They've been having a bit of a blow-out up in Newcastle this week. Much of May
has been occupied with a food festival called EAT!, a highlight of which was
a gala dinner called “Ten Things to Eat Before They Die”. Not, note, ten
things to eat before you die. That was the theme of last year's inaugural
festival bash, where they served the usual suspects - Beluga caviar,
truffles, wagyu beef - all very delicious to consume, no doubt, but faintly
revolting to hear about - like reading Seneca or some other mullet-obsessed
Roman rhapsodising about the rainbow of colours an expiring red mullet turns
when its death throes are viewed through the sides of a glass bowl.
After that blow-out, this year's gala was more in tune with the spirit of the
times. The menu was devised in association with the Slow Food movement and
contained ingredients from the Slow Food's “Ark of Taste” list, an engaging
conceit designed to preserve endangered culinary treasures. So on the menu
at Gosforth Park were Herdwick mutton, Formby asparagus, plus pears poached
in perry and assorted artisanal cheeses.
The Slow Food movement was started in 1986 by Carlo Petrini, an Italian
journalist who was appalled to find that a McDonald's had opened near the
Spanish Steps in Rome, and decided that a counterbalance was needed to the
homogenising creep of fast food. “We are enslaved by speed and have
succumbed to the insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits,
pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods,” warns
the Slow Food manifesto, which ends with an inspiring rallying cry: “Let us
rediscover the flavours and savours of regional cooking and banish the
degrading effects of Fast Food.”
Lovely sentiments, I'm sure, though you have to do a pretty nifty mindswerve
to get your head around the notion of the Ark of Taste, the thinking behind
which seems to be that to preserve these giant pandas of the culinary world
from extinction, the thing to do is expand their tiny local markets and, er,
globalise their distribution. Still, anything has to be better than the
Sisyphean exertions of the shepherd featured in Griff Rhys Jones's series
Mountain, whose occupation on a National Trust farm in the Lake District was
to keep Herdwick sheep, not for their meat or wool, but as ovine lawnmowers,
their sole reason for existing to keep the landscape looking as it had when
Beatrix Potter knew it (give or take the odd tasteful tea room). That seems,
in its way, almost as decadent as the existence of a McDonald's at the foot
of the Spanish Steps, and if the efforts of the Slow Food movement and its
sympathisers can create a proper market for this admirable little breed and
the other inhabitants of the Ark, so much the better. But it still leaves a
question about what we really mean by “regional” food.
Food has always had many functions beyond that of mere nutrition. We prepare
and consume it for comfort, for nostalgia, for festivity and as a mark of
status. In fundamental ways what we eat defines us, to ourselves and to the
people around us. Asda or Waitrose? Organic or not? Veggie or omnivore?
Gordon or Nigella? Fast food or slow? In countries such as Italy, where the
economy was predominantly agricultural until after the Second World War, the
concept of culinary regionality is embedded in the culture. A generation is
still alive that could pass down to its grandchildren the peasant recipes
from rural Italy collected by Patience Gray in her book, Honey from a Weed.
For Carlo Petrini to call for a return to regional food in his home country
is a matter of a shift in attitude, a revival of tradition still alive, if
endangered - the equivalent, say, of establishing a captive breeding
programme for a rare animal species.
In Britain it is another matter. To reanimate the concept of regionality here
would be more like trying to reproduce a living dodo from the handful of
desiccated skin and feathers preserved in the Pitt-Rivers museum. This is
not to say that there are not stubborn, dedicated producers of glorious
regional food in Britain. The problem is not the producers but the
consumers, and what the mass retailers perceive them to want.
During the postwar decades of the Fifties and Sixties, when the concept of
convenience food really took off, we lost in Britain the connection between
food and identity. This is an important subject and there is no space to
discuss it here, but its legacy is curious. Scraps, shards, archaeological
remnants remain - the glorious post-Imperial culinary culture, for example.
But essentially the 21st-century British attitude to food is entirely
divorced from the land - the paysage - of its production. The connection, in
so far as there is one, is to lifestyle, so we eat for “spiritual” notions
of health or purity (organic) or for reasons of fashion, buying ostrich and
quinoa rather as we might choose to decorate our houses in Provençal or
Gustavan style. What we don't do - not much, not yet - is cherish our
traditions of local produce locally, in any way that might enable producers
to build anything much beyond niche businesses.
Perhaps the Slow Food movement can change that. Or perhaps it might be able to
develop the very peculiar British relationship with food into a kind of
national regional market, in which I can pop in to the north Greenwich
Sainsbury's for a leg of Herdwick mutton and a bunch of Formby asparagus.
That would certainly be more interesting, and more worthwhile in terms of
the domestic agricultural economy than New Zealand lamb and Spanish
asparagus. Better still, though, would be properly local food: Romney Marsh
lamb and Kent asparagus (I have some in the larder now; its journey from
ground to plate no more than 20 miles). If the Slow Food movement can
encourage that, good luck to it. There are reports that new “market town”
branches of Waitrose plan to specialise in local food (though the effects on
local retailers remain to be seen). But to reinvent a true regional economy
would involve a social, economic and culinary revolution. And we have a
great British tradition of being timid about revolutions.
For once the seeds didn't cost a packet
To the Chelsea Flower Show, home of small formidable plantswomen and their
tall meek menfolk. After one dreadful year when I was squashed, trodden on
and (crowning indignity) bellowed at by stewards with bullhorns, I gave up
trying to extract any horticultural value from Chelsea. Perhaps I picked my
moment better this year, for the crowds seemed less dense, the prices more
modest (I came home with a nice ball of hairy green string for an
un-Chelsea-ish price of £2.50). And there was a charming new innovation:
freebies. A packet of sweet rocket seeds at the QVC garden, mixed salad
leaves from Daylesford Organic, while the Spana Moroccan garden trumped the
lot with alfalfa seeds and a handy cotton tote bag. All this, plus the
perennially thrilling sight of the Dubarry boot stand, populated by
curled-lip dandies and swishy blondes, like a Jilly Cooper novel made flesh.
Did I see any plants? I did. I noted that the fashionable plant of the year
is yellow aquilegia. And at the Peter Beales rose display (where an
agreeable cove with a white ponytail and a badge saying Lord Walpole was
dispensing helpful advice) I saw that the wonderful climber Souvenir du Dr
Jamain was making people reel with its astonishing scent. And felt suddenly
fond of Chelsea since that very rose, bought there a decade ago, is the
delight of my summer.
From shoots to shoot
More gardens. There was a lovely picture of Madonna in yesterday's papers,
arriving in Cannes in a fetching sequined garment for the premiere of her
documentary about Aids orphans in Malawi. She's credited as writer, producer
and narrator. But the director's credit goes to her gardener, Nathan
Rissman, who seems to have done a reverse Derek Jarman transition from
potting shed to editing suite. Which must be a bit of blow for Madonna's
husband, the director Guy Ritchie. But just goes to show that if you plant a
seed, you never know what may eventually come up.
We should each of us try to grow more of our own food if we have a garden.
ian cheese, london, uk
I had local food for breakfast:
Our own asparagus, an egg from a neighbour's hens, and homemede bread (not that I have any idea where the flour came from).
ben foster, penley,