I was a panellist on this week’s episode of The Big Questions on BBC One, arguing for reason over faith and debating “fat taxes”.

It’s on iPlayer.

Freddy Cole of Tissimans, Bishop's Stortford. Photo: Paul Vicente

The building stands on a quiet street near the top of a hill. It is buckled and listing with age, and its handmade bricks, laid hundreds of years ago, are weathered and cracked. The timber frames sit impassively in the white plaster; the bay windows — added in the 19th century — jut out from the gloomy first floor.

Some parts of the building date as far back as 1132. It only just survived an earthquake in 1884. A newspaper report from the time describes how “employees rushed downstairs, thinking the workroom at the top of the old-fashioned house was falling outwards”. Opposite stands the medieval church in which Cecil Rhodes’s father preached.

The building features on almost every postcard of the town. It is believed to have been a tailor’s since 1601, making it possibly the oldest menswear business in Britain and, reputedly, one of the 30 oldest family businesses in the world. It once made the liveries for the staff of Windsor Castle and Sandringham. Dr Johnson’s servant bought a hat there in 1769; the sculptor Henry Moore bought his suits there in the 1970s.

Inside, muffled by the hanging jackets, uneven floors creak under thick rugs. It smells of leather and dust. A white changing cubicle with a single chair and an old wood-framed mirror has an almost Shakerish simplicity. Time has afforded the place a feeling of permanence, but last week Tissimans, in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, announced that it was to close.

“We’ve got one customer who has been shopping here since 1956,” says Richard Nash, one of the full-time staff. “It’s been a pleasure to work in a building like this; it’s just a lovely environment.”

“We’re very disappointed,” says the current director, a wispy 22-year-old named Freddy Cole. His father — a tailor and a tailor’s son — bought Tissimans a few years ago, having wanted to own it for the whole of his working life. He, and another tailor who has worked at Tissimans for 40 years, were too upset to speak.

Cole blames the collapse of the business squarely on the recession. But Bishop’s Stortford remains a wealthy place. Unemployment stands at about 4%, half the national rate. It’s an important commuter town, only 40 minutes from London by train, but almost everyone I speak to agrees that it is in decline.

“It’s just dead,” says Danny Collins, 27, who works in a butcher’s shop. “I’ve been here five years and the town has gone from up here [he holds his hand by the top of his head] to down here [he moves his hand to waist level].”

“In the last six or seven months we’ve lost all but one of the recognised family businesses that have been here for 100 years or more,” says Sarah Turner, curator of the Bishop’s Stortford Museum.

Haberdashers, furnishings shops and booksellers have all gone under. Pearsons, a department store, closed last year. In Florence Walk, a small arcade off the high street, several premises are vacant, victims of the town’s decline.

A McDonald's chicken salad. Photo: Graham Turner for the Guardian

A comment piece for the Guardian

McDonald’s has announced the creation of 2,500 new British jobs. Over the last five years, in fact, the company increased its UK workforce by 20,000 – a rise of over 20%. Many of these McJobbers will be workers on benefits or “Wobs”, of course, and they’ll still be miserably underpaid on seven or eight quid an hour while, last year, the company’s chief executive James Skinner took home almost $9m.

But whatever its reputation among those of us who care about working conditions, public health, the environment and the quality of the food we eat, McDonald’s is still doing extraordinarily well. Every day, 68 million people visit one of its restaurants. If you’d bought its stock in 2004, when Morgan Spurlock released Supersize Me and some people predicted the eventual death of the giant, you’d have tripled your money by now.

