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.