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CHAPTER 1
FOOD

How did something as innocent as a lunchtime sandwich or morning coffee become the cause of social anxiety? Here we meet the Asda Mums.

The ready meal was nothing new in 1979. TV dinners were in existence before the advent of colour television, and Fray Bentos pies had long been available to consumers unwilling or unable to take the time to cook their own evening meal.

But in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher swept to power promising to bring harmony to the discordant classes, the ready meal went upmarket, thanks to Cathy Chapman, then 24-year-old head of poultry development at Marks & Spencer. She had already enjoyed success thanks to the simple, though radical for the time, idea of removing first the skin from a chicken breast, and then the bone from a thigh. The following year the breast became coated in Japanese breadcrumbs – crunchier, denser breadcrumbs than a home cook could ever produce from a stale piece of sliced white. Her next product, however, took it to another level.

It was the chicken Kiev. Now, for some, an object of derision, as naff as a tie-dye shirt or snowball cocktail, then, a sophisticated bistro dish that had been appearing on the menus of London restaurants for a few years. It was the first ‘middle-class’ ready meal and helped pave the way for the produce we see on our supermarket shelves today: everything from cheese and ham chicken Kievs from Iceland (£1 for 2) to Charlie Bigham’s Moroccan chicken tagine from Waitrose (£5.99). The ready meal industry is now worth £1.22 billion every year and is at the front line of a never-ending class war over food. Mealtimes have always been fraught, but over the last generation as our diets have become ever more varied, exotic and full of choices, the opportunities to feel bad about what you have put on your plate have been been greater than ever.

Back in 1979, when most people probably thought a Moroccan tagine was something you either smoked or sat on, high-quality cuisine meant French cuisine. Chapman lived in Islington, north London, just 400 yards from Robert Carrier, a restaurant in Camden Passage named after its owner, by then a television star, best-selling cookery writer, innovator of the wipe-clean recipe cards, and proud owner of two Michelin stars. In 1975 the restaurant had hosted dinner for the Queen Mother and Lord Grimthorpe, the first time Her Majesty had dined out in a public restaurant since before her marriage in 1923.¹ Chapman was encouraged by her bosses at M&S to eat at the best restaurants, and it was at Carrier that she first tried chicken Kiev.

‘Yes, I liked it. What’s not to like? Butter, garlic and a crisp outside,’ she recalls. Her taste of crispy, buttery heaven coincided with the rise of an entrepreneur called John Docker, ‘who believed this kind of food – chicken Kiev, prawn cocktail, duck à l’orange – could and should be available to a wider audience,’ explains Chapman. He set up a factory and staffed it with professional chefs who would then sell their pre-prepared meals for restaurants to re-heat. But he had ambitions for families at home also to enjoy this sophistication. And when he showed the dish to M&S, Chapman and her team decided Britain was ready for the first-ever chilled ready meal.

This is what made it different. It was not a boil-in-the-bag meal that you bought from the freezer cabinet, or a dismal pie in a tin. This was a dish presented in an aluminium tray, in the chiller cabinet of a supermarket, still a relatively small area dedicated to dairy products. It was protected by a cardboard box, with a glossy photograph on the front, and sold for £1.99 – the equivalent of about £8 in today’s money, a premium price for a premium product. They even, in the early days, came with a little paper chef’s hat on the sprig bone that protruded from the meat to make it look worthy of a magazine photo shoot. ‘It was really upmarket, fresh prepared food, the first time we’d done restaurant quality meals. It was a very big launch.’ This was food for the middle classes, and the upper middle classes at that.

Like all big launches for M&S it had to be approved by the board of directors. At this point the Kiev was nearly torpedoed. ‘My boss at the time, the head of food, said when he tasted it, “It’s got garlic in. I don’t like garlic, people don’t like garlic” – and said it shouldn’t be put on the shelves.’ This was not an uncommon view at the time. But with six weeks to go before launch it was too late to back out. With all the boxes printed, Chapman was forced to persuade the director he was wrong, and a Kiev without garlic was pointless.

