Questionable Cuisine

Growing up an innocent young boy in the breadbasket of America, I firmly believed that there was no food in the world so repulsive that it would turn my stomach. I proudly carried this naiveté around with me for my entire childhood. Then, when I was eighteen, I went to a university in Britain and got an education in such matters.

My first morning in the dining hall, I sat slurping on some lukewarm porridge thinking, “well, it could be worse”, when a girl sat down beside me who had apparently passed through a barn and picked up some large nuggets of horse feed.

“What is that?” I said, spraying porridge.

“You’ve never had Weetabix?” she said, pouring milk on an oblong brick of cardboard and looking at me like I was the crazy one.

But Weetabix are merely bland (like ‘the Gobi desert on your tongue’ bland). And as much as I dislike them, I was dying for a bit of bland the first time I tasted British hard candy. There’s a reason they call that filth, ‘penny candy’: it’s so cheap and nasty that people can charge a penny for it and still make a healthy profit. I can’t recall which foul nuggets I tasted once, then vowed to never eat again, but a quick perusal of some British candy websites reveals these ‘classics’: Blackjacks (flavoured with aniseed); Jap Desserts (uncertain flavor, and vaguely racist); milk bottles (milk flavor); and let’s not forget that scottish favorite, Irn Bru Lollypops. It’s as if you hate your own children.

Still, candy is forgivable because Britain is also one of, if not the only place in the world where you can by Haribo sour mix -- the most heavenly assortment of sour gummy candy on earth. It makes my mouth water and my teeth hurt just thinking about it:

The ultimate sin against the culinary world, however, and the one dish that instilled in me the fear of God as well as the knowledge of my own mortality, is eels in jelly. I know many English people would argue that this is traditionally a poor man’s dish and it’s not representative of British cooking as a whole, but in response, I point to the American soul food tradition and simply state: there is no excuse. The eels themselves aren’t overly objectionable - it’s putting them in a jelly made of their own broth that is napalm on the tongue. In fact, a quick flip through an old Delia Smith cookbook reveals that the English have a long history of putting strange things into jelly. Why? Gelatin is a desert colloid that, on occasion, can be eaten mixed with vodka. That’s it. It’s union with anything besides fruit, and even that’s pushing it, is beyond blasphemous.

Britain’s combative relationship with good, or even edible, cuisine is mostly a relic of darker ages before the small island imported rich colonial cuisines to make itself something of a food capital in Europe. But if you ever find yourself believing that old culture equals good culture, go no further than the nearest pie and mash shop and drop yourself some gelatinous truth onto your tongue.

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There's no point defending the indefensible: jellied eels are, I grant you, utterly vile - wobbling pots of putrid skin and bone, invented solely for the most sadistic of bulemia sufferers. Weetabix too - arid one minute, swampy the next, like a twisted game of culinary Catch-22. But for me, what excuses these artless abominations (and believe me, we've got plenty more of them) is that they are ours - we don't expect you to like them. What's more, having invented them, we don't plan on changing the recipes any time soon; they'll still be just as disgusting when the skies collapse. A slim heritage to maintain, you might think, but an honest one - and a stark contrast from the rip and run home economics of the United States.

Let me explain. Over here, we shovel gelatinous gloop down our throats fully aware of what is is and where it comes from. Were our slimy friends to slither they way across the pond, they would soon show up in coloured jelly, deboned,and restyled as 'Uncle Sam's Electric Eels in Jell-O With Added Omega 3!!! ', served in branded pots to commuters at 10 bucks a pop. Take coffee - a noble culinary tradition in Europe; a gargantuan rush hour fix in the States. On our side of the Atlantic, coffee is a small drink to be enjoyed slowly - on yours, its a pint of froth to be guzzled en route to the boardroom. A simple idea - roast coffee beans and water - debased and dressed up in a thousand ways for the highest commercial gain - that's what America brings to the table.

I could go on to list a thousand processed products as further examples, but your greatest crime against the culinary arts in undoubtably chocolate. When Kraft bought our beloved Cadbury's last year, there was uproar in the UK as people fretted that their glass and a half of milk would be replaced with the powdery nonsense that passes for American confectionary. But over here, our European friends wouldn't even recognise Cadbury's as chocolate in the first place - apparently it doesn't have enough cocoa in it. Given that the primary ingredients of Hersheys appear to be flavoured dust and animal fat, you'd be lucky to even get it through customs - it bears about as much resemblance to humble Aztec cocoa as it does to cosmetics. A Hersheys Kiss sounds like playground talk for ass-rimming - it's just a shame the 'chocolate' in those little brown wrappers doesn't taste as good. A jellied eel, for all its sins, is still a jellied eel- you know what you're going to get. It's hard to say the same for the pale imitations of tradition boosting corporate America's coffers, and boostings its subjects ever-expanding waistlines in the process.

