Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  For now at least, home cooking in most European countries has a healthy base, but for how much longer? The French are sufficiently concerned about the loss of food knowledge among schoolchildren to have instituted La semaine du goût: compulsory tasting classes in primary schools. Even in Italy, bastion of motherly home cooking, there is no room for complacency. Twenty years ago, the arrival of McDonald’s in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna prompted a group of protesters to serve up dishes of home-made pasta to bemused passers-by. Today that protest has grown into the Slow Food Movement – an international organisation with over 80,000 members, whose 2006 Turin conference, the Terra Madre, was opened by the Italian president himself.76 In countries like Italy and France, the question of whether or not people cook is not left to chance. It is seen as a matter of national importance; as a critical part of the jigsaw that keeps not just gastronomic culture, but society itself alive.

  The Shrinking Kitchen

  Today in Britain, those who cook regularly from scratch are a vanishing and ageing minority, and food knowledge among the young is patchy to say the least. Fifty per cent of those under the age of 24 questioned in a 2007 survey admitted to having ‘no skills’ in the kitchen.77 No wonder the industry analysts Mintel reckon that ready meals are about the safest bet in British commercial food: ‘Future growth is assured. The economic parameters are highly favourable and the social and cultural trends which are re-shaping UK eating habits are well-entrenched and non-reversible. For better or worse, the convenience habit is here to stay.’78

  A hundred and fifty years ago, architects strove to perfect the invisible, silent, odourless kitchen. Today ready meals have gone one better, ridding houses of cooking altogether. As a result of our ‘convenience habit’, private kitchens, those hardest-won of domestic spaces, are in danger of redundancy. Many of the trendy loft apartments that sprang up in British cities during the 1980s and 90s barely contained them at all – just tiny cupboards large enough to house a freezer, microwave and sink. Admittedly, the occupants of such flats are often young professionals living on their own, as almost a third of us in Britain now do. They were always likely to survive on ready meals, takeaways and eating out. But to the despair of nutritionists, our national disinclination to cook is not limited to singleton yuppies. Families on low incomes, who could most benefit from cooking from scratch, are increasingly spending what little money they have on convenience foods and takeaways. The urban poor are the real victims of our confused attitudes towards cooking. Despite food costing a fraction of what it did a century ago, their diets have barely improved: they have simply swapped one kind of malnutrition for another.79 Only among ethnic communities in Britain do the majority regularly cook for themselves, spending their food budgets on just that: food.

  Even if more of us in Britain wanted to cook, the homes we live in are hardly conducive. Urban lofts are not the only homes with inadequate kitchens: many of us live in ageing housing stock with kitchens crammed at the back, badly converted versions of the same, or social housing with minute galley kitchens à la Frankfurt. Then there is our new housing stock. For some reason, the dominant new-build dwelling in Britain is a mock-Georgian or Victorian villa with a cramped, boxy kitchen (often with a lousy view) whose only virtue is that it allows its owners to fantasise that someone else is doing the cooking (which, thanks to microwaves and ready meals, they often are).

  Worse still, British domestic space standards are shrinking. Even new-build family homes often have kitchens too small to accommodate basic equipment such as fridges and washing machines, let alone a dining table.80 Average figures compiled across 10 London boroughs showed that the recommended minimum size of kitchen for a three-bedroom dwelling was just 6.5 square metres.81 Try having a family meal in that. British space standards are some of the smallest in Europe, unregulated by central government since the mid 1980s on the basis that the size of dwellings is a ‘matter for the marketing judgement of developers, in the light of their assessment of their customers’ requirements’.82 So the good old forces of commerce are supposed to look after us as usual. Except, of course, they’re not. A 2003 report by the Popular Housing Group found widespread dissatisfaction with space standards in all types of housing, including the common complaint that kitchens were too small.83

  With residential space at such a premium, kitchens are more than ever under threat in Britain – and our ambiguous attitude towards them doesn’t help. Despite evidence that most people regard them as ‘the heart of the house’, there is no consensus as to what this actually means.84 According to the Mayor of London’s Housing Space Standards report, confusion reigns even among house-builders:

  … there is continuing uncertainty over whether the kitchen space needs to be maintained, can be reduced (are meals only ever cooked in a microwave or are cookers and food preparation space still needed?), or (with households using more appliances) needs to be larger.85

  In the absence of any clear notion of what a kitchen is supposed to be – and no concerted effort to find out – the housing industry’s default position is to stay rooted in the past, building homes with ever tinier kitchens. The result is that we are no longer building what the Rowntree Foundation calls ‘Lifetime Homes’: dwellings capable of providing for the long-term needs of their occupants.86 By assuming that people will not cook for themselves in the future, we are cutting off our options. Most of us barely cook now, and the more our kitchens shrink, the less likely we are ever to try.

  What’s Your Poison?

