On the 10th anniversary of Observer Food Monthly, we look back at a decade of changing views about food
At the end of 1998, the Observer published one of those features that make newspapers a hostage to fortune. It predicted the unknowns who would be making headlines in the next decade. One name was picked out in each of 10 fields of the arts; looking back, the only second sight in evidence was the fact that the strike rate was predictably dismal (the band we should now apparently be listening to, for example, is a combo called Gay Dad...)
Just one of the prophesies for household-name status came true, and this was in the newly designated art of chef-dom. One writer was dispatched to interview a young man who was at that time working on the grill at the River Cafe in Hammersmith, and described by the restaurant's co-owner, Rose Gray, as "a very talented boy, and an alluring sort of person". The boy who, the writer suggested, with an anthropologist's curiosity, "wears trendy T-shirts and speaks in a kind of nouveau cockney accent" had lately been spotted by Channel 4 who wanted him to develop the idea for a new cookery show, sort of anti-Delia, one which hated recipes, and which, in his words, would be "more like a convo, you know, like we're talking now".
It would be a convo in which he described how fresh pasta "was a piece of piss" and borage "an old Roman herb I thought I'd try in a rav". He even had a moniker, he said, "the Naked Chef" which would refer not to any novelty aspect of his presenting style, but to the fact that his food philosophy was "kind of strip-it-bare-and-make-it-work". On this basis alone you could argue that the Observer had not lost its gift for clairvoyance. In the dozen years since, the talented boy has sold more than �100m of cookbooks ? his latest, Jamie's 30-Minute Meals is now Britain's bestselling hardback non-fiction book of all time ? and of course the "convo" about food that he described has become a kind of national talking shop.
Even in April 2001, though, when this magazine launched, it wasn't clear that the foodie trend would be anything more than a passing phase. The first issue of OFM carried a long and brilliantly bibulous interview with Marco Pierre White, who opened up to Euan Ferguson about many things, including his sense that he did not feel threatened by the emergence of "other" headline-making chefs because inevitably they were spreading themselves too thin, selling out.
The original tabloid-friendly kitchen rebel said at the time that he was pursuing an out-of-character policy of "live and let live. Look at Jamie: what's he going to remember about restaurant cooking after he has done Sainsbury's? Look at Ainsley Harriott, he's big, he's black as the ace of spades, and he's great fun. Is he a good chef? Fuck no! But let them have their time, they're doing no harm..."
Fast forward 10 years and you might say Marco should have been careful what he wished for. Jamie (and Ainsley) are still going strong, while the great Michelin three-starred chef has, mostly for his sins, become the advertising face of Knorr stock cubes and "brand ambassador" for Bernard Matthews turkeys: "the king of birds... dryness is never about the turkey, it is always about the cook."
This latter desperate fable, in itself, tells you more than you need to know about the fact that British food in the last decade has been not one story but many stories. A good few of them have been a cause for celebration: never before has our culture been so engaged in discussing and experimenting with and agonising over and fantasising about and plain enjoying what is on the end of our forks. Our restaurants are, from where we are looking at least, the envy of the world; there is at least an irregular farmers' market in most large towns, along with the opportunity and desire to hunt down and taste and recreate some of the best cuisines of the world's more distant corners. Spurred by cheap travel and the benefits of mass immigration, no country is more cosmopolitan in its taste in food. We are, even, you could begin to believe, looking one way, living in a kind of organic renaissance, a paradise of curly kale and sprouting broccoli and wild salmon and foraged berries.
There are, though, other stories about Britain and food which remain far less palatable. In the last decade these have run in parallel with this sensual back-to-nature narrative, and have often threatened to undermine and derail it. At the same time as we have opted to choose cookbooks as our favourite reading material, there has been an exponential increase in the consumption of takeaways and fast food. We may be producing more world-class chefs than ever before, but a fifth of our food still comes out of plastic and a microwave. We might demand more and more as a nation to know where what is on our plates comes from and what it contains, but in the last 10 years we have become the fattest nation in Europe (children in Scotland are more at risk of obesity than those of any other nation in the world except the United States.) The taste for organics, which looked for a long time like a trend that would only grow, has stalled and gone into reverse with the recession. Cheap, processed food remains our staple diet; a quarter of all Christmas dinners eaten in Britain last year were entirely pre-prepared.
Nigel Slater introduced that first edition of Observer Food Monthly with these words: "The bottom line is that each blood-stained bit of meat, every cool sip of water, each spoonful of organic cabbage and every additive-encrusted potato chip; the salads, the Mars bars, the wine and beer, all play their part in what we are. Our bodies take both the virtues and horrors of every forkful ? for better and worse ? and turn it into us." We may have come to understand this proposition more clearly in the last 10 years ? we may have been bombarded with messages about carcinogens and superfoods and five-a-day ? but most of us still don't seem to quite believe it, and still fewer live by its implications.