Brixton, London

Photo Tommy Farley

Whitehaven

According to the media, something very American has happened in Britain this week -- a shooting spree, as American as streaky bacon, apple pie, and Jell-o. In these times of extreme grief, outrage, fear and uncomprehension, the media draws on what is familiar: gun violence = USA, Hungerford, Dunblane, and a call for tighter gun laws. The only problem is, in this case, the old formula doesn't quite compute. America is the gun crime capital of the world because our society is awash with easy-to-obtain firearms, many of them specifically made to mow down large numbers of people in small amounts of time. Often, when someone goes postal (a term we invented, thank you very much), our lax gun control laws are to blame because it turns out that he shouldn't have been carrying a gun in the first place and certainly shouldn't have been carrying the types of hand guns and semi-automatics that he used in his crime.

The Cumbria massacre was carried out by a middle-aged man with no history of mental problems or criminality using a shotgun and a .22 calibre rifle. See the difference?

Despite being from the land of of the quick and the dead, I don't have a strong stance on guns. I have shot them, enjoyed doing so, but would not shed a tear of they were all made illegal tomorrow. I would be happy to see more gun control in my own country, but my deepest fear regarding guns -- something that has been with me since seeing 'Bowling For Columbine' -- is that guns are not the problem. In that movie, the director Michael Moore points out that, per capita, Canadians own as many guns as American, yet they aren't shooting each other apart a couple times a year. On the other extreme, Britain has some of the tightest gun control laws in the world, but they weren't able to stop Cumbria. I have always respected Britain's ability and wilingness to learn from its mistakes and evolve as a society. However, I fear that the Cumbria shootings prove that there are some bogeymen that cannot be banished by public outrage and swift legislation alone. Such dark thoughts bring a whole new meaning to the term "Broken Britain".

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As Ted rightly points out, underneath the shock, horror and sympathy, the most pressing - and uncomfortable - question nagging away at the British consciousness right now is 'why?'. Even before Bird had fired his final, dreadful shot, the race was on to find a motive - and as the grim realisation that we may never find one dawns on the nation, there is a sense of unease which is impossible to shake. This isn't supposed to happen here: even now, despite the painful events of last week, the British perspective is that this is an American problem.

The reason for this collective national amnesia is that the alternative is too awful to consider - the only way we can sleep peacefully in our beds is to treat this as an anomaly. Without wishing to rationalise the clearly insane, the most notorious American shootings tend to be based on some sort of twisted logic, from the revenge-seeking outcasts of Columbine to the publicity-grabbing farewell videos of Virginia Tech. There is even some comfort to be found in the pantomime posing and videogame weaponry of US atrocities, which at least give society a recognisable framework for their anger - there is no shred of reassurance to be found in an apparently well-liked man waging his own lonely war across one of Britain's most scenic counties. Dwell on this too long, and suddenly every familar face from the pub is a potential killer. Far easier to forget until the next one comes along.

It is interesting to note how Whitehaven fits into the overall debate on guns in the US and the UK. When an evidently troubled individual's uncontrolled urges combine with a readily availabile arsenal of gruesome weaponry to deadly effect - as is often the case in US tragedies - we in the UK are quick to preach that this is an inevitable result of your lenient gun laws. The counter from the pro-arms lobby, however, is that it isn't the guns themselves that actually commit the crime - an argument all-the-more compelling, and unsettling, when the trigger is as elusive as it is in Whitehaven, as it was in Dunblane, and as it was in the sleepy village of Hungerford in 1987.

Immigration

It's a bad time to be an immigrant, or someone who "looks like" an immigrant. You can't even say the word between California and Croatia without making people nervous. Immigration. A few weeks ago, in a move that sounded strangely familiar, the state of Arizona passed a law dictating that immigrants carry their documents with them at all times. And how will the authorities know they are carrying their documents? Simple: they can demand to see the papers of anyone of whom there is a "reasonable suspicion" of illegality.

