A Greedy Man in a Hungry World: How. Jay Rayner

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СКАЧАТЬ in the hands of the big supermarkets and, whatever the downsides of that, it has, historically, led to cheaper food. In the early post-war years it took over a third of average salary to pay for the food shop. Today it is just under 10 per cent. Or, to put it another way, you had to work until Wednesday morning to pay for the family’s weekly shop; now you’ll have earned enough by some time just after noon on Monday. And that’s not because salaries have increased enormously, compared with all the other costs we face; quite the opposite.

      For these are the economic realities within which supermarkets operate. In 1962 average yearly pay was £799. By 2012 it was £26,200. It has increased by a factor of just over thirty. However, the picture with house prices is rather different. In 1962 the average house in Britain cost £2,670. Fifty years later it costs around £245,000. House prices have therefore increased by a factor of over ninety. Just stare at those numbers for a moment. House prices have increased at roughly three times the rate of earnings. Brutal, those figures, aren’t they? Faced with these realities, all those interesting historical debates about the fight by women like my mother and her friend Carole for the right to go out to work in the sixties and seventies become completely irrelevant. It’s no longer about the right to work. It’s about the need to work. The fact of the matter is that to support and run a household both members of a couple with kids need to be holding down full-time jobs. That makes them hideously time-poor. Ask anybody today to clear a morning of their diary just to go down the road to watch a man cut the butter you need off a huge block and they’d laugh in your face. In that context, supermarkets really are not evil. They are a complete godsend.

      They are something else too, something the legions of food obsessives who spend so much of their time bemoaning their dreadful impact on our culture could never bring themselves to admit. Supermarkets are a force for change, good change, the sort of change that makes life worth living. We talk endlessly about food revolutions, about the way our culture has developed over the years; how we have gone from a time when olive oil was something sold in the chemist’s for earache, and Parmesan cheese came grated unto dust and smelling lightly of vomit, to a foodie Shangri-La in which we all feast at a national table weighed down with gloriously good things to eat. We go on about this without noticing that in the vanguard of this revolution are the supermarkets. None of the things we take for granted these days – bunches of fresh brassic flat-leaf parsley rather than the dried, friable stuff that looks like the wrong end of a pot-pourri; butter from Brittany with crunchy salt crystals and a slight cheesy edge; cooking chorizos; crisp, green, peppery first-press olive oils; artisan breads; free-range eggs; big, butch sausages made from happy, outdoor-reared pigs; Thai cooking pastes; miso sauce and fish sauce and sesame oil, and so many other things besides – would be as freely and as widely available as they are today without the supermarkets.

      I remember the first moment this struck me. It was the mid-nineties and I was on holiday in the Yorkshire Dales. We took a day trip to Blackpool. I’m not sure why. I think we just wanted to feel cheap and dirty for an afternoon. It worked. In a good way. On the way back I decided we should stop off at the big supermarket – I think it was an Asda – on the edge of town to pick up some stuff for dinner. I had a double rack of lamb back at the cottage we were renting and I wanted to stuff it with a mixture of breadcrumbs and basil, olives, anchovies and caramelized onions. In those days my credentials as an urbane young man, who understood the imperatives of a Mediterranean diet, rested on that thing I did with the double rack of lamb. It was something I made quite often at home, but to caramelize the onions I needed a bottle of deep, dark, sour-sweet balsamic vinegar. In London, getting hold of some of that was no problem at all. There was always a well-stocked deli somewhere nearby, ready to do the business. But on the edge of Blackpool? I trudged moodily around the aisles, my face fixed in a sneer of pure metropolitan disdain. In short, I had my normal face on.

      Soon the expression was gone. For there, on the shelf, was not just a bottle of balsamic vinegar. There was a choice of balsamics. Oh my.

      This story looks ludicrous, doesn’t it? It’s quite clear that I’m a patronizing schmuck. What’s so amazing about balsamic vinegar in a Blackpool supermarket? But that’s the thing. In the nineties – less than twenty years ago – everything was amazing about this. I left that Asda clutching my bottle of balsamic – and my fresh basil, and my glistening anchovies – feeling like the country in which I lived was suddenly a better place. And it was suddenly a better place because a supermarket had decided to stock the things I wanted to eat.

      Why had this happened? Because food media in Britain, as elsewhere around the world, had exploded.

      A SHORT HISTORY OF A FOOD REVOLUTION

      Just as we have to acknowledge the part that the supermarkets have played in revolutionizing the way we eat, so we also have to swallow hard and accept that the key people responsible for changing the way we eat in Britain are those renowned gourmands Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch.

      I’ll say that again: Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch. Or, to give them their full job descriptions, arguably Britain’s most divisive post-war Prime Minister, and a media mogul now generally regarded as having been at the head of a company whose employees routinely engaged in phone hacking.

      Let’s go back a bit. Whenever you hear Britain’s Dordogne-loving middle classes engage in eye-rolling about the state of food culture in their own country and extolling the virtues and marvels of France, where every small town and village supports a perfect restaurant, and where they do not object to spending reasonable sums of money on food, and a family bonding experience involves slaughtering a whole pig and butchering it down so that everything other than the oink can be eaten, it is worth reminding them of this: during the Second World War the French quickly decided the game was up, laid down their arms and got on with their lives. Or lunch, as they called it.

      When that great historian and social commentator Bart Simpson described the French as ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ he was obviously being shamelessly provocative.

      On the other hand, as with all great gags, there was more than a grain of truth in it. The French do eat an awful lot of cheese. Witness General de Gaulle’s great gastronomic boast, disguised as despair, about the impossibility of successfully ruling a country that has ‘246 different kinds of cheese’. And, well, they did actually surrender. Quite a lot.

      Britain, meanwhile, locked in a war of national survival, industrialized its food-production system and introduced rationing on a vast scale. (And yes, of course, there was also some rationing in France during the twentieth century, but nothing like on the scale of that in Britain.) It is hard to overstate the damage that this war did to Britain’s food culture. A whole generation forgot how to cook. Likewise, a genuine fight for survival, combined with an ingrained Puritanism which regarded the spending of anything more than necessary on food as plain wrong, made completely redundant any sort of interest in food beyond its importance for basic nutrition.

      There were, of course, torch-bearers in post-war Britain who fought the good fight. Raymond Postgate launched The Good Food Guide in 1951, identifying the few places worth eating in by soliciting reviews from diners around the country; it was an early example of the kind of crowdsourcing the web would make de rigueur half a century later. A few chefs and restaurateurs – George Perry-Smith at the Hole in the Wall in Bath, for example, Joyce Molyneux at the Carved Angel in Dartmouth, or Brian Sack and Francis Coulson at Sharrow Bay in the Lake District – worked hard to introduce a select band of people to a better way of eating. But it was a minority sport for what was regarded as a decadent, over-indulged minority. Hell, in the early seventies most people had to live with the lights going off half the time. Against that a dish of salmon en croute with a sorrel sauce wasn’t merely a luxury; many people thought it was nothing less than an obscenity.

      It took Margaret Thatcher’s second election victory in 1983, and the boom that followed, to solve that СКАЧАТЬ