The McDonald’s PR campaign of the mid-noughties has undeniably been a success. But did the chain actually improve, or were its changes merely cosmetic? In the UK, at least, I would argue McDonald’s felt genuinely compelled to act on some of the concerns people had raised about it. It introduced more salads and fresh fruit to its menus, it began to use only free-range eggs and organic milk, it made its revolting coffeeRainforest Alliance and it began to recycle much more than it had before. People argued, with some reason, that the lettuce leaves were just fig leaves: that healthy-ish food in a burger joint was only a “vehicle to sell more burgers and fries”, as one anti-junk food campaigner put it to the New York Times

In part, she was probably right. But Jamie Oliver was right as well: it’s now possible to eat a relatively healthy meal in McDonald’s. (This is if you define “healthy” as merely “not high in fat and sugar”: a narrow definition, but the most important in the debate on obesity.) This is an undeniable improvement on the situation 10 years ago. Many people thought that putting calorie counts on menus would look stupid or nannying, but those numbers turned out to make it much easier for people to make better choices about the food they buy. Middle class as I am, I use them in Pret sometimes. Anyone could guess that a ham and cheese toastie is going to be more calorific than a tuna salad, but few would necessarily have realised the toastie has well over three times as many calories as the tuna.

While it’s clear that McDonald’s continues to make it easy to eat very badly for very little money, I’m not convinced it’s reasonable to blame it alone for the obesity crisis. Blind though it perhaps is of me, I still marvel that it can raise, kill and butcher a cow, make a bun and cheese with all those weird chemicals, lurid colours and sugar, van everything round the country or the planet, pay the rents on the restaurants, hand its staff their abysmal wages or million-dollar bonuses, market itself ferociously, and still sell a cheeseburger for 99p.

Continue read at the Guardian

Prospect's homepage

I have a piece in the current issue of Prospect discussing the sudden popularity of Korean food. It isn’t online, but you can pick it up at the newsagent’s or subscribe here.

A piece for the Sunday Times in which I asked friends of Michael Winner what he was like 

Friends of Michael Winner describe a man who enjoyed a reputation for being obstreperous but whose public image masked remarkable flashes of kindness and generosity. “His veneer was that of a barking rottweiler,” says Henry Wyndham, chairman of Sotheby’s, the auction house. “But he was a poodle on the inside.”

Many who knew him well describe an engaging contrast between the character and the man. “He played a version of himself,” says the director John Landis, who worked with Winner on films during the 1970s and later became friends with him. “His public persona was kind of a grand gesture: underneath it he was charming, funny and warm.”

Landis describes Winner working on the set of Chato’s Land in 1972: “He was outrageous, walking around with a big cigar and barking orders at people. There was a kid, maybe 20 years old, very upper class — he actually went on to become famous in politics — who always had to carry a chair behind Michael in case the director chose to sit down. It was like a sight gag.”

Friends who enjoyed Winner’s outrageous behaviour sometimes took vicarious pleasure in witnessing the results of his short temper. “Undoubtedly Michael’s bark was worse than his bite,” says Sir Roger Moore.

“But before any bark he would get a little red blush in his cheek. Michael Caine and I noticed this on the set of the film we made with him, Bullseye!. As we saw the cheeks reddening, we would say ‘Here it comes’ and watch from the sidelines as our beloved director gave what-for to someone on set.”

Continue reading at the Sunday Times (£)

Eating sous vide rack of lamb. Photo: Charlie Bibby for the FT

A feature for the Financial Times on sous vide cookery and Modernist Cuisine

In front of me is perhaps the most impractical cookbook I’ve ever used. Modernist Cuisine at Home is a vast, expensively photographed, thuddingly self-important tome, with an RRP of £100. It’s the smaller, domestic version of an even more ambitious, six-volume work called Modernist Cuisine, which has 2,438 pages, weighs 20kg and costs just under £400. Conceived by Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft executive who left the company at 40 to devote himself to gastronomy, the retiring headings of Modernist Cuisine at Home include “The 10 Principles of Modernist Cuisine”, which include the dictum: “Cuisine is a creative art in which the chef and diner are in dialogue.”

Comparing the creations of Heston Blumenthal to those of Joyce, Picasso and Le Corbusier, Myhrvold celebrates chefs who are “always at the forefront, pushing the boundaries of food and cooking”. Many of the book’s dishes – Thai soup, braised short ribs, mussels marinière, pizza margherita – sound familiar. But its ingredients, which include xantham gum, soy lecithin, malic acid, diastatic malt powder, N-Zorbit and Insta Cure #1, are not. They read almost as a reaction against the producer-led, rustic cookery that has characterised home cooking on both sides of the Atlantic for the last 20 years.