Many brits will hear in this law the echos of their own Terrorism Act 2000, section 44 to be precise, which allows the police to stop and search anyone who looks "suspicious." The problem here is what constitutes "suspicious." Personally, I'm suspicious of all white people because they have been and continue to be the perpatrators of the biggest crimes in human history. However, when governments start talking about "suspicious", they are invariably referring to people of my skin tone and hair color, or darker -- immigrant looking people. Of course, racial profiling is illegal, so politicians are making up all kinds of ingenious ways in which to identify a suspicious person. Congressman Brian Bilbray suggesting paying close attention to "the kind of dress you wear". You can see why these white people make me suspicious.

Minorities, racial, ethnic, religious or otherwise, are easy scapegoats in times of crisis. When things begin to go pear-shaped in a country, the first to the chopping block are the ones with funny accents, darker skin, different histories, their own ways of doing things, and Jewish people, who have often embodied all of these things. In the United States, our current whipping boys are Latin Americans, predominantly from Central America and Mexico. In Britain, it is Indians, Pakistanis, Carribbeans and Eastern Europeans. In France it's North Africans. Every wealthy country in the world has its class of undersirable and maybe even subversive, but most definitely 'suspicious', people who they whip mercilessly until the their constituents, bloodlust satisfied, go to sleep at night and dream of a world that has never hear the word "globalisation".

Being "anti-immgrant" is one of the general idealogical banners that the American Right is rallying around because it simultaneously scapegoats a lot of much broader problems while also letting Republican commentators take underhanded digs at President Obama. Bear in mind that many in the Tea Party Movement still doubt Obama's citizenship. And so the fear is amplified exponentially -- not only are immgrants overflowing our borders to steal our jobs and rape our daughters and degrade our way of life, but they have installed another darky in the White House to turn a blind eye to all of it! Mary -- get me my gun.

The words are made up but the sentiments among a certain group of white, working class, traditional-valued, bigoted Americans and the fearmongers who pander to them are very real. Just like the BNP is very real, just like the Swiss People's Party is very real. Now it could be that British culture, cultivated by hundreds of years of homogeneity IS lost and cheapened by immigration, and therefore needs some sort of protection (Tim: I would like to hear your views on this), but my country was built by immigrants, and it is absurd to think that they are simply going to stop coming if we put a couple of laws into place. A law like the one in Arizona does nothing besides legitimize bigotry by the police, which, if you've been keeping track, is not an organization that historically needs excuses to be bigoted.

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Well, first of all, there's an easy answer to your query, Ted: immigrants built your country; invading hordes built ours. That Great British Culture the nationalists love to bleat on about - is it Roman? Viking? Celtic? French? Perhaps - and those of a hard right persuasion might need to look away here - it's a multinational blend of all of them, and that's precisely what makes it so 'great' in the first place. After all, our patron saint St George was Turkish, the Queen's half-German and our much-loved national dish is the defiantly untraditional Chicken Tikka Masala - it's not entirely clear what, exactly, our flag-worshipping friends are trying to protect.

What is clear, and Ted already touched on this, is the deeply unpleasant role of racism in all this. Wave-upon-wave of our beloved European conquerers have found themselves quite comfortably accomodated into the myth of an 'indiginous Britain' - it is only when burkas and turbans grace the high street that the hard right really raises it's ugly, shaven head. We've had our tensions with Eastern European migrants, sure - but they are treated more as unwelcome neighbours than the malicious gypsy status reserved for our darker-skinned cousins. It is little surprise that our 'Stop and Search' statistics make for depressing reading; even less of a shock, sadly, that our incoming government has just made it even easier for the police to act on discriminatory sentiment rather than pesky old 'human rights'.

So yes, immigration is hotly, if rarely intelligently, debated on this side of the Atlantic as much as it is on yours. Fear is a powerful weapon, particularly in a recession when jobs are scarce - and as Gordon Brown's infamous encounter with Mrs Duffy revealed, someone different is always the easiest target when communities feel under threat. In my view, this is where good governance should come to the fore: it's their job to protect basic human rights and explain to xenophobes that they are plain wrong. Unfortunately, we choose to make concessions to the racists instead, letting prejudice creep into everyday policing and eroding some of our clearest civil liberties. Last time Stop and Search was enforced in Britain, it led to riots on the streets. If history has taught us one thing, it's that it's clearly no way to keep the peace.

