

  So the thing I’m going on about here is the news that the British have eaten their fill of food served on wacky objects – of which the slate is probably the least wacky example. The slate and the wooden board, as weird surfaces on which to present a meal go, are comparatively conventional, a bit square. Though not as square as the square plate. Which itself is obviously much less square than the round plate. Square as in boring and conformist, that is. Not square as in a regular quadrilateral. That sort, the square plate squarely nails. If you want a good square meal, go for the square plate, unless you mean “good square meal” in the idiomatic sense connoting solid straightforwardness, rather than straight-sidedness, in which case the circular plate is the squarer option.

  I’ve put it very succinctly, but those were broadly the findings of a recent YouGov poll. YouGov showed 2,030 people a series of increasingly unorthodox food platters and receptacles and asked which ones, assuming they were clean, the respondents thought were acceptable items for serving meals in. Or on. The crazy replacement crockery examples were suggested by an organisation called “We Want Plates”. It describes itself as “the global crusade” against zany food service, has spent years documenting all the mad things dinners have been smeared on in the name of style and will sell you a “Plates Not Slates” hoodie for £40.

  The poll result was a wholesale rejection of the non-plate. Of those surveyed, only 69% and 64% respectively had any truck with slates or wooden boards, only 52% wanted their chips in a plant pot, flooring panels received the approval of just 28%, shovels of 17%, dog bowls of 10% and a measly 9% would tolerate their food being brought to them in a perfectly clean and sanitary shoe. Joyless curmudgeons. What do they hang up for Father Christmas? A large Jiffy bag? Who knew that people were so fussy?

  If you want confirmation of that fussiness, the survey also found that, while square plates were acceptable to a surprisingly high 96%, circular plates met the approval of an amazingly low 99%. That’s right: 1% of them weren’t happy with their meal being served on a round plate. That’s roughly 20 people. Even if the 99% was actually nearly 99.5%, it’s still 10 or so. What do those guys want? Nutrient injections? Their lunch to be fired at their faces from a trebuchet? How is the food supposed to get to be in front of them?

  But let’s leave aside that anomalous dozen hover-meal-insisting extremists – they probably didn’t understand the survey or thought round plates were imposed by Brussels. What about this stinging rejection of the plate replacement? How could Britain’s restaurants have got it so wrong? Should we blame the Westminster bubble (a light foam that goes well with poached turbot on a bed of samphire, served on the back of a No Entry sign)? How should the food service industry respond?

  In my experience, everyone has always slagged off the weird items food gets served on. This kind of service has been happening for a few years now – decades, if you count scampi and chips in a basket (which I suspect most people don’t because that’s an old-school notion, uninfused with hipsterish wank). But the square plates and boards and general non-standard plate objects probably started appearing at the end of the last century. Precisely one second later, as the very first zany meal was plonked down in front of a diner, that diner said they thought it was silly, and their dining companion agreed, and their mealtime chat was bolstered by reflections on how impractical it all was and what idiots some people were. Lovely.

  Thinking it’s stupid to serve food on a non-plate is one of those mysterious reactions that, despite being breathtakingly predictable, still feels original. You feel like you’re the only person who’s ever felt that way, which makes it a bit like being in love. So it’s an enjoyable feeling and one which, if food were never served insanely, no one would experience.

  It’s also enjoyable to talk about, not just during the meal but later. It makes good conversation: under cover of a funny story about soup served as thousands of tiny droplets, each clinging to a bristle of an upturned brush, or a paella dished up in an old disc drive, we let slip that we’ve been eating out in trendy places. We’re in touch with the zeitgeist, but are too down-to-earth to be impressed. Who doesn’t want to come across like that?

  So it’s entirely unsurprising that, when surveyed about their views on this, people delightedly state their annoyance at silly restaurant trends. They do it because it’s fun. It’s not a sign of genuine consternation at food service fashion, any more than skiing is evidence of desperation to escape mountaintops. It’s recreational.

  The daftest part of this outward board-dom (should have left that for the Mail) is the implication that restaurants don’t realise it’s easier to use normal plates, and that there’s something frivolous or foolish about them worrying about their image as well as the food. But of course ther
e isn’t. They’ve got to. There are cheaper and quicker ways of satisfying nutritional needs than eating out, so it’s vital to surround the process with a few frills, something memorable, some signs of effort. There’s no real justification for despising serving cheese on a skateboard or steak on a hot anvil, unless you’d equally scorn a tablecloth.