Central to this alleged movement is sous vide or “under vacuum” – a cooking technique where you seal food in a vacuum pouch, then put it in a water bath so it cooks at a constant temperature – sometimes for hours or days at a time. Typically, when you sear a steak, the outside of the meat will be well done, and the middle will be about right. In theory, a sous vide steak should always be cooked perfectly because it has been heated to the ideal temperature throughout. Nor should it overcook, unless that temperature is raised. When it’s time to eat, the bag is snipped open and the meat briefly seared in a pan to take on some colour.

Sous vide emerged in fancy French kitchens in the 1970s, and gradually caught on elsewhere. Ferran Adrià made extensive early use of sous vide during the 1990s at El Bulli, and he and other “molecular” chefs such as Blumenthal have helped spread it to more ordinary professional kitchens. It’s now in a number of British gastropubs.

Continue reading at the FT

'The typical British household could save £50 a month by minimising its food waste'

A comment piece for the Guardian

The figures are stark: up to 2bn tonnes of perfectly good food is wasted every year – between 30% and 50% of all the food produced around the world. In Britain alone we waste a quarter of all the food we buy. This includes 1.6bn apples – 25 each – and 2.6bn slices of bread. If you could somehow get all the food we waste in the UK into the bellies of the world’s malnourished people, two-thirds of them would no longer go hungry.

Much of this waste is cultural. Your average Briton wastes 112kg of food a year: Germans, who are much more frugal about food than we are, fritter only 15kg. (Americans are even worse than us.) And that shows we could change some of this. Wasting food isn’t merely bad for its own sake: as Tristram Stuart shows in his powerful book, Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, it damages the environment, uses up dwindling resources, and contributes to the rising cost of food in the developing world. The more food you buy that you don’t need to eat, the hungrier goes the global south. The Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) calculates that the typical British household could save £50 a month by minimising its food waste.

There are several easy steps many of us can take to reduce our own waste of food. One of the most important is to treat use-by dates with scepticism. Supermarkets are quite reasonably terrified of poisoning their customers – Stuart shows how they calculate those dates for people who leave their shopping in hot cars for hours on end, put it in poorly working fridges, and so on. Evolution has given you clear and powerful senses that can help to determine if meat or produce has gone bad. Bear use-by dates in mind, of course, but you know from the smell of the milk if you shouldn’t be drinking it.

Continue reading at the Guardian

Louis Cole eating a goldfish

A feature for the Guardian

You may remember Louis Cole, the man who eats strange things. He became a YouTube celebrity by munching live scorpions, maggotty turkey legs, giant ragworms and the like. In April this year, he uploadeda video of himself eating a live goldfish (YouTube has since removed the video but, inevitably, it’s available elsewhere): he lifted the creature out of its bowl, held it up briefly then bit down on its head, chewing up the animal and swallowing it. Tasteless and crass the act may have been, but the creature was dead in a few seconds. If it suffered, it didn’t suffer for long.

At the end of April, Cole received a hand-delivered letter from the RSPCA telling him that he might have broken laws relating to animal cruelty, and threatening that the police would come to arrest him if he didn’t reply. Fish, like all animals with a backbone, are covered by legislation in a way that scorpions and tarantulas are not. Faced with an official-looking document and the risk of arrest, Cole got himself a lawyer. He was told he faced a £20,000 fine and up to six months in prison. For eating a goldfish.

Whatever you think of Cole’s brand of shock eating, the RSPCA’s approach towards him over the course of this year looks heavy-handed. “I felt from the start they wanted to pin me up and make an example of me,” he says. He was initially interviewed at a police station. On one occasion, “I was told I needed to see them within a couple of hours or a warrant would be issued for my arrest. They drove to meet me and I sat in their van answering questions. I didn’t have my lawyer with me and he felt this behaviour was underhand.” The RSPCA confirms these events, though it says he was free to leave at any time.