She was right. It was an immediate hit. The dish was the height of sophistication, with its very name evoking exotic, Cold War Russia (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was one of television’s hits of 1979), while the oozing, melting, garlicky butter hinted at a continental elegance that most people in winter-of-discontent Britain could only dream of. The first weekend, £10,000-worth was sold, and they ran out; production was immediately doubled. Within four weeks this one dish was bringing £50,000 a week into the M&S tills. ‘The sales were phenomenal and it became a talking point at the time. People would have dinner parties and serve it, saying, “Here’s one I made earlier,” and it wasn’t; it was one they’d bought at the end of the road.’ To this day, Marks & Spencer, despite its food sales being one-tenth the size of Tesco, sells more chilled ready meals than any other retailer in Britain² and its dine-in-for-£10 meal deal during the recent recession was the salvation for many Portland Privateers and Middleton class people who had been forced to cut back on eating out at their local restaurant.

M&S’s timing was impeccable and Chapman’s persistence was prescient. Ever since Tetley introduced the tea bag in 1953, convenience food had been growing more sophisticated, but it had never really won over either gourmets or the upper middle classes, the customers that had helped M&S become Britain’s biggest clothing retailer. There was always a fear that processed food was either a bit gimmicky, or frankly just a little common, especially when it was frozen or dehydrated. Fresh ready meals that could be passed off as restaurant-quality dishes you had magically whipped up in your kitchen were a salvation for a generation of women, who were now out during the day working, and didn’t have the time to slave over a stove as their mothers had done.

But though the Kiev was a hit, and helped encourage all the other supermarkets to launch chilled ready meals – in turn fuelling their amazing success at grabbing more of consumers’ disposable income – it exposed class divides when it came to eating, divides that are now deeper than ever before. Greggs versus Pret à Manger, McDonald’s versus Wagamama, frozen chicken dippers versus sous-vide smoked duck. Something as innocent as a slice of white bread may have had the salt content reduced, but it has never been so loaded with social anxieties. It used to be about whether you asked Norman to phone for the fish knives, and whether you called it tea, supper or dinner (or even ‘country supper’ if you are in the Chipping Norton set). Those old-fashioned distinctions about terminology and cutlery still exist to some extent, but the deeper divides are about what you put in your mouth and sip from your morning cup.

Some people not only turn down but actively despise certain meals because they are ‘for chavs and idiots’ and refuse to step inside particular food shops. Food writers are both worshipped – Delia, Jamie, Nigella all so famous they go by first names only – but also reviled for promoting an unobtainable, Wood Burning Stover lifestyle, where the windowsill always has fresh basil, the sausages are always organic and the olive oil is always Fair Trade, and preferably Palestinian too.

Indeed, one’s supermarket of choice has now become almost a short-hand for what socio-economic group you belong to – are you an Asda Mum or Tescopoly drone? A Waitrose deli-counter devotee, an Aldi acolyte or a member of the Farmfoods underclass? Which one are you?

It was all so different back in 1954, when food rationing finally ended with the lifting of meat restrictions. Ration books were burnt in celebration and Smithfield market opened at midnight for the first time since before the war. It had been a slow process allowing Britons unfettered access to food. Indeed, food rationing had been in place for nearly half of the period between 1954 and the end of the First World War.

In an age when sushi is so ubiquitous that Marks & Spencer sells enough seaweed to wrap around the M25 every year³ it is hard to imagine quite how dismal the diet of most families was. As the 1950s were about to start, the weekly ration for a man was 13 ounces of meat, 8 ounces of sugar, 6 ounces of butter or margarine, 2 pints of milk, 1.5 ounces of cheese, 1 ounce of cooking fat and 1 egg.⁴ It was just not possible to have a food revolution on those provisions. Or even a particularly tasty meal. Of course the rich, as always, enjoyed some immunity because they could afford to eat in restaurants, which were free from rationing – though certain limitations were in place, such as meat and fish not being allowed to be served at the same sitting.