  * * *

  Last Christmas, I worried about my heart …

  What I keep telling myself is that scientific research is not retrospectively rendered pointless just because the outcome is boring and predictable. It’s not like a TV drama. The human urge to understand the workings of the universe cannot necessarily be satisfied entertainingly. The apparently obvious has to be tested in experiment if it is to be thoroughly understood.

  So I shouldn’t blame the researchers from the universities of Birmingham and Loughborough for the fact that their widely reported study into festive weight gain, published in the British Medical Journal, produced such depressingly guessable results. I should blame those who reported it as if it were interesting and illuminating.

  The only interesting aspect of it – and that was really only slightly diverting in an “I’m staring at my phone trying not to think about Brexit” kind of way – is that it’s about Christmas. And it’s nearly Christmas. So everyone’s thinking about Christmas and the eye gets drawn to stories about Christmas. That’s what I’m hoping, anyway. Hi everyone! It’s Christmas, isn’t it?!

  Beyond the Christmas thing, there was nothing of note. It might as well have said: “No measurable elevation of brain cancer risk from Christmas cracker jokes, says report.” That would get some hits: “Ooh, Christmas!” people would think. “Christmas crackers, jokes – that’s caught my eye and distracted me from Brexit. But, ooh, cancer – nasty, frightening. Brain cancer – is that a headache coming on? Or am I imagining it? Can the imagination get cancer? Right, definitely clicking … Oh right, crackers don’t give you cancer. Fine. What’s next?”

  Sadly, this particular study wasn’t about cancer, but it was about obesity. Which is linked to cancer, I think I’ve read. There are definitely links you can click on about that link. So what the study found is that if you get people to weigh themselves twice a week over Christmas and give them a chart showing how much exercise it would take to work off each Christmas treat (for example, 21 minutes of running per mince pie), they will put on less weight than the control group, who displayed much less control. They just got given a leaflet on healthy living, which they may or may not have elected to eat.

  The self-weighers actually lost 0.13kg each over the festive period, whereas the “no self-”control group put on 0.37kg. Which actually doesn’t sound very much at all, but I suppose that’s an average and it’s all about long-term trends and, well, it all adds up, as Isaac Newton said. Or was it the Green Goddess?

  Now, as findings go, I’d say this one is stratospherically unsurprising: people put on less weight, on average, if they monitor their weight. If monitoring your weight had no effect at all, or made you fatter, that would be unexpected. This is not. The summary of the findings should read: “Just guess them and you’ll be right.”

  To me, the only startling thing about any of this is that it takes 21 minutes of running to work off a mince pie, and that was a pre-existing fact rather than a finding of the study. But seriously, one mince pie equates to 21 minutes of running? You run continuously for the length of a whole episode of The Simpsons, and that means you can have one measly extra mince pie? A whole hour’s running every day won’t quite buy you a three-mince-pies-a-day festive habit? Suddenly neither running nor mince pies nor existence itself seems worth all the faff.

  Anyway, that aside, fair enough, well researched, good to have checked. If you measure your weight and think about your weight a lot, you’re likely to weigh less than if you don’t. Smashing. My only objection is to people reporting it as if it’s a solution to Christmas weight gain. “Just weigh yourself twice a week and you’ll be fine!” the articles imply. But that’s not really the solution, unless you keep your bathroom scales at the top of 47 flights of stairs (though it probably turns out even that would only earn you two slices of turkey and a small eggnog). The slimming isn’t caused by the weighing, but by behavioural changes triggered by the thought processes the weighing provokes.

  People don’t like those thought processes. They’re repelled by them in the same way they’re attracted to snacks. That’s physics. Outside study conditions, people won’t weigh themselves twice a week if it gets them down, particularly at Christmas. It’s supposed to be the season to be jolly. Glumly standing on scales feeling guilty about canapés past, and indeed passed, is not the vibe at all.

  All the report is really saying is this: people should think more about their weight and the arduous physical exercise they should take if they want to eat certain things. That’s restating the problem, not providing the solution. That’s “This toddler has a high temperature,” not “Give Calpol.”

  So what’s the Calpol? Sober analysis and self-control? Some people might call that the natural way, but I reckon it’s as natural as a hyena on a seafood diet. It smacks of wisdom and, by nature, humans aren’t so much wise as clever. We use cleverness to obviate wisdom. That’s what’s destroying the planet, but it’s also the only hope of saving the planet.