  Without the basic knowledge that our grandparents took for granted, cooking can be a daunting prospect. A growing number of people find the very idea terrifying. Fear of getting it wrong – at an extreme, of poisoning oneself – is enough to put off many from even having a go, and, as Joanna Blythman pointed out in her recent book Bad Food Britain, that attitude is now being drummed into British schoolchildren as young as seven. The government Food Hygiene Mission Control programme, an interactive resource issued by the Food Standards Agency, seeks to educate children in the dangers of food by inviting them to help ‘exterminate Pathogens [with a capital P] and save the human race from food poisoning’.87 Hardly the kind of thing designed to lure a new generation of chefs into the kitchen.

  The food industry has even come up with a way of persuading those of us on the verge of cooking not to bother. ‘Ready-to-cook’ ranges such as M&S Cook! and Waitrose Easy consist of some raw ingredients assembled inside a transparent packet that allows us to see, say, a whole chicken breast sitting next to a sprig of thyme and a sachet of sauce. First launched in 2004, the ranges are flying off the shelves, not least because they quell people’s fears about what is inside the packet. However, whatever they say on the front, ready-to-cook ranges have nothing to do with cooking. The Waitrose website tacitly admits as much: ‘Our ready meals are, of course, designed to make your life easy. But we’re also passionate about making them every bit as good as the food you’d prepare for yourself – if you had the time.’88

  Supermarkets love to persuade us that we don’t have time to cook. But of course that’s nonsense. We have never had more leisure time than we do now; we just prefer to spend it doing something else. True, few households now have full-time housewives to run them – but even working mothers today have more time than those of a generation ago. A quick bit of maths also tells you that these stripped-down not-quite-ready meals are supermarket nirvana: ‘added value’ taken to the ultimate degree of preposterousness. Paying someone else to cook our food is one thing, but paying them to place a chicken breast next to a sprig of thyme? That is just plain barmy. We’re back to Betty Crocker all over again.

  The consequences of not cooking are far more serious now than they were even a generation ago. In our industrialised, urbanised society, cooking is the one chance most of us have of taking some control over what we eat, and all that means. Cooking is not just about what goes on in the kitchen; it is the pivotal point in the food chain: the one that, arguably, affects ev
erything else in it.

  Strangely, the one thing most likely to drive us back into our kitchens is the ready-meal revolution itself. Now that we no longer have to cook for ourselves, cooking has, for the first time in history, become cool. It is fast becoming a popular leisure pursuit among affluent urbanites in Britain, even – and this really is a historic first – among men. The number of us who consider ourselves ‘foodies’ is steadily rising, which is good news for artisanal producers. In 1990 there were fewer than 10 farmers’ markets in Britain; today there are more than 500, and hand-crafted food production is booming. Patricia Michelson, one of Britain’s foremost artisanal cheese retailers, says the number of producers in Britain was in freefall a decade ago, but has expanded so rapidly since that British cheese is now ‘firmly on the map’.89

  Yet despite the recently converted foodies in Britain, we are still a long way from having a ‘vertical’ food culture in this country – one that permeates every stratum of society. In order to achieve that, we need to take radical action: something along the lines of, say, introducing compulsory classes about food and cooking (rather than merely poisoning) into primary schools. Few parents today have much interest in cooking, so to expect them to teach their offspring is a forlorn hope. If the British government was really interested in improving the nation’s health, it would use primary schools to teach kids not just how to cook, but also about the far-reaching influences of food.90 Getting young children to grow their own food and cook their own lunches would be a great way of overcoming their fear of food, as well as introducing them to a whole range of food-related issues, such as understanding ethnic diversity, the environment, and obesity. In fact it is hard to think of an important subject that could not be well taught in a kitchen.

  Cooking, like talking and writing, requires education – and like those other essential skills, it comes easily once you know how. Practised regularly, it is so instinctive that it can be done half-consciously, while chatting to friends, looking after children, listening to the radio, or thinking up the next sentence of your book. That is when cooking becomes both useful and a pleasure; when it need not take inordinate amounts of time. At the start of the twenty-first century, there is a growing perception among a limited group of mostly affluent middle-class Britons that cooking is both important and a pleasure. The real trick would be to find a way of spreading that perception. The result of such a shift in attitudes would be profound – revolutionary, even. It could make a vital difference to all our lives in the coming century. No generation in history has ever thought cooking was cool. Maybe, with our help, the saving grace of the next one will be that they are the first who do.

  Chapter 5

  At Table

  The fate of nations depends on the way they eat …

  Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin1

  The Lord Mayor’s Banquet in 1761. The annual feast at the Guildhall remains an important political event.