UK Election Special: The Results

So...you were so liberal you decided not to vote for stodgy old Labour and instead put in a vote for the fresh faced Lib Dems? Oops, you've just elected the Conservatives. Welcome to Hell, you granola-crunching, organic, free-range, bio-diesel swilling piece of biodegradable yuppie trash. This whole thing is giving me bad Bush v Gore 2000predecessor, squared off against a middle-of-the-road conservative, and just enough lefties defected to the third party (an owl-faced man named Ralph Nadir who represented the Green Party) as a matter of principle to give the conservative the win. If you have read a newspaper in the last ten years, you can see that those idealistic liberals really proved a point, just not the one they were hoping for.

Unlike what you may have learned when you were twelve, the point of voting isn't to win, it's not to lose. No candidate is going to be everything you want in a politician. In order to get elected, he or she has to represent, or seem to represent, a lot of different people, including, and this one is above all, themselves. This means that our job as voters is to choose the best of a pretty raunchy bunch of characters, whether they are named Brown, Cameron, Clegg, Bush, Gore or Obama. Of course, you can complain, but bear in mind that some groups of voters, like American blacks, had to spend about two hundred years in the land of the free before they got their 'first black president', which, ironically, was what Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton. I suppose, then, that the real lesson to be learned from elections on both sides of the pond is that, unless a third party could actually run away with the election, voting for them is just going to hurt your cause. flashbacks. As you may or may not recall, Al Gore, a slightly 'boring' candidate widely considered to be more of a supporting actor to a much more popular and charismatic, but wildly untrustworthy,

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As alliances go, it's about as unholy as caviar and ketchup. At each other's throats two weeks ago, backslapping their way into Number 10 today: whatever the fallout in the future, Britain's newest comedy duo have, for now at least, completely reconfigured the political landscape of our country. Liberal Democrats are supposed to be dwell in the tree-hugging realms of the left. Conservatives stack their chips in the gated communities on the right. Now the stockbroker and the hippy have joined hands and frolicked into power together, with Jeeves and Wooster gleefully at the helm. Who knew?

On closer analysis, it shouldn't really be the surprise that it is. Grassroots Liberal Democrats may be up in arms - and the steady flow of supporters defecting to Labour suggests trouble ahead - but, as we've discussed before, behind the headline-grabbing single-issue policies, the manifestos of both parties are dominated by a shared distrust of big government; their central philosophies are, in fact, perhaps the closest in parliament. However, what interests me more is the personal side. Why was Clegg, an expensively-educated child of privilege, far happier to go into an alliance with David Cameron, an, er, expensively-educated child of privilege, than he was with Brown, the clunking Scottish social democrat?

Forgive my cycnicism - but what this smacks of to me is that peculiarly British quality of 'being clubbable'. Cameron and Clegg ooze charm. Watching them together is a lesson in the smooth social confidence afforded by an expensive education in the UK - and in many ways, this is the grease that runs the country. We may not have lords and ladies any more, but the upper reaches of British society - be it judges, doctors or politicians - are still dominated by children of privelege, and it is in this very world that our new joint-leaders were born to thrive. It's one big club, and both Cameron and Clegg are perfectly schooled in shaking the right hands, playing by the rules and tipping the doorman on the way out. You can picture them discussing cricket, wine and their long-established ancestral roots; Brown, meanwhile, loved football, porridge and the finer points of Keynesian economics. He never stood a chance; he didn't have any 'chat'. There may have their differences, but when it came to the crunch, Clegg went with what he knew: family, class and the old school tie.

UK Election Special: A Very American Election..

So that was that: four straight weeks of frenzied electioneering over and done with, one tense night at party headquarters across the capital to go. As the British public heads to the polls, a brief pause to reflect on one of the more striking aspects of the campaign: just how American it all felt. Granted, we don't drag things out as long as you guys, and, yes, we actually count our votes by hand when they come in. But this year more then ever, the emphasis has been on personality as much as politics - it's almost as though we are electing a president. We've had televised debates for the first time ever. The battle to claim Obama has been both ludicrous and hard-fought. Every third word spoken seems to have been 'change'. The media have played a colossal role. It's like the quaint British electoral system decided to switch off the wireless and join the 21st Century - and as ever, when it comes to modernity, we're more than happy to follow your lead.

It's not just presentation, either. Britain is locked in a fierce battle over taxation and the state, with a Conservative victory likely to pull the UK closer to a US-style capitalist system than ever before. Labour, the traditional party of the working classes, has had the rug pulled from underneath it, with the decline of British manufacturing demolishing their core vote. In its place, every man must stand for himself - and, as the upper classes are also shrinking, material wealth is increasingly the only measure of success. The so-called 'special relationship' may be over, but Britain's place in the new world order is already halfway across the Atlantic - whether we keep right on paddling remains to be seen. Given how unsuccessful we usually are at being American, however - take the British film industry for one - it might be wise to pack a lifejacket just to be safe...