Cole chose to fight the accusations because he worried “if I’d admitted any guilt it might be taken into court, and I might end up with a hefty fine or a prison sentence”. Throughout, he claims, “I was under the impression that they had some level of power, that they could enforce certain things.” In fact, the RSPCA is merely a well-funded charity that, among other actions, brings private prosecutions against individuals. It has no special powers whatsoever, although it sometimes looks as if it might. Its inspectors wear uniforms that look very similar to those of the police, and turn up unannounced at people’s properties asking to inspect, for example, animals’ living conditions. (You have every right to refuse and shut the door if this happens.) Its number ends in 999.

Continue reading at the Guardian

'Christmas husbandlie fare' indeed

A comment piece for the Guardian

Prepare to unbuckle your belt. On Christmas Day, the average Briton will consume 6,000 calories, the equivalent of almost 5kg of egg fried rice, or 24 baked potatoes. A Christmas dinner main course is only 1,000 calories, but all the extras, puddings and booze tip the scale.

And a good thing too. Though the modern Christmas dinner is a fairly recent composition, feasting at the midwinter solstice is probably as old as civilisation in these islands. And from the Normans to the Tudors, the elements of Christmas dinner barely changed. If you were rich you ate lots of meat, especially peacock and boar. If you were poor you put some scraps of meat into your porridge, perhaps killed and ate a chicken, or used a bit of expensive, treat-day spice.

Frumenty was a sloppy medieval puddle of minced mutton, onions, currants, wines and spices. The food writer Florence White called it “England’s oldest national dish”, and it’s the forerunner of Christmas pudding. Some time around 1550 emerged its cousin, the Twelfth Night cake, one of the earliest spiced cakes. Whoever cooked it baked a single hard bean within it, and the person who received this became King or Queen of the Bean: it was their job to direct the evening’s festivities.

Turkeys reached Britain in the 16th century, and quickly became “Christmas husbandlie fare”, as writer and farmer, Thomas Tusser put it in 1573. Henry VIII is popularly believed to have been the first monarch to eat a Christmas turkey. The Puritans disapproved of the Christmas feast, but by the 18th century people had started to celebrate it again. On Christmas Day 1716, the Prince Regent (later George II) sat down to plum broth with capon, partridges, beef, pork, turkey, woodcock, stag’s tongue, plum pudding, snipe, pheasant, andouilles, brawn and mince pies containing meat.

Pies, in fact, were a vital Christmas food for a long time. It was traditional to bake a rich and long-lasting meat pie to send to your relatives:Hannah Glasse’s Yorkshire Christmas pie of 1747 saw pigeon, partridge, chicken, goose and turkey baked into a solid crust.

But the Victorians, especially Charles Dickens, cemented Christmas dinner in the modern form. The closing pages of A Christmas Carol, with their child-sized turkey and flaming pudding “like a speckled cannon-ball”, display not only a fuzzy Victorian sentimentality but a belief in the virtue of feasting as an expression of love. Dinner at Fred’s: “Wonderful party, wonderful games, wonderful unanimity, won-der-ful happiness!”

Continue reading at the Guardian

Game birds at O'Shea's butcher in Knightsbridge. Photograph: Michael Franke

I went on a pheasant shoot for The Independent

The British have rediscovered game. Marks and Spencer increased its sales of venison by 340 per cent between 2010 and 2011, while last year wood pigeon sales rose by almost 40 per cent in Waitrose. The UK Game Company says overall game sales were up 30 per cent last year. And this year, for the first time, M&S has started stocking pheasant, rabbit and partridge.

I pitched a story on lard to the Food Programme on Radio 4, and they agreed to run it. I crop up quite a bit on the recording, making lard in my kitchen with Tim Hayward and interviewing Jeremy Lee of Quo Vadis restaurant in Soho.