Even when eating out, however, the options were limited. Before the war, most food eaten out of the home was consumed, if not in a work canteen, either in a fish and chip shop, a tea room or department store café at one end of the scale, or in an intimidating hotel restaurant at the other end. Outside London, the idea of a reasonably priced, unpretentious restaurant where a working-class family could enjoy a meal was almost unheard of. The most popular option was Lyons corner houses, a chain that had dominated the eating-out market for decades, which made a fortune for its founders, the Jewish immigrant Salmon family (Nigella Lawson is one of the heiresses). Hot meals were served, and some were waitress service, but it was hardly sophisticated fare.

The first (1951) edition of The Good Food Guide, produced by an army of amateur reviewers (a full half-century before TripAdvisor), lays bare quite how uncosmopolitan the British restaurant scene was. Of the 484 restaurants and pubs reviewed outside London, only 11 served primarily foreign food, and of those ten were European, with just one Chinese included.⁵ The idea of the guide came from Raymond Postgate, who had been a founding member of the British Communist party. Though by the 1950s he had put aside Marxism, he took a militant approach to eating out. He believed that diners had a duty to approach their Dover soles or brandy snaps with a certain hostility if they were to ensure they were not to be diddled by the owners of the means of production. ‘On sitting down at the table polish the cutlery and glasses with your napkin. Don’t do this ostentatiously or with an annoyed expression, do it casually. You wish to give the impression not that you are angry with this particular restaurant, but that you are suspicious, after a lifetime of suffering.’ He deserves credit just as much as Elizabeth David, the ground-breaking food writer, for freeing the British from brown meat and browner sauces.

The old hotel dining rooms were crucibles of class. Intimidating, and so often depressing, they were a test for most families eating out. Cutlery, china, wine lists and waiters – all were traps to trip you up and make you feel a fool. My father-in-law can remember clearly the tension in the house as his own father prepared to go off on a trip down from their home town, Workington, to London to represent his union at a dinner. The dinner was to be a formal one at a big West End hotel. So, his father was sat down at the ‘best kitchen’ table (what most working-class people would have called the parlour) and given a tutorial by his wife about the arcane rules of fish knives, soup spoons and which glass to touch first. She had been in service and knew the pitfalls and was determined that he wouldn’t let the side down.

As a family they never ate out, except for when they went on a trip to the department store in Carlisle or Newcastle. ‘Department stores had quite nice restaurants in those days. The prices in Binns [now owned by House of Fraser] were quite reasonable. We’d have fish and chips or a pie, nothing spectacular. Certainly no coffee.

‘But we would never have eaten out in Workington. There was a chap called Walter Archer, who had a bakery and confectionery business, who opened a café in one of his shops, which survived no more than a year or so. He told us that the trouble with the people of Workington is that the moment they’re within five miles of home they don’t see the point of eating out. He was right.’ And if a café or tea room was considered a wasteful luxury, the restaurant at one of the town’s two hotels was out of the question.

The playwright Alan Bennett, a butcher’s son who won a scholarship to Oxford, recalls the horror of his parents visiting him at university and the trip to the hotel. The waiter came with the menu. ‘Mam would say the dread words, “Do you do a poached egg on toast?” and we’d slink from the dining room, the only family in England not to have its dinner at night.’ They were also befuddled by the wine list. But then, as Bennett asks plaintively, ‘What kind of wine goes with spaghetti on toast?’⁶

This partly explains why Britain, more than any other country outside America, was to embrace fast food. It offered the promise of being classless. No waiters, no wine list, no pretentious French terms, no embarrassment about the bill. The first in Britain, opening the year that food rationing ended, was Wimpy. Within a few years it was already starting to change the face of Britain’s high streets and diets, as the Observer reported at the end of the decade: ‘Dirty and lethargic cafés with fly-blown sandwiches and antique sausage rolls have given way to mechanised eating places, though the staff have not always kept pace with jet-age eating.’

Each table came with a wipe-clean menu and the Wimpy signature condiment: a ketchup bottle in the form of a plastic, squeezy tomato; and burgers cost just one shilling and sixpence, the equivalent of a cinema ticket or three loaves of bread – more expensive than it is now in relative terms, but considerably cheaper than a café meal.