UK Election Special: Gordon Brown & The Labour Party

And so we come to Gordon Brown. Stalin one minute. Mr Bean the next, the bedraggled Prime Minister has lurched uncomfortably in front of the baying public for months, like a punch-drunk boxer crying out for the final blow – but still he stands. One of British politics' greatest survivors, Brown has withstood countless coups from within his own party, savage personal attacks from a bloodthirsty media, accusations of bullying and even a budget-crippling worldwide recession to somehow make it to May 6th. Now, for the first time as Prime Minister, he faces the public – and undoubtedly his greatest challenge yet.

It is remarkable, given the depths to which Brown's popularity has plummeted, to reminisce over just how rosy things were at the beginning of his tenure. With the public supposedly sick to the back teeth of the glitz and spin of the Blair years, Brown was ushered in as the perfect antidote: dour, fiercely intelligent and thoroughly uninterested in personal appearance, his arrival was acclaimed as the end of personality politics in the UK. As the months have worn on, however, it seems the British public has gradually changed it's mind – and when the first X Factor Election arrived, Brown was found seriously wanting compared to newer, more exciting choices. Chuck in the credit crunch, the continued erosion of the working class communities which form Labour's base vote, and the natural desire for something new after 13 years of the same government, and Brown looks to be toast – even if the latest polls suggest our bizarre electoral system may see him clinging to power by the tips of his fingernails in 48 hours time.

Of course, Brown's problems are not just to do with presentation: loyal Labour supporters have been leaving in droves since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, while Brown's cuddly relationship with City bankers – New Labour were, famously, 'very comfortable with some people becoming filthy rich' – has alienated the left yet further. But there is no doubt that his lack of media savvy is a critical problem. When among friends, he can be a formidable performer, expressing populist left-leaning principals with fire and vigour; when exposed to the wider public, it all too often goes horribly, horribly wrong. On the one hand, this is the man who inspired world leaders to follow his interventionist lead in the banking crisis and took a £20,000 pay cut upon becoming Prime Minister – on the other, this is the monster who savaged a little old lady from Rotherham who was just out to do a bit of shopping. If he had more successfully sold the public one view, rather than being consistently shown as the other, he may well have been sleeping a little easier tonight as the public prepares to go to the polls and deliver its final verdict. Sleep tight, Gordon; it should all be over soon.

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There is a famous scene from Mel Gibson's epic kitsch storm, The Passion of the Christ, in which Jim Caviezel,gets the sweet hell flogged out of him for about five minutes. It's like a long music video, but in aramaic and latin, without music, and with more blood. Midway through, Jesus takes a knee, the punishment appears to be over and the audience -- including the isrealites on screan (but excluding ol' Judas who's lurking in the backround) -- breathes a sigh of relief. But no! Mel Gibson's friends love the punishment, especially if its semi-nude and from behind! Jimbo stands back up and submits to another two minutes of good old fashion scourging.

I bring this up because watching Gordon Brown try to save his sinking ship has been a lot like watching Gibson's Jesus, complete with slightly fucked up face, get flaggelated for an unconscionable period of time. It has been mercifully shorter, but no less cringe inducing. Every time you think he has hit rock bottom and it's safe to take a breath and stop watching, he stands up, brushes himself off, and motions for more.

It's obvious from watching every movie that Mel Gibson has ever even breathed near, that he is a man who likes to be punished. Well, Gordon Brown makes that slavering nut job look like a cub scout. He is the most hated man in Britain since Beckham was sent off and still he won't step down.

The poor Scot couldn't catch a break with a drift net and a baby pool full of cyanide. Imagine you are on a relaxing walk through Rochdale (however unlikely that may be) when you get ambushed by a rabid pensioner raving about Eastern Europeans flocking to britain. You deal with her as best you can, allay her fears of the great Eastern threat, shake her hand, kiss her grandchild, and get the hell out of Dodge wondering why you got into politics in the first place. Once you think you are in private, how would you describe said woman? Even if I were feeling charitable, I would have called her a lot more than 'bigoted.' That's not a value judgement, that's not even a disparaging comment. That is the dead on, ugly truth. In fact, there is no better description for that woman than what the Prime Minister called her. But he'll be scourged for it, and we'll all keep watching, up until the final agonizing moments where he is nailed to the cross. At this point, the only thing i can figure that keeps him going is his love of the pain.