Not just about chlorine chicken

This isn’t just about chlorine chicken

 by Brian Bamford

GEORGE ORWELL wrote an essay 'In Defence of English Cooking' that:
'It will be seen that we have no cause to be ashamed of our cookery, so far as originality goes or so far as the ingredients go.  And yet it must be admitted that there is a serious snag from the foreign visitor's point of view.  This is that you practically don't find good English cooking outside a private house....  It is a fact that restaurants which are distinctively English are hard to find.' [1945]

Over half a century later in the Caterer & Hotelkeeper Millennium Supplement, on the 23 December 1999 claimed:
'Rationing was reintroduced in 1940, a year after the outbreak of the Second World War.  It continued until 1954, casting a shadow over any real culinary progression. Post-war London's leading restaurants were almost entirely run by Continental Europeans.'

And yet it goes on to argue:

'Outside the capital, though, the general state of food being served in most restaurants was abysmal, apart from rare exceptions such as Sharrow Bay in Ullswater (which opened in 1949) and the Bell at Aston Clinton.'


Raymond Postgate who went on to jointly write The Common People with G.D.H.Cole, helped to found The Good Food Guide.  Postgate a socialist, who helped to found the Communist Party of Great Britain, laid down some rules for fighting a war for English food wrote:



'Navigating a British restaurant during the middle of the twentieth century was in its way not so different from scoring a drink in Sweden before the outbreak of hostilities.  Postgate likened it to war.  The “Rules for Eating Out” published in the first Guide , from 1951-52, refer to restaurant staff as “the Enemy” and recommend battle tactics.'  And he advises:

“Take a long time reading the bill of fare, and see that your wife decides what she wants first. If the Enemy hears one of you say: ‘I’ll have whatever you do, dear’, he immediately decides he has no serious foe to encounter. What you want to impress on the establishment is that it has to deal with a pair of people who know exactly what they want, and are implacable.” ( GFG 19)

Adding in his recommendations:  'While diners and waiters were engaged in conflict, rules of war did apply, and the encounter should be civil even if it was not yet civilized. “You wish to give the impression not that you are angry with this particular restaurant, but that you are suspicious, after a lifetime of suffering.” ( GFG 19)'

His basic justification for the founding of The Guide is clear:
 'The Guide had become necessary because the suffering had lasted longer even than the lifetime of many GFG users: “For fifty years now complaints have been made against British cooking, and no improvement has resulted.” ( GFG 7)'


Serious entertaining was more likely to be done in private houses, where most professional chefs were employed, or in gentlemen's clubs - there were 200 at the turn of the century, compared with about 40 today.  Restaurants were frequented mostly by aristocrats and the gentry.  Women, of whatever class, were rarely seen in such establishments.

Derek Pattison & the 'Veblen good'

In response to the recent news that members of the US Congress have written to the US negotiator, calling on him to get rid of the UK’s ban on chlorinated chicken ‘once and for all’ DEREK PATTISON writes:
'I think it is true to say that people are economic maximizers and though we can make choices, our choices are always constrained for a variety of reasons.  This could be economic and also due to our social/class position in society .'

So speaks Pattsion, the economist, on behalf of the most miserable of sciences; forever labouring the price of everything and the value of nothing.  What would Raymond Postgate, founder of the Good Food Guide have to say about that?

When I did my degree in sociology at Manchester Poly. it was structured around economics, because at that time it was considered  that of all of the social sciences it was the closest to a 'natural science' like physics etc.  Do we want to eat cheap chlorine chicken suitably swilled with the chemical from the USA?  Yet when we considered this science of economics our attention was drawn to 'inverted demand curves'  and the effect of what came to be called a Veblen good as a type of luxury good for which demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. A higher price may make a product desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure.  A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own. *

This is a sociological consequence which determines a price according to a snob value.   Here the effect on demand depends on the range of other goods available, their prices, and whether they serve as substitutes for the goods in question.  The effects are anomalies within demand theory, because the theory normally assumes that preferences are independent of price or the number of units being sold. They are therefore collectively referred to as interaction effects.

We can imagine that after Brexit cheap chlorine chicken will quickly become the food of the poor.

Another writer John Wilkins writes:  'And so we have the climb down.  The ban will be dropped and low animal welfare, chlorinated chicken will be UP on our supermarket shelves.'


The concession in this case has been that low welfare products will pay a higher tariff (the tax charged on imports) than high welfare products.  But even if the US agrees to this, there is no guarantee that the tariffs rate won’t be cut later on.

Mr. Wilkins adds:  'This is fundamentally about the right of our government or any government to set standards and regulations on things that people care about, whether on animal welfare, climate standards, workers rights, public health, environmental standards or anything else.'



Worryingly, the government is trying to present this as a win for the environment minister, because even though the promise that a ban would be maintained has been broken, it turns out that what the trade minister, Liz Truss, actually wanted to do was not only overturn the ban but also reduce all tariffs on chicken to zero! 

The Decline of English Food 

When George Orwell was writing in the post-war years there was rationing, and as he says 'Pubs, as a rule, sell no food at all, other than potato crisps and tasteless sandwiches.'  Meanwhile, at that time, the 'expensive restaurants  and hotels almost all imitate French cookery ... while if you want a good cheap meal you gravitate naturally towards a Greek, Italian or Chinese restaurant.'

Raymond Postgate believed that the decline in English cuisine went back to the Industrial Revolution, when he claimed that the young migrant women from the rural areas who moved into the cities had lost contact with their grandmothers thus distancing them from their traditional recipes and ingredients. 

The concession is that low welfare products will pay a higher tariff (the tax charged on imports) than high welfare products.

But we know agribusiness has been lobbying hard on this, and 47 members of the US Congress have written to the US negotiator, calling on him to get rid of the UK’s ban on chlorinated chicken ‘once and for all’.  Former trade minister, Liam Fox, said last month that “the US would walk” if it had to comply with the UK’s animal welfare standards.[5]

And so now John Wilkins says 'we have the climb down and the ban will be dropped and low animal welfare, chlorinated chicken will be UP on our supermarket shelves.  The concession is that low welfare products will pay a higher tariff (the tax charged on imports) than high welfare products.  But even if the US agrees to this, there is no guarantee that the tariffs rate won’t be cut later on.

'Worryingly, the present government is trying to represent this as a win for the environment minister, because even though the promise that a ban would be maintained has been broken, it turns out that what the trade minister, Liz Truss, actually wanted to do was not only overturn the ban but also reduce all tariffs on chicken to zero!' 


It is hard to believe that the quality of English cuisine will improve as a result of these recent developments in UK-US trade relations and animal welfare.

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*   Veblen goods are named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, who first identified conspicuous consumption as a mode of status-seeking in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).^[1] A corollary of the Veblen effect is that lowering the price decreases the quantity demanded.^[2]

A Veblen good is a type of luxury good for which demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. A higher price may make a product desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own.

Veblen goods are named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, who first identified conspicuous consumption as a mode of status-seeking in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).^[1] A corollary of the Veblen effect is that lowering the price decreases the quantity demanded.

Veblen goods are named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, who first identified conspicuous consumption as a mode of status-seeking in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).^[1] A corollary of the Veblen effect is that lowering the price decreases the quantity demanded.^[2]