  Middle Temple Hall

  Middle Temple Hall is not your average sort of dining room. An imposing Tudor chamber with a dramatic double hammer-beam roof that soars 47 feet above its broad-planked floor, it has been the heart of Middle Temple Inn, one of London’s four Inns of Court, since Elizabethan times. Its oak-panelled walls, lovingly restored after heavy damage during the Second World War, provide a suitably sober backdrop to the brightly coloured coats of arms of its many distinguished alumni. At the far end of the hall is the Bench Table, raised on a dais and fashioned out of four 29-foot planks of oak cut from a single tree in Windsor Forest and floated down the Thames on a barge. Reputedly the gift of Elizabeth I, the table is where the Benchers sit; members of the Inn’s elected parliament, most of them ‘silks’ at the very top of the legal profession.2 Behind the Benchers hang a series of royal portraits, above the centremost of which – a rather lugubrious rendition of Charles I on a horse – is the Inn’s heraldic emblem, the Lamb and Flag. In front of the Bench Table stands the Cupboard, a ceremonial desk given to the Inn by one of its more colourful members, Sir Francis Drake, made out of a hatch cover from his ship, the Golden Hind. Next to the Cupboard is the Ancients’ Table, where the eight most senior barristers in Hall have dined since 1595. Just about the only objects in the room unworthy of historical footnotes are the oak refectory tables where ordinary members of the Inn sit.

  With its royal connections, majestic roof, and heraldic imagery (not to mention the odd chunk of pirate ship), Middle Temple Hall has undeniable pedigree. For over four centuries it has witnessed the social, practical and ceremonial life of one of London’s greatest institutions. To misbehave within its hallowed walls, under the beady eye of the law, would be unthinkable – which was what made my first meal there something of a trial. The reason for my dining at the Inn was my friend Nick, who, after a successful career in our mutual profession of architecture, had decided to become a barrister. This, as you might expect, involved him in a lot of hard work, but it also involved something rather less expected: his attendance at no fewer than 18 formal dinners in Hall. When Nick asked me to join him at one of these compulsory feasts, at first I thought it sounded like a jolly night out, but I soon realised my mistake when he warned me to dress soberly, and to expect some elaborate (yet unspecified) rituals. It was thus with some trepidation that I met Nick on the front steps, and we proceeded into Hall – he in knee-length black gown, me in my funeral kit – along with 200 similarly clad individuals already taking their places at table. As we scrambled to two of the last remaining seats, the head porter banged his staff on the floor and bade us all rise to face the room, whereupon the Benchers, resplendent in silken robes, proceeded in stately procession to their table, grace was said in Latin, and we all sat down.

  Nick and I found ourselves opposite a young female lawyer and a much older male one; the latter, to my relief, immediately began engaging us in conversation. Since he seemed to be the only one of us remotely at his ease, we happily let him take the lead, and when the first course arrived – a homogeneous green soup – it seemed only natural that he was the first to be served and to take up his spoon. This pattern continued all evening, and at some point it dawned on me that the entire procedure was somehow codified: there could have been no other explanation for the curious combination of elaborate manners and indifferent food of which the meal consisted. While our host continued to behave as if he were leading some sort of panel discussion, the food got steadily worse: after the tasteless soup, we were regaled with grey lamb served with waterlogged vegetables and industrial mint sauce, followed by chemical-tasting fruit trifle with artificial cream – not the sort of food you normally get dressed up for.3

  Apart from the bottle of Bordeaux Nick bought for us to wash it down with, the meal felt a bit like being back at school, which, as I later discovered, was more or less exactly what it was. Had I not been so overawed by my surroundings, I probably would have noticed earlier that the table at which we were sitting was laid up in groups of four, with the side plates on alternate sides so that they formed a series of natural barriers. These sets of four, known as ‘messes’, are one’s designated company for dinner at the Inn, and it is forbidden to talk to anyone in an adjacent mess, apart from asking for the salt. The most senior barrister in each mess, who sits nearest the Bench Table facing the room, is designated ‘mess captain’ for the evening, and it is his or her duty to make the juniors feel welcome, to steer the conversation towards interesting topics, and to encourage everyone to express their opinions. In short, for the duration of the meal, they are expected to act as host, mentor and teacher.

  The system is as old as the legal profession itself, dating back to the fourteenth century, when the Inns of Court replaced the clergy as arbiters of English law. The Inns were originally run like universities, and with their inner courts, lockable gates, chapels, libraries and dining halls, they resemble Oxford and Cambridge colleges, those other great educational inheritors of medieval monasticism. In the case of Middle Temple, the monastic inheritance is expli
cit: the site once belonged to the Knights Templar, whose title, Lamb and Flag emblem and ancient chapel were all adopted by the Inn.4 Even the Inn’s social structure derives from the warrior monks: the Knights’ habit of living and dining together in pairs, for both companionship and discipline, is the origin of the chambers system and the messes in which barristers still dine.5

  From the outset, dining was integral to life at the Inn. Students were expected to ‘keep terms’ (live on site) and attend regular meals in Hall, where a specially appointed barrister, the Reader, read out articles of law, or presided over mock trials in which students could test their skills. However, the arrival of printed books in the sixteenth century marked a decline in formal training, and by the seventeenth century it had died out altogether. Students resorted to dining in Hall simply in order to try to learn something from their elders, and in 1798 the arrangement was formally ratified with the introduction of compulsory dining – a move that did little for the Inns’ reputation, since it gave the (essentially correct) impression that ‘gentlemen could eat their way to the Bar’.6 Formal lectures were reintroduced in 1852, but by then, obligatory dining was considered too valuable to lose.