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The one area where British restaurants really do push the boat out for their consumers is children’s food. Britain is unique in Europe in that it likes to make a fuss of children by offering them an especially bad menu. A separate ‘children’s menu’ is an alien concept in any other country except the US. Restaurateurs elsewhere take the attitude that children will eat the same sort of food as adults, the only concessions being that dishes may be offered in smaller portions, or produced more promptly to pre-empt outbursts from hungry toddlers. Foreign restaurateurs do not live in fear of hysterical children throwing tantrums in the dining room because they can count on the fact that the children have been socialized at home by family meals and can usually be relied upon to sit round a table and eat alongside others. Britain, on the other hand, believes that a dining room is a hostile and foreign environment for a child, a potential war zone. Before contemplating a restaurant visit with their children, the British seem to believe that children must be pacified with a distinct repertoire of ‘child-friendly’ foods (for which read ‘junk’) and bribed with free, non-food gifts. Otherwise, how else can they be expected to sit through an exclusively adult dining experience that is widely considered to be intolerable for a British child? Viewed from abroad, when it comes to food Britain’s treatment of children amounts to neglect, a national embarrassment, even to the British. One Englishwoman told me:
‘We often go to this seafood restaurant in Marbella. We like it because it is chilled and laid-back. You can sit on the balcony and eat fantastic prawns and squid while you look out at the sea. The people who eat there are very international: Dutch, Germans, Belgians, Swiss, Austrians, Canadians, Scandinavians. When they come in a family group, you notice how the kids just sit down and eat the same food as their parents, no nonsense. The British families stand out because the children won’t eat this or that, and so their parents start asking the waiters for something different for them that’s not on the menu. Why can’t they just appreciate food like European children seem to?’
In 2003, the Parents Jury – a group that campaigns for better children’s food – surveyed the food in British restaurants that commonly serve to children, based on responses from 1,400 parents. The judging panel concluded that, because the standard was so low, the idea of children’s menus should be done away with altogether. The children’s menu in one prominent chain was summarized by a judge as follows: ‘No fresh food. Everything is out of the freezer and into the fryer or microwave. I bet they haven’t got a chopping board in the kitchen.’ The Parents Jury went on to highlight one typical children’s menu with a prehistoric dinosaur theme. It consisted of heavily processed foods: ‘Raptor hot dog’, ‘Jungle chicken’, ‘Jurassic sausages’, ‘Bronto burger’, ‘T-Rex pizzas’ and ‘Big Dino breakfast’. All these were served with chips and a refreshing ice lolly with ‘fruit-flavour’. To make the package more attractive, it was available in a larger or super-size version for 50 pence extra. Good children who finished up this assembly were rewarded with a free lollipop. A subsequent survey of 141 children’s meals served in cafés and restaurants in London found that every one failed to meet even the basic nutritional standards set down for school meals.
Almost 40 years ago, Derek Cooper summed up his conclusions about the state of Britain’s eating-out scene. ‘There is, alas, no optimism on the eating front. For the minority prepared to pay for the privilege there will always be a small number of good restaurants. The majority of us will continue to put up uncomplainingly, perhaps even with a sort of masochistic pleasure, with bad food.’ Four decades on, his remarks still seem extraordinarily apt.
Britain has become a nation that steadfastly believes it no longer has the time to cook, except for Christmas Day and the odd weekend when we dabble in the ancient art of cooking and try to work up some enthusiasm for the pleasures of the table. As little as 20 years ago, we used to look on cooking as part and parcel of daily life, then reports came from the United States of the emerging trend towards ‘no-cook’ eating. It was said to have started in Manhattan, where apartment kitchens were tiny and the possibilities for eating out were rich and varied. ‘Grazing’ became a new buzz word as consumers took to roaming fertile foodie pastures, eating what they felt like, when they felt like it. So the modern myth was born that it is possible to abandon cooking entirely but still continue to eat great food every day of the week.
The British had their doubts about no-cook eating. To start with, few neighbourhoods in the UK have a dazzling food emporium such as Zabar’s or Dean & DeLuca on the street corner. Then there were those tales – possibly apocryphal – of Americans who stood over their toasters in the morning shouting ‘Faster, faster!’ at a slice of bread, just so they could jog off to work at six in the morning to work a ten-hour day. It all sounded a bit manic.
But at the beginning of the 21st century, Britain seems determined to follow in the footsteps of the US when it comes to eating habits. While it would be an exaggeration to say that home cooking in Britain is dead, it is most certainly in a chronic state. In 2001, the average British household cooked from scratch – that is, prepared a meal from mainly raw ingredients – just 3.36 times a week. By 2002, 45 per cent of Britons agreed with the statement ‘I am so tired in the evening, I don’t have the energy to do anything’. Many British people are now convinced that they don’t have the time or energy to cook and they are acting upon that conviction. While in 1980, the average meal took one hour to prepare, now on average it takes 13 minutes. On current trends, it is predicted that by 2010, this will shrink to 8 minutes. Cooking is now widely seen in Britain as an optional activity, a reflection of how little importance the country gives to food. Why would one want to cook, so the thinking goes, when nearly everything else in life is potentially more interesting and rewarding? As the convenience food manufacturer
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