One of the pioneers of Britain's revolution in thinking about food was Fergus Henderson, whose resurrection of established traditions of waste-not-want-not butchery and inspirational faith in a national cuisine at St John have made him perhaps the most influential British cook of the past 20 years. Though Henderson is by nature an optimist, he is not entirely convinced that the changes he has helped to bring about have penetrated as far into the culture as we might like to believe. When I asked him recently if he thought Britain had become a surprising nation of foodies in the last decade, he laughed. "It's very confusing," he said. "They keep telling us that London is the restaurant capital of the world, but then if you look in people's fridges you will still find an awful lot of pink ham in plastic."
The mystery for Henderson is not when did we start being a foodie nation, but rather why did we stop. "There was a time," he says, "when everything was by necessity local and seasonal. But now it has become a mantra which we use to reassure ourselves with, without ever really doing it. I mean in Britain, if there is one thing we have it is fantastic seasons. You'd like to think that what-to-cook-when boils down to common sense. Asparagus and duck eggs and lamb all have their moment. Nature has always been writing this amazing menu for us, it's just that for a long while we forgot to listen to it."
Henderson is far from convinced that food has become as clear an ingredient in who we are, as it is for the French, or the Spanish, or the Italians. "I was in Rome recently at some cool bar with funky young people," he says, "and the conversation for a large part of the evening centred on a particular kind of Roman chicory, the flavour of it, when it was best to eat. When I'm sitting in a bar with a group of young English people and talking about the particular virtues of London's cabbage, then I'll know the revolution has occurred."
Those stubborn anecdotes about children believing milk comes from a plastic bottle and meat is made in styrofoam boxes are hard to shift. "It is still," as Henderson observes, "mainly only restaurateurs who will speak to farmers about vegetables, or to butchers about carcasses. We talk about Borough Market," he suggests, "as though it is a sort of revelation. But you know every little town in France still has a market with food as good as Borough Market, and nearly everyone who goes there knows what they are looking for. Though our supermarkets have made some concessions to 'real' food," he says, "they still only make as many concessions as they have had to make."
Some of these concessions have been made out of outraged necessity. In 2001, at the time of the magazine launch, Britain's farmers were once again slaughtering livestock on an industrial scale, not for consumption but to prevent the spread of disease. If the BSE scandal of the 80s and 90s had finally made the British public begin to understand that faceless industrial farming might have consequences, the foot and mouth debacle emphasised the gulf between policymakers and farmers, with the needs and welfare of consumers (eaters, food lovers) lost somewhere within it.
This was brought home to me at that time when I went up to Cumbria to talk to farmers and others about what the future might hold once the bans on livestock movement were lifted. The farmers' hope was that this might prove a turning point. That producing meat and milk for ever lower returns, squeezed by the buying power and changing demands of the big four supermarket chains, while taking European subsidies for depleting stock and keeping fields empty, could be revealed as the short-sighted folly they had always known it to be.
At one point on that trip I went along to hear Lord Haskins, head of Northern Foods, Britain's largest processor of ready meals, address an audience of those farmers. Haskins, in the usual government spirit of impartiality, was at that time also the co-ordinator of a New Labour task force on agricultural strategy, and, of course, as a result, he said nothing that the farmers wanted to hear. He talked a good deal about "agricommodities" and not at all about livestock, he talked of a generation of consumers who wanted perfect ovoid potatoes free of scabs; he talked of how British people saw supermarkets as their champions, and he explained how all of the livelihoods of the farmers were actually in the hands of Alan Greenspan (chairman of the Federal Reserve of the US at the time) and the forces of globalisation (not, as it turned out, at all a happy place to be). The buzz words were diversification and vision and flexibility. If you had walked into the room having missed the introductions you would have had no idea that the speaker was talking to a local audience of hill farmers about creating food at all.
For a long time this disconnect served the supermarkets well. The profits of Tesco and the rest were built on the ideas of consistency of presentation and a certain abstraction about provenance. The last thing they wanted a consumer to be thinking about when he or she bought a ready meal was the process by which it came to be under its cellophane. In recent years, pressure brought about by consumers with greater awareness, and anxieties about health, has changed at least some of these imperatives. And if an agriculture minister were to give a talk to (the surviving) cattle farmers now, the emphasis might well be on food security and proper stewardship, as they always believed it should be.
There are other dislocations, though, in our proper understanding of the fact that we are what we eat. In the spirit of the time we have outsourced some of our desire for more home-cooked food; we experience it vicariously ? thus the caricature of the family sitting down with its TV dinner watching the sweating contestants on MasterChef shucking oysters or boning rabbits, or gazing fondly at Nigella whipping cream. Food has become visual entertainment in the last decade, but that has not always translated to our plates.
The New York Times food writer Molly O'Neill coined the idea of "food porn" seven years ago. It struck her as she was signing copies of her latest bestselling recipe collection, with a line of people snaking out of the bookshop, that she was putting her name to books that almost no one in the queue would ever actually use. When she asked the people in the queue they mostly confirmed her fears.
