Britain and good food are two things which are not commonly associated. Visitors to Britain have widely varying opinions about all sorts of aspects of the country, but most of them seem to agree that the food is terrible. Why? One reason could simply be that British tastes are different from everybody else's. However, the most common complaint is not so much that British food has a strange, unpleasant taste, but rather that it has very little taste at all. The vegetables, for example, are overcooked. It is all too bland.

        Another explanation may be that most visitors to Britain do not get the opportunity to sample home cooking. They either eat the food cooked in an institution, such as a university canteen, or they 'eat our ' a lot, usually in rather cheap restaurants and cafes. These places are definitely not where to find good British food. Typical British cooking, which involves a lot of roasting, does not suit the larger scale production or the quick preparation which is required in such places. For one thing, food should, according to British people, be eaten ho t, which is difficult to arrange when feeding large numbers of people. In addition, the British have not go t into the habit of preparing sauces with grilled food in order to make it tastier.

        The explanations above can only serve as a partial excuse for the unfortunate reputation of British cuisine. Even in fast food restaurants and everyday cafes, the quality seems to be lower than it is in equivalent places in other countries. It seems that British people simply don't care enough to bother.

        The country has neither a widespread 'restaurant culture' nor a 'cafe society'. In the middle of the day, people just want to eat up quickly and are not interested much in quality (the lunch break is an hour at most). Young people and families with children who eat at fast food places are similarly not interested in quality. Little effort is mad e to make the hamburgers tasty because nobody expects them to be. The coffee is horrible not because British people prefer it that way but because they don’t go to a cafe for a delicious, slow cup of coffee - they go there because they need the caffeine.

        Even at home, food and drink is given relatively little attention. The coffee is often just as bad as it is in the cafes. British supermarkets sell far more instant coffee than what the few people who drink it often call 'real' coffee. Instant coffee is less trouble. Meals tend to be eaten quickly and the table cleared. Parties and celebrations are not normally centered around food. For example, if a British person expresses a liking for bar because, this does no t necessarily mean that he or she likes barbecue d food - it is understood to mean that he or she enjoys the typical barbecue atmosphere. When the British do pay attention to food, it is most frequently not to appreciate it but to notice what they don't like about it. Food hits the headlines only in the context of its dangers: for example in 1993, when it was discovered that 100 tones of six-year-old beef had been allowed to go on sale; or when a government minister announced that the country's eggs were infected with salmonella. In the early 1990s, everybody in the country knew about 'mad cow disease' (a disease affecting the brain s of infected cattle). There are quite a large number of vegetarians in Britain and an even larger number who are aware of the implications for their health of what they eat. 'Health food shops' are as abundant in the country's high streets as delicatessens.

        British people have been mostly urban, having little contact with 'the land', for longer than the people of other countries. Perhaps this is why the range of plants and animals which they will eat is rat her narrow. There are plenty of enthusiastic British carnivores who fee l quite sick at the thought of eating horsemeat. To most people, the idea of going out to pick wild plant s for the table is exotic. It is perhaps significant that when the British want to refer to the people of another country insultingly, they often allude to their eating ha bit s. Because of the strange things they do with cabbage, for example, the Germans are 'krauts". Because of their outrageous taste for frog's legs, the French are 'frogs'.

        However, the picture is not entirely negative. While the British are conservative about ingredients, they are no longer conservative about the way they are serve d. In the I 960s, it was reported that the first British package tourists in Spain not only insisted on eating (traditionally British) fish and chips all the time but also on having them , as was traditional, wrapped up in specially imported British newspaper! By now, however, the British are extremely open to the cuisine of other countries. The country's supermarket shelves are full of the spices and sauces needed for coo king dishes from all over the world (the increasingly multicultural nature of the population has helped in this respect). In addition, there is increasing interest in the pure enjoyment of eating and drinking.