  The Calpol equivalent would obviously be some way of maintaining a healthy weight without thinking about it, without having to exert self-control (I’m sure the pharmaceutical industry is bristling with suggestions). That’s what we yearn for: to be able to submit to our evolved instinctive urges once again. Delicious food is there, so eat. Merry-making booze is there, so drink.

  But we also want to live long lives, and one of the flaws of evolution, from the human point of view, is that it doesn’t give longevity any credit. Anyone who can just about survive to middle age while remaining fertile is likely to be as genetically influential as a sprightly 95-year-old.

  So we’ve never evolved the urges that would allow us to make old bones without constantly deliberating about our health – which you can’t do for long without also thinking about death. And that’s the very thing all this midwinter Christmas cheer is supposed to help us avoid.

  * * *

  There’s been a major breakthrough in the quest to improve the taste of champagne. You probably think that’s one of those “first world problems” that everyone in the first world is so obsessed with not being obsessed with. Or rather a first world solution to a problem, like invading a country and taking all its oil. But I’m not sure it’s even that.

  After all, who really gives a damn what champagne tastes like? Even in the first world? I mean, you’d complain if you were served some and it tasted of peppermint or Fanta or cheese, but only because you’d think that meant the glass hadn’t been washed or it wasn’t really champagne. If champagne had always tasted like Fanta, you’d sit back and enjoy that fizzy, sugary, orangey hit which you associate with luxury and celebration. Champagne just needs to taste like whatever champagne tastes like. The specifics of that flavour are as irrelevant as a banknote’s appearance.

  The supposed breakthrough comes from Federico Lleonart, who is a “global wine ambassador for the drinks company Pernod Ricard”. That’s the phrase in all the papers, and I’m sticking to it. To be fair, it varies a bit across the media. Jilly Goolden in the Daily Mail kept it vague and article-free, calling him just “global wine ambassador …”; The Times grandly asserted that he was “the global wine ambassador …”; while the Sunday Telegraph dismissed him as merely “a global wine ambassador”.

  None of which gives us much insight into the structure of Pernod Ricard’s wine diplomatic service and how many ambassadors and embassies there are. One for each country? One for each wine? One from each country to each wine? Are there ones for other drinks – Pernod, for example? Or is that what Lleonart is: Pernod’s ambassador to wine? In which case does every drink have an ambassador to every other drink – the big
jobs being tea’s ambassador to coffee and his opposite number?

  On the scale of indispensability to human society, global wine ambassador may rank somewhere below party planner and above web designer’s mood-board chakra realigner – about the same level as topical columnist, in fact – but it seems safe to assume that he’d know a bit about wine. And not just because he’s got a lot of time on his hands.

  And what he, and other experts, are now saying about champagne is that, if it’s a posh one (as opposed to a normal champagne of the sort people actually ever buy – you know, the cheapest one that’s still allowed to have the word “champagne” printed on it, even if it’s accompanied by “Morrison’s”), it tastes better drunk from a normal wine glass than from one of those tall flutes. Even if it’s a new flute which hasn’t yet developed a stubborn clod of unreachable matter in the bottom that fizzes insanely when the glass is full, giving the disconcerting impression that it’s dissolving.

  Lleonart says: “When the sparkling wine or champagne has complexity, depth and autolytic notes, such as the best cavas or champagnes, then the best option is actually to use a white wine glass in order to let the aromas express themselves better.” This statement confused me, and not primarily because I don’t understand what ‘autolytic’ means even though I’ve looked it up. I think I know what complexity is, but depth must mean something else in this context because otherwise it stands to reason that a fixed volume of champagne would have greater depth in a narrower receptacle. But what confused me most was the reference to “the best cavas”.

  Imagine, if you will, the announcement of the engagement of a beloved child to an upstanding and appropriate partner. It is a joyous family occasion. What do you do? Do you, for example, open a bottle of one of the best cavas? You know the sort. Not one of those crappy garage cavas, but one of the ones that wine experts say taste better than many champagnes – so much so, in fact, that they warrant the use of normal wine glasses rather than those awful, dated flutes, the efficacy of which science has rejected as firmly as the way up you were taught to put your now affianced child to sleep decades ago. Do you? Do you produce the receipt for this fine cava, proving that it cost more than many champagnes, and that therefore it’s only your insistence on the best possible fizzy taste, not penny-pinching, that denies the apple of your eye a more famous C-word for the congratulatory toast? Or do you buy a bottle of champagne?