Tag Archives: features

How we fork out millions for MPs’ food and drink

Posted on by
2

A feature for G2

It is just after prime minister’s questions, and it’s all rather lively in the Strangers’ Dining Room in the House of Commons. Sir Peter Tapsell, father of the house, is at a corner table, burbling contentedly. Tory and Labour MPs are rigidly segregated. A doddery staff member with Charles Darwin’s beard spoons out crumble and custard. Down the corridor in the empty bar they are serving “Top Totty Blonde Beer”, with its bunny-eared model. By the following day this will be withdrawn, after a complaint from the shadow equalities minister, Kate Green.

I am here as a guest of MP Kerry McCarthy, having read recently of theappalling hardships our Honourable Members endure in their dining rooms and refectories. “Literally uneatable” was Tory MP Laurence Robertson’s verdict on the food served in the Commons last year. Another member bewailed their “bucket” of chips, adding that while such presentation is “no doubt trendy”, it makes the chips “soggy”. (“The tower arrangement is better,” this gourmet claimed.) Packets of crisps from Commons vending machines are 10g too light. The beetroot is “tasteless”, the eggs are “watery” and the salads are “cold”. In all, despairs one MP from the wood-panelled dining room with its sweeping views of the Thames, eating in the mother of parliaments is “a dismal experience”.

There are, remarkably, 28 different food outlets in the Westminster complex. The grandest and most traditional are the adjacent Members’ and Strangers’ Dining Rooms. These share a menu, the former’s being heavily subsidised. Only MPs and officers of the Commons are allowed in the Members’, the Tea Room and various other places. “I don’t like the food and can’t eat most of it,” says McCarthy, who is a vegan. “I think it’s generally pretty OK – though some of the combinations are a bit bizarre.” Starters at the Strangers’ include rabbit and apricot terrine or roast partridge breast, both £6.75. I have chicken with cabbage and black pudding potato cake: tepid but tasty and, at £13.55, cheap compared with many central London restaurants.

Continue reading at the Guardian

Secrets of the menu

Posted on by
Reply

A piece for The Guardian on how restaurateurs design menus so that people pay more

Restaurateurs and those who advise them have long argued that people read menus in predictable ways. The received wisdom holds that a diner will start on the right-hand side of a menu, a little way above the middle, before zooming up to the top right-hand corner. Then he’ll jump backwards to the top left and down the left-hand page, then finally fill in the gaps in the bottom-right and the middle.

Not so, apparently. New research from San Francisco State universityclaims to overturn this notion. Once they had hooked people’s heads up to computers, presented them with menus and studied their eye movements, the researchers found that participants read menus sequentially from left to right, like books. (In part, this confirms Gallup research (pdf) from 1987.)

The findings could have important implications for menu design and the way we order in restaurants. Restaurateurs might need to rethink placing their showcase items at the top-right of their menu or just below it. The menu from Keith McNally’s majestic New York brasserieBalthazar, deconstructed in this paper a couple of years ago, proudly places “Le Bar à Huîtres” at the top-right of the page, with its high-margin plateaux de fruits de mer at $70 and $115 and half a lobster at $23. (It also sticks a prawn cocktail there for $15: this might look expensive in isolation but seems almost cheap beside such expensive dishes.)

Continue reading at The Guardian

Gourmet crisps – a half-baked idea?

Posted on by
Reply

Kettle Chips: the only acceptable fancy crisp

Something for The Guardian on supposedly ‘posh’ crisps

Following their horribly named “Do us a flavour” marketing campaign of a couple of years ago, Walkers have just announced a new gimmick - what’s that flavour? - introducing three “mystery” crisp flavours for the public to identify. I’ve just tried them. Packet A tastes of salt and stale milk, and a glance at the ingredients reveals it contains “mystery dairy seasoning”. Packet B smells of concentrated tomato syrup and tastes of dried blood (that’ll be the suitable-for-vegetarians “mystery meaty seasoning”); while packet C is vaguely curried and yoghurty and may turn out to be chicken tikka masala (it has pictures of chicken breast, chillies and coriander on the packet “for inspiration”).

