The Food.

Before I left for England, advice was thrown my way like drunks playing darts in a pub. A lot of the advice was nonsensical, overly-critical, generalizing, or simply incorrect, however, a subtle nearly-invisible thread existed in their words. I’m going to take a leaf out of those people’s books and make a bold statement in the same light – only this statement is true. I’ll say it, I will. Everyone’s thinking it, but I’ll be the one to say it. The English can’t do food. Yes, it’s actually that bad.

Okay, maybe I’m not being fair. It’s not that I want to retract my statement so soon, but I don’t want my English friends to hate me. Let me rephrase: generally, the English can’t do food. (I don’t know if that changed anything, but I tried.)

Just imagine a perfectly good plate of…anything. Hamburger, pizza, chicken, fish, anything. Now imagine that perfectly acceptable plate of food left to soak in a pot of grease over a stove on Wednesday, only suddenly remembered once a copy of The Guardian hits a front door step on Sunday. The result is an overly-cooked and overly-soaked taste in a somehow-pulled-together, seemly-looking dish. You learn the tricks to cope, of course. Salt and pepper make everything better, naturally. But another unsung hero makes everything great: ketchup. Ketchup becomes the elixir that makes you wonder why any other flavor exists, let alone any other condiment. Ketchup on toast, soup, chicken, fish, vegetables, fruit, beans, meat pies, pancakes, everything. You can’t go wrong with it. Yes, this is my minor ode to ketchup. 

Mostly, I think it just comes down to the food being bland. Boring. There’s no excitement. We’d have to create fun with our food, like we were five years old again:

 (Also, note the irony of the copy of Oliver Twist featuring the starved orphan boy on the cover. Deep.)

There are a few common English dishes that aren’t all that bad – they just aren’t all that great. Shepherd’s Pie and the other pastry-fillers get old quicker than the accent, every sausage has an eyebrow-lifting air that makes you question your own taste buds, the Sunday Roast feels like it could stick to the ceiling above you, and Yorkshire pudding soaks up any bit of flavor gravy might’ve had before it consumed the rest of the plate. But, that being said, fish and chips is always a good fall back. In London, it seems like no matter where you are, there exists the distinct and lingering scent of fish and chips that permeates rooms, down halls, through walls. It’s in bathrooms, classrooms, clothing stores, under tables, in parks, on the bottom of shoes. The scent sends you in a trance; you can’t not give into it. The seduction begins with one single fine plate of fish and chips, and you’re set from there.

How could this not seduce you?

In all honesty, I ate so much fish and chips that I convinced myself for a whole solid week once I came back to America that I had mercury poisoning. (Hey, it could happen.) Somehow there was solace in adding vegetables to every dish. My body would crave all the nutrients of leafy greens lost with every grease-ridden, English bite. I felt like someone could actually end up eating veggies with every meal even if they despised them their whole life. Adding a scoop of peas to a slice of fish slathered in ketchup completed a picture no artist could dream of drawing simply because all the grease deprived you of real taste. Highly seasoned potatoes seemed to make a difference as well:

 

The strange food phenomena continued with Heinz beans. First of all, I’ll be the first to admit that the English version of Heinz beans trumps the American version hands down. I’m not sure why they taste different, but they do. Anyway, beans became a staple dish in my previously exclusive American diet. But an odd thing began to happen. Both my American roommate and I felt like we couldn’t heat up the beans, or even put them in a bowl, like they were unspoken rules among the English. It seemed they could only be eaten out of the can with a half-crooked fork and grimaced face. Every bite of bean felt like we were rationing for WWII. If it wasn’t in a can, it was depressingly poured over a piece of toast and, again, slathered with ketchup. It actually tasted okay, but boy, did it feel like a war was going on.

By that time, if I’d already bothered to make toast with my WWII-rationed beans, I’d probably complete the full English Breakfast experience and add an egg or two. Toast, beans, eggs, salt, pepper, and ketchup for days. This meal became so regular that the thought of eating eggs today makes me nauseous. I never thought food could become so…unalive.

Now, regardless of any of that, it’s time to get real. You wanna talk food? Let’s talk food. I’ll give you two words – two of the best words to ever get together and form a loose phrase: Indian food.

 

Without sounding too much like all those British morons who colonized everything in sight and saw India as “the jewel of the empire,” I can’t help but think that Indian food is just so…mystical. I take a single bite of that wonderful country’s supernatural cuisine and I’m instantly warm inside. It literally fulfills me. Naan, curry sauce, tikka masaala, wine, rice, chicken, lamb, and simosas begin to form a soup of mouth-watering comfort sliding down a throat and through a nation, a time, a crevice of the heart.

Somehow, this spicy, fiery culinary knife has cut through the soul of a bland, damp island in the northern Atlantic – but how? Can the Indian food of Brick Lane pervade the hearts of simplistic, dead, bland English food? For a brief time, my American roommate and I were convinced that the English were so stern and polite and subdued because they were inherently and continually unsatisfied from food. Is this too harsh? Maybe. Maybe not. Does food fuel a nation? Where else do we get our power from, if not the food we eat? There must be a connection between the non-existence of taste in English food and over-powering kick from Indian food that bring the colonized and colonizer together. Or maybe that’s all a lie.

One thing is for certain, though, every time I wander past a curry shop or stand selling moderately adequate fish and chips back here in America, my heart twinges. Perhaps the English have learned to survive on the sweetly bitter taste of nostalgia just like me.