Click here to listen.

Blue Stilton cheese from Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, has a protected geographical status. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

A piece for Comment is Free

It’s a happy day for some sausage makers: Newmarket sausages are the latest food to be awarded Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) status by the EU. The sausages now link happily with Arbroath smokies, Cornish pasties, Gloucestershire cider, “Scotch” beef and lamb, Welshbeef and lamb, Whitstable oysters and others. Italy has well over 200 PGIs (and PDOs – Protected Designation of Origin – a similar system of recognition), France around 200, Spain well over 150. Newmarket sausages becomes the UK’s 50th food product to earn European recognition for their quality, history and links with the local area.

I spoke to a tired but delighted Chris Sheen, MD of Musks Newmarket Sausage. “I made my first application 10 years ago,” he says. “It went backwards and forwards as they decided on a geographical area. Defra helped us with the application, then the EU sat on it for a year. By the end, we were on 18 versions of the application – there was a lot of mental aggravation when they kept coming back and asking for more changes, but it was all worthwhile.”

Good luck to Sheen: I hope he sells more sausages as a result of this. But the issue raises a number of questions. Promoting local foods is a sound idea in principle. If you live in Suffolk, it’s nice to help the local economy by buying its sausages. And if those sausages are any good – although I don’t remember having tried them, I’ve every reason to believe they are – then it’s worthwhile to bring them to wider attention.

But it’s not hard to foresee potential problems. After their efforts, producers of Newmarket sausages are now given a shiny badge with which to emblazon their packets. But earlier this year the EU rejected an application by Lincolnshire sausages for PGI on the grounds that there were already “too many variations” of the product in the UK. That was the only reason – too much replication. It was outside the remit to consider the taste of the food, or whether Newmarket sausages deserve to be given a commercial advantage over those from Lincolnshire, even though that’s the effect of this.

Continue reading at the Guardian

Night-time in the bar at the Duck & Waffle, one of the UK's first high-end restaurants to stay open 24 hours a day

A feature for G2

At 11.30pm, the elevator for Duck & Waffle in the City of London has the hot, beery stench of an underventilated nightclub. I already feel jetlagged from heading out for dinner so late, and when it whooshes me up the Heron Tower’s 40 floors in under 30 seconds it gives me an extra headrush. It is a bit like being drunk, which seems rather appropriate for late-night eating.

In New York, Paris and many east Asian cities, 24-hour restaurants have become part of the eating habits of the population. Not in Britain, which is strange when licensing laws theoretically permit round-the-clock opening and many people work shifts through the night. “It may be because of our historically rigid licensing laws,” says Jonathan Downey, a bar and restaurant owner who has held two 24-hour licences. “At Milk & Honey our kitchen is open until 2am and we probably sell five plates of food during the last hour.”

Which is probably why many late-night British restaurants are aimed at drunk people. Buddies in Brighton has featured on Channel 5′s sociological study Brighton Beach Patrol, and with its fry-ups with lager, pizza and burgers, caters to a distinctly vomity clientele.

London’s oldest all-night restaurant, and the only one with a 24-hour booze licence, is Vingt-Quatre on the Fulham Road. “We have security,” says its managing director Simon Prideaux, “who make the call on whether someone has drunk too much.” At 11pm, VQ’s menu contracts to a few soaky classics: omelette, bangers and mash, a full English. The place has lasted since 1995 by harnessing one of the great truths of eating out: the squiffy don’t crave culinary invention.

“To eat at four o’clock in the morning,” says Jay Rayner, the Observer’s restaurant critic, “things are either going to be really bad or so good that it doesn’t matter where you are. You have to wonder how much value is being placed on the quality of the food.”

Continue reading at the Guardian

This is a guest post, supported by M&S

The Christmas holiday is just around the corner, and that means it’s time to start preparing for the festivities. This includes a number of different things, from buying gifts, to setting up decorations, and implementing any other holiday traditions you and your family may have. Among these preparations, another aspect of the holiday season that you need to be thinking about is perhaps one of the most enjoyable: food and drink. Over the holidays, people tend to relax a bit with regard to diet, and take the opportunity to enjoy some special foods, drinks and treats. And in order to make this aspect of the holiday season truly special for you and the people around you, it is worth taking some time to consider holiday foods in advance. Here are a few suggestions to help get you thinking.