I pine – don’t you? – for a time when crisps were just crisps. Why this need to take nice shards of fried potato and dust them in weird chemicals that never resemble what they’re supposed to? Walkers have decked their latest packets in pictures of fresh sage, chives, ripe tomatoes, crumbly parmesan and – good God – yellow peppers. This is presumably supposed to make the crisps look more upmarket, but it just seems grasping and odd.

“Posh crisps are the biggest scam of our time,” said Jay Rayner a while back. Four quid is too much for a small sachet of fried potatoes, even if the spuds have been “fried in extra virgin olive oil” (a stupid idea) or “dusted with pink Himalayan rock salt” (posh salt being an even worse scam than posh crisps). India Knight is another journalist who can’t abide expensive chips. They’re “annoyingly crispy,” she says, “so there’s no meltiness at any point, only these spiky shards – and to me they taste overwhelmingly of stale oil … Crisps are fried potatoes. They are not a thing that needs to be faffed about with.”

Continue reading at The Guardian

Is Red Tractor pork really ‘high welfare’?

Posted on by
1

Pigs at West End Farm, Wiltshire. Photo: Oliver Thring

A piece for the Guardian on the welfare of British pigs

Red Tractor pork is high welfare pork – or so the adverts say. The UK’s pig industry is in the midst of a £2m marketing campaign encouraging people to consider the welfare of British pigs. Around 80% of British pork farms unite under the Red Tractor scheme, which has specific welfare standards. These turn out to be more or less the legal minimums, but at least guarantee that the pork is British.

Supermarkets, which sell most of the pork in this country, care about profits first and are thus happy to sell lower welfare Spanish, Danish or Polish pork to British consumers who often want the cheapest product. This is helping to put many UK pork farmers out of business. The total UK pig herd shrank by 40% in the last decade, while UK pig farmers lost over £100m last year owing to the rising costs of pig feed and because higher welfare standards than many EU countries mean our pork is more expensive to produce.

It’s broadly true that British pigs enjoy better living conditions than most of their European counterparts; the British pig industry claims that most of the pork we import from the EU could not be produced legally in this country. In 1999 sow stalls became illegal in the UK, as they are in Sweden: they remain commonplace in much of the continent and some US states. These monstrous cages, which maximise the number of pigs which can be housed in a space, restrict a sow’s movement during almost all of her four-month pregnancy to an area little bigger than her own body. (Sows have litters every four months or so, usually with just a few days between pregnancies.) Unable to turn around or even lie down comfortably, she is utterly unable to engage in the natural activities of a pig: rootling, exploring, or building a nest for her piglets.

Sow stalls are to be phased out across the EU by 2013, though farmers will still be permitted to use them during the first four weeks of a sow’s pregnancy. British pork farmers echo concerns about enforcement of the EU ban on caged hens which came in to force on 1 January, worrying privately that many European farmers will simply ignore the legislation. As one said to me: “We know jolly well they’re not going to implement it.”

Continue reading at the Guardian

Better than your usual table, sir?

Posted on by
Reply

Bar stools. Tottery high chairs. Photo: Juice Images/Alamy

A brief piece for the Guardian on a clever new website that lets you book specific seats in restaurants

There’s a new website called Table Guru which I rather like. I appreciate that its target market probably careens towards the geek end of the restaurant spectrum (guilty), but the idea behind it should suit almost anyone who likes to eat out. In the way that many theatres show you the auditorium seating plan when you book your seat, this site maps restaurant interiors, displaying the spacing and placing of covers, so you can ask for a decent table when you ring up to book. Users can upload their own photos and reviews, and share opinions on the best spots in a given room. It’s only available for 55 Michelin-starred restaurants in London at the moment, but the site is expanding rapidly.

Many people probably don’t care where they sit in a restaurant. I do. It may be a first world problem of almost parodic stature, but I believe that the placing of a table, its proximity to other diners, to the kitchen, corridors, the bogs – has a palpable impact on the enjoyment of a meal. You might be eating the most exquisite food in the world, but if a waiter’s buttocks are brushing the back of your head every 30 seconds, or a wintry gust extinguishes your tea light every time the door opens, it could just as well be ashes and alum on your tongue.

The problem is partly in legs. Ours and tables’. They get in the way. Fay Maschler has never recognised the appeal of eating on tottery chairs so high your feet can’t touch the ground, and nor have I. A friend and I share a hatred of wine bars or tapas-style places that put chairs round wine barrels so you can’t fit your legs underneath. Bar counters are frightfully modish, and normally I don’t mind them, but these too can be ruined when your knees are rubbing against those of the person next to you, unless you fancy them.

