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.
*************************
* 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]
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