The concept, American of course, was brought to Britain by Lyons. In 1958, 5.5 million burgers were sold, enough for one in ten of the population to have eaten a Wimpy that year. What was their success? the newspaper asked. ‘For the customer, particularly the all-important teenager, they are quick, simple and classless. A Wimpy can be eaten in less than ten minutes, leaving the rest of a lunch hour for shop gazing, flirting or jazz.’ Sadly, the nearest today’s office workers get to flirting and jazz at lunchtime is a quick trawl on Facebook.

‘The Wimpy bars, with their bright layout and glass fronts, are inviting and casual, with none of the inhibiting air of posher places. In contrast to the working-class egg-and-chip cafés or middle-class ABCs [Aerated Bread Company tea rooms] the Wimpy bars have the same kind of American class neutrality as TV or Espresso bars.’⁷

Of course eating out in fast food places, or indeed any places, never became a classless activity. As with so many exciting, new, American activities that hit Britain in this period – pop music, jeans, frozen fish – classless merely became a euphemism for working class. No more so than with fast food, which over time took on a demonic quality, at least in the eyes of those who refused to eat it. Junk food for the junk classes.

This demonisation was mostly peddled by the Wood Burning Stovers, who as time went on were more than happy to have someone else cook their meal in bistros, trattorie and pho noodle bars – but not if it was ‘mechanised’, nor if it was American. McDonald’s, by the sheer force of being successful and American, became the whipping boy. By the mid-1980s, a decade after it arrived in Britain, it was expanding fast, rapidly taking market share from Wimpy and Wendy’s, another chain, and the company wanted to open an outlet in Hampstead, invariably described in tabloid newspapers as ‘leafy’. It is a particularly charming borough of north London, whose heath has majestic views down to the City and Westminster. Home of Keats, Sidney Webb, D.H. Lawrence and Edith Sitwell, it was, in its own estimation, a cut above McDonald’s. There proceeded an almighty 12-year-long row that ended up in the High Court.

‘The last rampart has fallen,’ The Times declared in 1992 when the burger chain finally won the right to open – on the site, symbolically, of a disused bookshop. Everyone quietly forgot that prior to that it had been occupied by a branch of Woolworths. The Hampstead residents, led by local MP Glenda Jackson, the only elected member of parliament to have won an Oscar, and author Margaret Drabble, insisted they were neither being snobs nor prejudiced against burger bars, they just didn’t like the idea of extra traffic and litter. The Heath and Old Hampstead Society said the result would be a rash of copy-cat chains, low-grade boutiques instead of proper shops ‘where one could buy a reel of cotton’.

The true feelings of residents, however, were revealed in a letter to Camden Council, which complained about an influx of ‘noisy undesirables’, while the actor Tom Conti said, ‘McDonald’s is sensationally ugly.’ As the Washington Post rather neatly put it, Hampstead was not so much a village, more a rather smug state of mind. The residents of Hampstead always have been Wood Burning Stovers to a man, Radio 4 devotees, owners of Ottolenghi cookbooks, recipients of organic food boxes. They sip flat white coffees from their local Ginger & White café (slogan: ‘We don’t do Grandes’), which offer organic marmite and soldiers for toddlers who have learnt to order a babycino before they can wipe their own nose.

The article in The Times reporting on the chain’s final victory in NW3 could not hide its outright snobbery: ‘The most valid objection to [McDonald’s] is in fact their ubiquity and the fact that they have done so much in 18 years to debase the act of eating. Many customers are already excavating their purchases as they walk away from the counter, smearing ketchup around their mouths and grabbing handfuls of the deep-fried toothpicks that are parodies of the honest British “chip”.’⁸

McDonald’s has undergone something of a transformation in the last six or seven years, particularly in Britain. There was certainly a time when I would never have taken my children into one of their outlets, partly because I disapproved of the food’s unhealthiness, partly because I am a reluctant owner of a wood-burning stove and quite like a flat white coffee – and with that comes a fairly large dollop of snobbism. Putting aside the issue of the food, most outlets just weren’t very nice, with harsh strip-lighting, sweaty formica tables and even less healthy-looking customers.