Some restaurants simply have no good tables – McDonald’s, Ducksoup– and in those one can normally muddle along quite happily. A few restaurants have no bad ones; I think AA Gill once said that was the genius of the Ivy. But most places have a mixture of good and bad spaces, and it’s one of the most irritating mistakes a manager or waiter can make to plonk you in the latter when a restaurant is half-empty.

Continue reading at the Guardian

The gay diet

Posted on by
Reply

Sushi: gay?

A piece for the Guardian on the alleged gayness of certain foods. This piece went semi-viral.

Simon Doonan has just written a book called Gay Men Don’t Get Fat. Doonan is less famous here than he is in the States: he’s a Reading-born, highly successful window dresser for Barneys, a style columnist for the New York Post and elsewhere, and is married to the designer Jonathan Adler. His title alludes, of course, to the mid-noughties bestseller French Women Don’t Get Fat, which did more to raise awareness of the French paradox among the general public than any book before it. Doonan’s text is more of an arch and witty discourse on aspects of gay and straight life, written in a gossipy, frivolous and ultimately rather lovable style.

“Straight foods are basic and uncontrived,” he writes. “Gay foods are fiddly and foofy … Sushi may well be the gayest food on earth. The design of the average ikura gunkan maki or hirame nigiri is, if you look at it objectively, really quite extraordinary. Sushi chefs are basically taking sloppy bits of fish and magically reworking them into exquisite bonbons. How gay, right? … While sushi is swishy, Mexican food is unbelievably macho. As delicious as a burrito is, it is basically just a cross between a turd and a penis.”

The stereotyping is well written and pretty funny, if a touch crass. But like all stereotypes, it may contain some truth. Reading that section, I was reminded of the moment Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno character meets pastor Quinn from Little Rock, Arkansas, who counts praying away the gay among his compassionate duties. Bruno asks whether, once cured, he’ll still be able to have brunch or “eat very, very chocolatey stuff all the time”. Quinn bewilderingly tells him that such excess must be forbidden “if in fact you are doing it because that’s part of a homosexual lifestyle”.

Continue reading at the Guardian

 

Olive oil fraud: pressing truths

Posted on by
Reply

Olive oil. Photo: Joop Greypink / Getty

A piece for the Guardian on the extensive fraud in the Italian olive oil industry

The Italian fraud squad recently announced it was investigating allegations that the country’s largest olive oil producers have adulterated Italian oil with cheaper imports from Spain, Greece, Morocco and Tunisia. Nothing new here: fraud in the Italian olive oil industry is very old indeed. Amphorae used to store olive oil in ancient Rome display several anti-fraud measures, including clear labelling and a primitive form of “traceability”. In the original Godfather novel, Mario Puzo modelled Vito Corleone on a real-life olive oil mafioso named Joe Profaci. Just this month, an American writer living in Liguria named Tom Mueller published a book about fraud in the Italian olive oil industry. The text develops an interesting article on the subject he wrote for the New Yorker in 2007.

Mueller found that fraud was extensive, particularly adulteration and false labelling. The world’s largest former dealer in olive oil, one Domenico Ribatti, plea-bargained his way to 13 months in prison during the 1990s for passing off Turkish hazelnut oil, which he had refined in his own plant, as olive oil. Another prominent importer, Leonardo Marseglia – appropriately based in a town called Monopoli – has variously been accused of selling cheap non-European oils as Italian ones, fudging documents to shirk import tariffs and forming a criminal network to smuggle contraband. Marseglia has denied the charges.

A 2007 EU investigation found that 95% of all known misappropriations of EU agricultural subsidies occurred in Italy, which tells you something of the culture in which Italian olive oil fraud was taking place. George Bennell is the managing director of Belazu, which markets a delicious unfiltered olive oil from a small producer northern Spain, among other goods. (Declaration of interest: the company once paid for me to visit the groves.) “I don’t know for sure that Spanish olive oil fraud is less common than Italian,” he says. “But the fact is, the Spanish produce twice as much olive oil as the Italians, and the Italians consume and export more olive oil than they can produce, so they have to import it.”