Christmas Hampers

If you have never looked into purchasing M&S Christmas Hampers before, this year might be a great time to start. Not only can these hampers make tremendous gifts, they can also be fantastic simply to have around your home during the holidays. Different hampers come with different contents, ranging from various foods and drinks, to treats, and even recipes and ingredients. A food or treat option like this is very convenient and unique for your home during the Christmas season, and allows everyone to enjoy some fun foods that aren’t always around.

Fine Wines

It can also be nice to have at least a small selection of nice drinks around for late evenings spent with family and friends, or holiday dinners. Some people prefer unique Christmas cocktails, and there are certainly plenty of these to go around. But, particularly for large holiday meals, it can also be very nice to have a selection of nice wines around. If you are used to buying relatively inexpensive wine to have around the house, even a few slightly more expensive wines might provide you with new, festive tastes and quality. This is a great, affordable luxury for the holidays.

Christmas Treats

Finally, there’s the most important aspect of holiday food to consider: Christmas treats. Often depending on family tradition, different people cherish different treats during the holidays. But, whether it’s homemade gingerbread cookies, a special eggnog recipe, or a selection of candies or pastries, Christmas treats do a lot to bring together the atmosphere of the holiday season. Be sure to have your recipes prepared, and your store bought treats ordered in advance, so that you can be sure you aren’t without these crucial elements come Christmas!

Post-Party Food

As any party animal knows, the breakfast after a big night is essential to ensure the next
day isn’t a complete write-off. If your big night out has drained your cash reserves, having
an easy and inventive breakfast recipe to hand will help you avoid the hangover without
forking out and, as an added bonus, without having to leave the house. With the great range of products waiting to be found at Sacla.co.uk, you’ll be all set to create your own cheap and cheerful alternative to a café fry-up, with a touch of Italian class to set you up in style for the day ahead.

Inspiration for an Effortless Morning Meal

Shakshuka, the delicious Middle Eastern dish of eggs, tomato and spices, is the perfect
antidote to morning after blues and the inevitable sore head. It’s simple to prepare, uses
ingredients that you’re likely to have lying around in your cupboard and fridge, and can easily be adapted or expanded to cater to your equally party-worn friends.

To begin, sauté onions and peppers in oil, before adding a heady medley of coriander,
thyme, parsley and bay leaves. When the smell has got your mouth watering, throw in the
chopped tomatoes and season with salt and pepper.

If you’re feeling up to an extra spicy kick, you might want to sprinkle in some cayenne
pepper at this point in the process. Simmer for around 15 minutes, adding water at regular
intervals to maintain the consistency of pasta sauce. Then make two wells in the mixture
by separating it with a spoon, and break two eggs into the spaces. Cook gently for 10 more minutes, if you can wait that long!

Finally, to give your breakfast a twist of rich flavour unique to Italian recipes, top the whole
thing off with a scrumptious squirt of basil pesto from the new Sacla’ squeezy bottle. Serve
immediately with a generous wedge of thick, crusty white bread. Try it for yourself and let
cultures collide and the taste sensation begin.

Beyond Breakfast

Sacla’ products form a delicious accompaniment to meals at any time of day or night. You
can serve the shakshuka on top of Sacla’ Fresh Trofie pasta for a big warming dinner perfect for fending off the winter chill. Add a dash of Organic Basil Pesto to a steaming jacket potato stuffed with creamy mozzarella for a quick yet satisfying lunch.

For a mid-afternoon snack with bite, just tip a jar of Fiery Chilli pesto into a dipping bowl and enjoy with tortilla chips. To keep up-to-date with ingenious recipe suggestions, follow Sacla’ on Twitter where you’ll also find the latest on competitions and supermarket deals to perk up your next grocery shop.

