The Realm Of The Senses

Or nervous ones. While the celebrity chefs were busy feeding royals and rock stars, Britain was traumatized by a series of food scares. In 1988 the junior Health Minister Edwina Currie announced that most of Britain's eggs were infected with salmonella. In the decade that followed, the British public learned that some of their beef was infected with BSE, or mad-cow disease, and E. coli, and that some of their soft cheeses carried Listeria. Food suddenly became dangerous--and politically charged. The Tory party's inept handling of the mad-cow crisis helped lose it the 1997 election. Memories of the BSE crisis no doubt haunted Tony Blair and his ministers last week, as they wrestled with a food scandal of their own. The genetically-modified-food hysteria is one sign of Britons' fierce new interest in food. Other indications: with funding from unions and city councils, communities have started farmers markets. And over the past four years, organic-food sales have shot up from £100 million to £260 million.

Some people look elsewhere for reassurance. For a quarter century, Delia Smith has helped Britons navigate the kitchen, coaxing them to cook with sensible titles like "Frugal Food" and "One Is Fun." Her followers love the petite 57-year-old because her dishes are dependable and unassuming. "Delia might possibly come across as boring," concedes Padma Moorjani, a Nottingham scientist who took up cooking five years ago. "But she demystifies cooking. All her recipes work." Her loyal readers (10 million in the U.K.) and television viewers see to that. After Delia featured eggs in her fall series "How to Cook," Britain went out and bought an extra 54 million eggs in the six weeks that followed the show. When Delia mentioned that a particular omelet pan was "a little gem," sales of the item shot up by 44,900 percent.

Pleasure has crept into parts of Britain where it wasn't welcome before. A hard-left member of Parliament, Ken Livingstone, writes a weekly restaurant column in The Evening Standard under the jaunty title "Ken Livingstone, I Presume." "It used to be there was an embarrassment if you were a socialist if you were seen to eat well," says food columnist Craig Brown. "Now it's the reverse." Indeed, the revamped attitude to food echoes the refurbishment of the Labour Party. If the old left wanted a redistribution of wealth, the new left wants to give more people the chance to make it. And if there's a unifying cry for both Tony Blair's New Labour and the food evangelists, it's that Britain's ever-expanding middle classes should have the chance to live well.

To be sure, every revolution has its limits. Britons still spend less of their incomes on food than other Europeans, and organic farmers say business is briskest among childless Yuppies in the prosperous south. Basil Hughes, a retired dairy farmer in north Yorkshire, reckons he's had only three Chinese meals in his life. His wife, Margaret, says their trip to Italy last year might mean they drizzle a little more olive oil on salads, "but we're still 'meat and two veg' kinds of people deep down." But mangoes, fresh tagliatelle and sun-dried-tomato chutney are at the local supermarket, just in case the Hugheses get a craving.

© 1999