Continue reading at the Guardian

The best hangover cures

Posted on by
Reply

Perhaps the finest 'cure' of all

A piece for the Guardian on hangover cures

Kingsley Amis, that imperishable drink – rather than drinks – writer, pointed out that a hangover takes two forms. These are the physical and metaphysical (PH and MH). Food taken on a hangover must address both, though the MH (“that ineffable compound of depression … anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future”) is harder to tackle.

Alcohol lowers your blood sugar and makes you particularly hungry. That’s why hungover people crave fat, sugar and carbs (those two are related, of course): they’re the most efficient ways to take on calories. I often find the PH can be palliated with a lunchtime bowl of carbohydrates, particularly pasta, which helps to effect a restorative nap at around 3pm. Healthy, “minerally” foods are most useful for the MH, as is anything with a level of umami. A few food critics, writers and other industry insiders told me their favourite hangover cures: their selection follows.

Continue reading at The Guardian

 

Philadelphia pepper pot: the soup that won the American Revolution?

Posted on by
Reply

George Washington ... clearly hankering for some Philly pepper pot

A piece for the Guardian’s US site (www.guardiannews.com) on a tripe soup that supposedly won the revolutionary war

On 29 December 1777, so the story goes, George Washington had spent 10 days at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, camped with his army and assorted women and children. The winter had been unremittingly bleak. Up to a third of his forces were bootless – some had left bloody footprints in the snow as they marched into camp – and all were hungry. Local farmers were spurning the unreliable revolutionary currency and selling their crops to the British. ”Unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place,” he wrote, “this Army must inevitably … Starve, dissolve, or disperse, in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can.”

This desolate scene was supposedly improved when the commander’s baker general, Christopher Ludwick or Ludwig, improvised a stew using tripe, vegetable scraps and whatever meagre spices he had to hand. His brief was to “warm and strengthen the body of a soldier and inspire his flagging spirit,” in Washington’s words. Legend maintains that this brew revived the beleaguered army, sustaining it through its darkest months, and helped lead to its eventual victory.

The story, though stirring, is almost certainly untrue. Pepper pot is a Caribbean dish, and it may well be that slaves and freedmen brought a taste for spicy broth to Philadelphia. But Caribbean cuisine makes little use of tripe. The French and (ironically) the English are more partial to the cratered stomach lining of the cow, with its elastic texture and distinctive – not to say unpleasant – taste and smell, this last resembling ripe manure. (Readers who have yet to try the delicacy may now be suspecting it was merely another hardship to befall the Continental army.)

Continue reading at The Guardian

Who’s stalking now

Posted on by
1

A red stag in Richmond Park. Photo: Getty

A piece on stalking for the Guardian

When the first deer appears, seemingly from nowhere, I swing the rifle round too quickly and it spots the movement, vanishing without a sound. We wait a few frozen minutes up in the high seat, until the stalker decides it isn’t coming back, and whispers that we should hunt from the ground. Once I’m halfway down the ladder, the muntjac skitters past almost in mockery.

There are probably more deer living wild in the UK than ever. No one knows how many; they are secretive, wide-roaming animals, and populations fluctuate each year. But they breed quickly, lack predators apart from humans, and are superbly adapted to life in the British countryside. These islands’ six free-living species total well over 1m animals, who thrive even though 350,000 are shot and 74,000 are involved in car accidents every year.

Anti-hunting, pro-animal charities and much of the general public question the ethics of stalking. “It’s a bloodsport, a branch of the entertainment rather than the food industry,” says Alistair Currie, policy adviser for Peta. “Many of the animals are not killed instantly, and the killing of individual animals by hunters leads to changes in the local deer population which lead to other stresses.” What of farmers whose crops are damaged or destroyed by deer? “As ever with human dealings with animals,” says Currie, “the solution is a lethal one. Fences keep deer out.” (People involved in deer management claim that putting up costly fences and letting nature control deer numbers condemns many deer to starvation, and many more to acute hunger.) A spokeswoman from the League Against Cruel Sports tells me it’s “crazy” that “untrained people are allowed to go out and shoot deer. At the absolute least, we think there should be a minimum competency of gun use before people are allowed to stalk them.”

Continue reading at the Guardian