"The people buying my book didn't see me as an interpreter of everyday life," she realised, "they saw me as the high priestess of a world that existed almost exclusively in their imagination. They told me that they read my cookbooks like novels to enter an alternate reality where cooking is slow and leisurely and imbued with a comforting glamour..." It was voyeurism rather than practicality that her buyers craved; on another occasion O'Neill noted: "The amount of money spent on kitchen equipment is generally in inverse proportion to the amount of time spent cooking with it."
These high priestess fantasies are hard to shake, however far they depart from reality. I remember once talking to Nigella Lawson about the way the Domestic Goddess tag began as a kind of a joke, but quickly became a sort of cult, with the finger-licking chancellor's daughter and her confected Eaton Square lifestyle at its centre. By her own admission Nigella's homemaking skills had never extended far beyond the cooker. "I am incredibly messy and have no interest in picking up an iron, ever," she said. "The worst of it is, I don't like mess, but I can't do tidy. If I have a car it looks like a squalid living room, piles of books and half packets of biscuits. I have been told off all my life for not tidying my room and never brushing my hair?"
The rise of the celebrity chef has coincided with our interest in confessional memoirs. The attraction of someone like Nigella, made to seem so effortlessly languid, lies not only in her food tips but also in the intimacies of the unattainable lifestyle she seems to represent. One element of this appetite is a kind of nostalgia for technique. We don't necessarily have the skills or confidence for dicing or plucking or marinading, but we are entirely in thrall to those who do.
In one of the more surprising shifts in a nation weaned on Delia, TV cooks, the Domestic Goddess apart, have increasingly taken on the role of alpha males. Their knife skills and taming of fire in the corner of our living rooms have afforded them an outlaw bravado. If Marco Pierre White helped to set this trend it was given its most complete expression by Anthony Bourdain, whose Kitchen Confidential kicked off the decade with a new kind of all-action hero: the sous chef. Bourdain made prepping sound like an SAS operation: "Carlos, my daytime grill man, comes in. He has a pierced eyebrow and a body by Michelangelo, and considers himself a master soup maker. He asks if I've got any red-snapper bones. Yes. Carlos loves any soup he can jack with Ricard and Pernod, and today's soup de poisson is one of his favourites?"
Gordon Ramsay took Bourdain's guerrilla rhetoric to its logical conclusion, getting behind the lines of enemy kitchens, constantly in the face of lesser cooks, messing with their heads. As soon as men got in the TV kitchen, cooking became a fantasy war zone, and Ramsay was our Rambo. As a result, where our fathers might have grown up with the mythology of the military, our sons may now grow up with the legends of the last-minute dinner party. Aside from the blatant comedy in this, there are probably one or two cultural advantages: the new front line, at least in the imagination of the generations of men sharing domestic cooking duties, can now legitimately be the six-burner stove: "I have my extra virgin olive oil, and I'm going in?"
Nigel Slater is, of course, far too cool to subscribe to the gung-ho spirit of that caricature, so I'm pretty sure that is not what he was alluding to when he signed off his opening OFM introduction 10 years ago with the belief that "there has never been a time when our food was more exciting, enticing, or indeed, more dangerous?" You do get the sense, though, that the great British adventure into food and all its stories that he described back then is still only just beginning.
The way we ate
2001
Foot and mouth devastates British agriculture as 10 million sheep and cattle are slaughtered to halt the disease.
April 2001
Tesco, Britain's biggest retailer, makes �1bn profit for the first time.
March 2002
Jamie Oliver creates the Fifteen Foundation to train disadvantaged youngsters in the restaurant business. He puts up his house as collateral, without telling his wife.
2004
Household spending on food and drink hits �85.8bn in 2004, up 53.4% over the previous 12 years.
January 2005
Come Dine with Me first broadcast on C4.
February 2005
Jamie's School Dinners airs. Its success leads the government to create the School Food Trust to improve school dinners.
April 2005
Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck is voted No 1 in the annual World's 50 Best Restaurants poll.
November 2005
Sales of organic produce increase by 33%. The market is now worth �1.2bn
August 2008
The price of food rises by 8.3% overall in the UK in seven months. Meat and fish prices increase by 22.9%.
September 2008
MasterChef: the Professionals begins on BBC2. Parent show MasterChef has now been running on and off since 1990.
April 2009
Gordon Ramsay accused of serving "boil in the bag" food at four of his restaurants. He maintains the meals are freshly prepared by a central supplier.
January 2010
Profits at Gordon Ramsay Holdings fall 90%. Jason Atherton leaves Maze and Claridge's loses its Michelin star
September 2010
Jamie Oliver's 30-Minute Meals becoming fastest selling non-fiction hardback ever. The Bookseller estimates the value of the food & drink book market at �90.8m. In 2001 it was �55.5m.
November 2010
All 25,000 of Heston Blumenthal's �13.99 Waitrose Christmas puddings sell out. Bids on eBay reach �250.
2011
Borough Market in London now has 4.5m visitors annually. Ten years ago it had 50,000.
April 2011
Tesco announces profits of �3.8bn
Monet Mazur Rozonda Thomas Rachel Weisz Miranda Kerr Sarah Shahi
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