This is a sponsored advertorial provided by Sacla UK.

The expensive equipment in a quarter-of-a-million quid kitchen wouldn't be wasted on Heston Blumenthal. Photograph: Matt Lloyd/Rex Features

A feature for Comment is Free

There is much to make the gorge rise and the tears well in the “£250,000 kitchen”, a new masterclass in mega-crass designed by Electrolux and promoted by the grumpy firebrand chef Tom Aikens. (Literally a firebrand: he allegedly once held a burning-hot palette knife against the bare skin of an underling.) Consider the insanity of dropping two grand on a food mixer, when many three-Michelin-starred restaurants make do with ones costing half that. Note the jelly-brained insanity of the £6,200 vacuum packer. Behold the embarrassing machismo of it all, the nerdy obsession with kit, the dials, bleeps and touchscreens, the sweaty fingerprints on the chrome.

Heston Blumenthal has a lot to answer for. Perhaps, had he never gone in search of perfection, nobody would have designed a domestic oven whose temperature can be controlled to the nearest 10th of a degree. The daftness inherent in this is obvious. Room temperatures and ingredients vary far more than the temperature of an oven. So if you’re making, say, a soufflé, your main variables are the size of your eggs and the temperature of the room or fridge you’ve kept them in. A few grams’ or a couple of degrees’ difference and your own search for perfection is thwarted.

In any case, Blumenthal is sort of a genius, and equipment like this wouldn’t be wasted on him. I may be wrong, but I reckon the kind of person who can spend on their kitchen what other people spend on their house is unlikely to do much cooking themselves. I’d imagine that the majority of people who buy this stuff will have a private chef who’d be able to produce good food from far more ordinary kit. And this reinforces one of the truisms of many high-end things: they’re wasted on the people who can afford them.

Continue reading at the Guardian

'The Peruvians famously eat cuy, or guinea pig, and have developed a fascinating festival in which they dress the creatures in little costumes before roasting and eating them.' Photograph: Martin Mejia/AP

A justified public outcry arose yesterday at news that some traders in east London’s Ridley Road market have been selling illegally imported meats, including Ghanaian cane rat. The bushmeat trade is a destructive and criminal operation, a potential threat to public health, to the environment and even to the security of certain species.

It was almost certainly west African hunters butchering chimpanzees for food that led to the relatively tame simian immunodeficiency virus jumping species and mutating into its monstrous, pandemic cousin, HIV/Aids. The Bushmeat Crisis Task Force has documented the environmental damage wreaked by some bushmeat hunting methods, such as people starting forest fires to smoke their quarry out. Many of the African animals commonly used for bushmeat, including gorillas and elephants, are endangered.

But much of the disgusted reaction to this news overlooks an important point. One tabloid headline capitalised “rat” as though the Ridley Road stallholders had been selling Cockney rodents hauled from the sewers. In fact, cane rat looks rather more like a cat-sized, short-haired guinea pig. Its meat is said to be lean, “succulent and sweet” , and low in cholesterol. In Ghana, Cameroon and Nigeria, where it’s more appealingly called grasscutter, people actually farm it.

Continue reading at the Guardian

Rice paddies in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China. Photograph: Xinhua Press/Yu Xiangquan/Corbis

Every autumn, the Chiangjing river in Hubei, eastern China, begins to drop and the nearby lakes become thick bogs covered in webs of detritus. Men come in little boats, perhaps 100 a day, paddling their way across the sinking river in the dim, blue-grey light before sunrise. They’re looking for lotus root, the starchy staple that is a highlight of much Asian cooking, and gives a sweetish solidity to a winter soup.

