British cooking.

Of all the grate European traditions for cooking England is not the first one that would immediately jump to the front of your mind. French or Italian must be the top of any ones list, all depending on who you favour.

Now I have been told that if the French revolution had been different and we had got all the cooks then we would have a grate tradition of fine food. Instead all the gardeners come over and we got grate gardens. I do not know if there is any truth in that but you never know.

Being British, in fact English, why we do not have a proud food tradition is part of our history and part social. One strongly influencing the other. But most of all we have to look at the industrial revolution to try and understand what happened to food in this country.

As the industrial revolution started people moved from the country to the cities to work in the mills and factories. And with that movement of people we began to move away from being in touch with the country and agriculture. Also the fast movement toward an industrial future and a need for expansion and growth of an empire. Such things as food did not seem important.

But also take a look feather back in the history of the country and you find it a mainly Protestant population. For years we had been at war with the French and looked down on all the feasting and what was painted to be over consumption. It was a better thing to resist such evils as enjoying your self.

So take an ingrained Protestant tradition, a society that embraced industrialisation and empire. Food played second fiddle to most of this apart from the fact that some of the famous chefs of the day came to London to cook. Then tow world wars and a los of the empire left the country struggling. And the food culture did not take hold till the nineteen eighties. With the loss of the old power houses of industry and the move to a service based economy food and food culture took hold.

Now food is more readily available in our shops. Restaurants have open in every town and good ones at that. The television is full of chefs who are cooking, growing vegetables and talking about food.

And this is all every well but as a nation have we got the food habit. It is hard to say. We like to watch food being made on television and going out to eat but we have still not made that connection with food and cooking. We probably will not fro at least another twenty years. After all it has taken us only twenty years to come a long way who knows what will be next.