The Political Economy of the Restaurant
Political organizer and chef Lewis Bassett’s The Full English offers a firsthand account of how English food has been shaped by industrialization, empire, and class from the vantage point of restaurants across the country.
A socialist organizer turned chef looks at England’s restaurant industry in a new book. Along the way, he sheds light on the ecosystem upon which food production relies — from the private ownership of large swaths of land to the exploitation of workers. (Bert Hardy / Picture Post / Hulton Archive via Getty Images)
English food does not have a good reputation. In 1806, Grimod de La Reynière, a pioneering French food critic, wrote that “[England’s] cooking is limited to boiled chickens.” More than two hundred years later, stereotypes about the country’s food have hardly improved.
Looking at the staple icons of English cuisine today — fish and chips, the Sunday roast, the full English breakfast — one might agree with Grimod’s point. These dishes are brutish mounds of meat and carbs, the product of a culture that has often seemed more interested in excess than culinary refinement. They hardly suggest the level of technique and attention to simple, high-quality ingredients associated with French or Japanese food.
It’s not only the nation’s cuisine that’s in a sorry state. Ultraprocessed food accounts for more than half of the calories consumed in the UK each year, while obesity rates remain substantially higher than the European Union average. How did England come to eat this way? In his first book, The Full English: The Ways We Eat and Why, the chef and writer Lewis Bassett examines the country’s culinary traditions and eating habits in order to understand the peculiar history that produced them.
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