When I was growing up in the UK in the 1970s and 80s, British cuisine was in a bit of a low spot. Not that I noticed this at the time, because other than an occasional fish and chips, or a chinese takeaway, we rarely ate out. Mum was (is) an excellent cook and we had a balanced diet with an average amount of peas for a British family (for non-Brits, this is a lot more peas than you would expect).
Once I was in college in the mid 1990s, quality British cuisine was beginning to make a tiny bit of a comeback, but this was a completely irrelevant trend for us in our student haze of warmed baked beans on white toast. Our most exciting food moments involved late-night curries after a Friday night ‘in town’. (And I still miss those curries).
But my student days in South Wales saw the beginning of a fledgling interest in cooking.
I remember standing there one day with a can of tuna, some rice and eggs, and wondering what I could make. I looked for spices, found some curry powder, and realized I could make a student version of kedgeree. (Imported from India, it has become a British dish, and is normally made with much more delicate smoked haddock!)
It was yummy, in a canned tuna kind of way, and I began to recognize that making food can be a creative outlet. You can try things out, play with flavor, and texture, and color, and no matter how it turned out, it was still usually edible, and was sometimes spectacular. And I began an experiential journey to ultimately understand that the best food was simple. The better the ingredient, and generally the fewer the ingredients, the more delicious the dish. I began to smell tomatoes before buying them in the store.
I treasured Saturday mornings when I got to go to the indoor market and find Mavis Davies’ bakery to get a half dozen warm, freshly-sugared ‘welsh cakes’. (Recipe below!). There were never more than two left when I got back to the dorm.
Fast forward 25 years, and I have eaten my way around a good part of the United States, gleefully getting to taste not just food, but place. (Once spending a night in a sketchy motel bathroom in Portland, Oregon after an encounter with a bad oyster).
Eating food is one of the only things that occupies all five senses simultaneously.
Let that sink in for a second. What other activity really takes over ALL your senses? Listening to your seat-mate eat chips open-mouthed on a plane notwithstanding, even sound can add to the experience of eating.
And yet, in America, we have a such a hard time with figuring out how to eat.
As a nation, we are obese. Certainly, this is partly a result of too many calories, but it’s also related to how many of those calories are from fat and sugar. The data vary considerably, but we eat a LOT of added sugar. At least 3-5 times more than we need according to the World Health Organization.
And while we have access to generally cheaper produce than many nations (afterall, we have climates that vary from tropical to desert to plains to wet), we often fall victim to the fast food on the way home.
Rockefeller recently did a study calculating the true cost of food in America and they estimated that when you take into account the environmental cost of cheaply-produced (industrial) food, and the health issues that we foist on ourselves from obesity and diet, the true cost of food is about three times what we pay. In other words, we shell out around a trillion dollars a year in diet-related health costs that if we ate better (and slightly more expensively), we wouldn’t need.
How do we change that?
I think there might be two things we can do.
The first is to support local producers and vendors. I miss having an indoor market to get my welsh cakes, and vegetables, fish, bread etc. It was like a supermarket, in the sense that all the things were in one spot, but they were all different businesses. I could do most of my shopping on a Saturday morning and support 8 or 10 different local producers.
Farmers’ markets can be like that in the US, but so many have become expensive, boutique, specialty-kind of places. They are often places to be seen, or they even have a tourist focus, rather than serviceable markets supporting a real food need, supplied by real farmers.
I’d like to see more real green grocers and fishmongers making a comeback. This is also important for community connection, and I think the post-pandemic, we might all recognize that more now. As Stanley Tucci says in his memoir ‘Taste’,
“To me, eating well is not just about what tastes good but about the connections that are made through the food itself….I am hardly saying anything new by stating that our links to what we eat have practically disappeared between sheets of plastic wrap. But what are also disappearing are the wonderful vital, human connections we’re able to make when we buy something we love to eat, from someone who loves to sell it, who bought it from someone who loves to grow, catch, or raise it. Whether we know it or not, great comfort is found in these relationships, and they are very much a part of what solidifies a community.”
I couldn’t agree more.
I think the way to break our addiction to poor quality food is not to try to limit food, or go on a diet, or move from meat-based packaged products to plant-based packaged products, but to really engage with food again and its producers and purveyors, and to talk MORE about it.
And…the second idea is to teach it in school. And in college.
My home economics class in high school was all fine and everything, but I think it was a total of an eight-week mini-semester and the first thing we cooked was egg mornay. Who the heck eats egg mornay?
Cooking was the main part of our home economics education, and a bit about budget, but never did anyone teach me how to taste.
If you placed in front of an 11-year old, a factory-produced tomato and a backyard heirloom tomato and asked them to look, smell, and taste those tomatoes, I guarantee they could tell you which came from the backyard without any instruction whatsoever. The whole class would cost about $70 even if you got two of the most expensive tomatoes for each of 25 students. But I think we would see big differences in the life of those kids, and possibly, in a few years, in our whole societal approach to food.
(I love watching Queer Eye by the way, when Antony helps some poor chap cook a simple, tasty dish, and they’re blown away by the taste of real food. We can do that in school and help the Queer Eye guys out).
And when we get older, in college, why not add in a course on food as a required element - environment, heritage, culture, and flavors, with ‘labs’ (i.e. cooking) as well. It would help us appreciate different ethnicities, economics, history, AND the value of real food to our health, our communities, and our plates. This has got to be just as important as algebra (or…..maybe more?)
So all this is really an entreaty for us to take seriously that food is connection, community, experience, and health. All of those things. But mostly, food is flavor, and I don’t think we should live life without a good dose of that.
Tomorrow I’m going to take you to the American Southeast - my home now. And we’re going to dive into food culture and heritage using the region. And on Saturday, I’m going to share my fave food-related readings.
But for now, I have to go. I’m hungry.
The recipe: Welsh cakes! These are so easy and delicious!
Instead of me writing it out today, I’m going to gift you a very old four-minute video of Jamie Oliver making welsh cakes. He’s a legend (though do not add cranberries or blueberries as he suggests is an option….raisins or currants only).
I often say that with a little effort, food is one of very few consistent sources of pleasure three times a day! (Four if you count dessert). Maybe hugs too, if you're lucky enough. Both require being 'present in the moment' to realize it though.
This is a good one - lots to think about! And I agree - taking the time to connect with others over a delish experience all the way around does wonders for a community, for a family, for all of us. Not something I tend to think much about, usually. Thank you!