I’d never given a thought to where lotus root comes from. Getting hold of it turns out to be fantastically difficult, dirty and dangerous. The roots, perhaps a metre or two long, lie deep in the thick, gluey mud of the lake bed. They’re fragile, and snap or scratch easily, and there’s no machinery to get them out. You wade out into the bog, the mud coming up to your knees, and find a root, work out which direction it’s lying in, then dig it out slowly and carefully by hand. At the end of another 14-hour day, the workers compare their aches, torn muscles, sprained ankles and twisted ligaments like soldiers or a rugby team. They hope for particularly nasty winters, which mean that more people make lotus-root soup, and the price of their product rises.

This is just one segment of the best TV show I’ve ever seen about food. I’d hazard it’s the best one ever made. A Bite of China began airing in May on the state broadcaster there. CCTV is better known for its obliging communist propaganda and unwatchable soap operas than for anything this sumptuous and beautiful. Thirty of the country’s most respected filmmakers worked for more than a year filming the seven 50-minute episodes. They shot throughout the country, from the frozen lakes of the north-east and the bamboo forests of Liuzhou to the frenetic chaoses of Beijing and Hong Kong.

Continue reading at the Guardian

In February this year the Advertising Standards Authority ruled that TripAdvisor can no longer claim its reviews could be 'trusted'. Photograph: Sunset/Rex Features

What store do you set by anonymous online reviews? Research from an American university would suggest quite a lot: it recently revealed the terrifying importance customers attach to a restaurant’s status on Yelp. A mere half-star difference in ratings resulted in a considerable jump or plummet in business (interesting given the site rounds a 3.74 down to three and a half stars, and awards four stars to a 3.75).

All the more incentive, you might say, for restaurateurs to try harder. Except that by their nature, the anonymity of online reviews means these sites are ridden with problems. London Eating now suffers for its former success. Seen as influential, it’s so awash with shills, PRs and those with other vested interests that, apart from its page of new restaurant openings, I stopped using it years ago. Harden’s and Zagat are somewhat better: they benefit from editors who scrutinise individual contributors. The Good Food Guide, the latest edition of which came out this week, uses professional – at any rate, paid – critics and is fairly reliable.

Little wonder, then, that many restaurants – such as Hawksmoor – email customers directly to ask them how their meal went, or that two companies have signed a partnership to help restaurants monitor feedback more closely. The system lets the restaurants know what the customers ate, where they were sitting and who served them – this is presumably more useful and easier to correct than “FoieGrasLover452″ having a public tantrum about not being greeted with sufficient deference.

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Negroni cocktails: Campari, sweet vermouth and gin. Photograph: Brian Leatart/Getty Images

Aperol seems everywhere all of a sudden, and its cousin Campari is also enjoying a new popularity. Frank’s Campari Bar opened in 2009: a seasonal, cash-only cafe on the roof of a car park in Peckham, south London. Its food isn’t great, and it caters mainly for hipsters with dubious facial hair, but it sold / sells cheap Campari cocktails with a nice view.

The first Polpo restaurant now has a Campari bar downstairs, and the Aperol bar at its Covent Garden outpost launched a couple of weeks ago. I went home to Edinburgh last weekend, and discovered George Street (one of the main shopping drags) to be currently given over to a vast tent heftily promoting Aperol spritzes at around four quid a pop. These red Italian drinks are enjoying a new moment of fame.

None of this remotely matters, of course, but I’m still intrigued as to why they should suddenly have become so popular. It may be simply that they’ve been rediscovered by another generation – they went out of fashion, and like many things they came back – although I expect the marketing departments of Gruppo Campari, which owns both the drinks, may have something to do with it.

Whatever: they’re both delicious. Two brothers named Barberi launched Aperol in 1919. The bitter concoction, which is flavoured with rhubarb, sour orange, gentian and something called cinchona, was originally targeted at “active men”, although since the 1930s it’s been seen as something of a girly drink. Aperol is only 11% ABV to Campari’s 25%: many Italians, particularly in the north, rather rigidly segregate the drinks between sexes. The Aperol spritz emerged in the 1950s: a slug of Aperol, a slosh of prosecco and a top-up of soda water. The “cocktail” is only 8%, and a perfect way to begin an evening if you don’t want to get plastered.

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