ANTI-EARNESTNESS AND OBSCENITY RULES
Our ambivalence about food may be due in part to the influence of the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule. Excessive zeal on any subject is embarrassing, and getting all earnest and emotional about something as trivial as food is, well, frankly rather silly.
But it seems to me that our uneasiness about food and foodieness involves something more than this. There is a hint here of a more general discomfort about sensual pleasures. Flaunting one's passion for good food, and talking openly about the pleasure of eating it, is not embarrassing just because it is over-earnest but also because it is somehow a bit obscene.
It has been said that the English have a puritanical streak, but I'm not sure this is quite accurate. Sex, for example, is not regarded as sinful, but as private and personal and therefore a bit embarrassing. Jokes about sex, even quite explicit ones, are acceptable; earnest or fervent talk about the same intimate physical details is obscene. The sensual pleasures of eating, it seems to me, are in the same category - not exactly a taboo subject, but one that should only be talked about in a light-hearted, unserious, jokey manner.
Foodies (or foreigners) who dwell too lyrically, too erotically, on the delights of a perfectly executed, voluptuously creamy sauce bearnaise, will make us squirm, blush and look away. To avoid offending, all they need do is lighten up a bit, laugh at themselves, not take the whole thing quite so seriously. Without such ironic detachment, foodie-talk becomes a form of 'gastro-porn' (the term normally refers to lavishly illustrated foodie magazines and cookbooks, with detailed, mouth-watering descriptions of each luscious dish - but can equally be applied to over-enthusiastic foodie conversation).
TV-DINNER RULES
Although the idea that we are becoming a nation of discerning gastronomes is, I'm afraid, over-optimistic foodie propaganda - well, a gross exaggeration, anyway - interest in food and cooking has certainly increased in recent years. There is usually at least one food-related programme on every television channel, every day. Admittedly, some of the game-show-style programmes, in which chefs compete to cook a three-course meal in 20 minutes from five ingredients, are more entertainment than cookery - and my foreign informants found this approach to food either amusingly daft or shockingly irreverent. But there are plenty of genuinely informative cookery shows as well.
Whether this actually translates into much real cooking in English homes is a matter for some debate. It is probably true to say that many English people avidly watch the celebrity TV chefs preparing elaborate dishes from fresh, exotic ingredients, while their own plastic-packaged supermarket ready-meals circle sweatily for three minutes in the microwave. (I've often done exactly this myself.)
But there are exceptions - people who are genuinely inspired by these programmes, and rush out to buy the TV chefs' cookbooks and try their recipes. And I'm not just talking about a middle-class, trendy-foodie elite. Delia Smith's cookbooks are always at the top of the popular bestseller lists, and shopkeepers are frequently caught out by the 'Delia Effect', whereby any product she recommends on her evening television show - from the humble egg to a particular make of saucepan - will sell out in shops across the country the next day. A small but significant number of my working-class friends and informants have become much more enthusiastic and adventurous cooks as a result of watching television cookery programmes. A bus driver told me he was a 'big fan' of Gary Rhodes. 'I love his recipes,' he said. 'I'd never even tried to cook fish before - not real fish, proper fresh fish. Now I can go to the fishmonger and get, oh, red snapper or whatever and make a really beautiful meal. I did roasted sea bass last weekend. It's very pricey, is sea bass, but it's worth it. Beautiful, it was.'
Like most other English born-again food-lovers, however, he only does this sort of 'proper cooking' once a week, on Saturday nights. There are still very few households in England where fresh ingredients, pricey or otherwise, are painstakingly prepared and carefully cooked on a daily basis. The shelves of the more up-market supermarkets may be full of exotic vegetables, herbs and spices, but the majority of shoppers still have no idea what these ingredients are or how to cook them. I spent some time hanging around the fruit and veg sections in supermarkets, staring at things like pak choi, wild mushrooms and lemongrass, and randomly asking fellow shoppers if they knew what one was supposed to do with them. Most did not, and neither, for that matter, did the supermarket staff.
THE NOVELTY RULE
I am, however, falling into a very English trendy-foodie trap here - equating 'good' food and 'genuine' interest in cooking with novel, foreign ingredients and new ways of preparing them. My foreign friends and informants find the frantic novelty-seeking of English foodies somewhat bizarre, and laugh at our constantly changing fads and fashions - from nouvelle to Cajun to Fusion to Tuscan to Pacific Rim to Modern British. One minute it's sun-dried tomatoes with everything, the next minute these are passe and it's raspberry vinegar, or garlic mash, or polenta, or, oh, I don't know, confit of black pudding and potato rosti layered into a precarious tower in the middle of a huge white plate, with goat-cheese filo parcels and a balsamic reduction or rosemary jus or horseradish sabayon or something.
This current novelty-obsession is not peculiarly English; the same trend can be observed among our colonial descendants in America and Australia, but they are much younger nations, composed of immigrants from a variety of cultures, with no traditional indigenous cuisine to speak of, so they have some excuse. We are supposed to be an old, established European culture, with centuries of tradition and a sense of history. Yet when it comes to food, we behave like teenage fashion-victims. Presumably because, when it comes to food, despite our seniority, we are actually in much the same position as the teenage former colonies, having no great culinary tradition of our own. Some historically-minded food-lovers claim that English food has not always been so undistinguished, citing the great banquets of former times, with rich game pies and exotic spices and so on. But these things were largely the preserve of a very small, wealthy minority - and foreigners have been complaining about the poor quality of most English cooking for centuries. Now they marvel at our indiscriminate mixing and matching of foreign influences.
'I thought the English were supposed to be resistant to change?' said one of my confused foreign informants. 'This is not what I see in your restaurants. In Italy, we are much more traditional, much less open-minded about food. And the French are even more...' He put his hands close together in front of his eyes, in a gesture indicating tunnel vision or narrow-mindedness. He had a good point, I thought. The English have a reputation as stick-in-the-muds, but our attitude to food suggests that we can be remarkably flexible, willing to try new things and absorb different culinary practices. The wilder extremes of the most recent novelty-seeking trends are mainly confined to the young and fashion-conscious, but Greek, Italian, Indian and Chinese food have been part of the English diet for decades - as familiar and established as meat-and-two-veg. Indian food in particular is now an integral part of English culture. Our customs revolve around it. No Saturday night pub-crawl would be complete without a visit to the local Tandoori or Balti restaurant. And when the English go on holiday abroad, the food they most miss, according to the latest surveys, is not fish and chips or steak-and-kidney pie but 'a proper English curry'.
MOANING AND COMPLAINING RULES