But the McDonald’s of the 1980s and 90s is no more. Partly spurred on by an alarming slippage in profits, partly thanks to a boss in Britain determined to tackle the hostility towards the brand, the restaurants started to go upmarket. The décor in all 1,200 branches was spruced up. Some now even have flowers on the table. The milk went organic, the eggs became free-range. Free WiFi was introduced, when this was an expensive luxury, and espresso and lattes started to be served. Then the recession came along, and it won over hundreds of thousands of new customers determined to continue enjoying a weekly meal out, or a morning cup of coffee on the way in to work, but keen to save money. Eight out of ten families in Britain with children visit at least once a year. My family is now one of those, though that horrifies some fellow north London parents.

There is still an astonishing level of animosity felt towards the golden arches, with much of it class based more than anything else. I interviewed the new British boss, Jill McDonald (no relation), who perhaps rather provocatively compared the burger chain to John Lewis, the epitome of understated Middleton taste on the high street. ‘You get the white van man in the morning stopping in for his egg McMuffin and you get the guy who has stopped off before his meeting with his laptop. There’s not that snobbishness about our brand any more,’ she said.

The reaction to the interview proved that there was still some way to go. ‘Only idiots and chavs go to McDonald’s … nobody but them would take their children there,’ said one online reader, responding to her comments. Another said: ‘I take one look at the customers inside with their noisy and totally uncontrolled offspring and back off quickly. Am I being snobbish? Probably, but I do not want to eat near that lot, nor do I want to walk about the street eating one of their products.’

Despite its move upmarket and its broad appeal to most of the country, McDonald’s will never really win over the Wood Burning Stovers, who like to think the food-on-the-go that they eat is individual, authentic and preferably ‘artisanal’. The fact that it is prepared in a big industrial kitchen on a trading estate in Park Royal, before being shipped out to their local gastro pub or sushi bar, is something they don’t consider. The key demographic for McDonald’s is Asda Mums – a large swathe of the population who straddle what some would call the lower middle class and the upper working class, but now defined in these recessionary times by their loyalty to the cheapest of Britain’s big four supermarkets. Food for Asda Mums is mostly fuel, not a statement of status. Their presiding concern is that their children are well fed, which means nutritiously so (they fret about the sugar content in Fruit Shoots), but that also means generously so. McDonald’s brilliantly supplies that need – and it is a fortnightly treat, and a guilt-free one at that, for many Asda Mums.

The company assiduously targets Asda Mums, through its advertising but also its associations, with its support of football, and tie-ups with Disney and other mass-popular movements. In a study by the think-tank Britain Thinks, undertaken during the summer of 2011, McDonald’s came third in a list of ‘the most working-class brands’ behind the Sun and Iceland and above KFC and Asda. It is revealing that four out of the five brands are food-related.

McDonald’s and KFC owe their place in this list partly to price, but partly to the ideals introduced by Wimpy back in 1954 – fast, quick service of a commoditised food. No one can ever feel as if they are going to be caught out either by their table manners, their pronunciation of a product or the arrival of a shockingly large bill at the end. Tipping and a wine list, two of the most anxiety-inducing social phenomena, are categorically absent from fast food.

The boss may be wrong about the snobs, but she is correct when she asserts that it is a ‘democratising’ brand, a term that Sir Terence Conran used in the 1960s to describe Habitat, his home furnishings shop. Thanks to fast food, eating out was no longer a social minefield.

If Asda Mums are the bedrock on which McDonald’s builds its success, then it is the Hyphen-Leighs who have turned Greggs into the country’s biggest fast food chain – with more outlets than anyone else. Based in Newcastle, Greggs has a range of nice bread, perfectly decent sandwiches and a selection of savoury pastries, selling an amazing 140 million sausage rolls every year – that is 800 every minute. But no food item in Britain, not even a Big Mac, has been the object of so much class debate in the last year. This came about when the Chancellor tried to close a long-standing (and complex) loophole that meant hot pasties, steak bakes and sausage rolls, as sold by Greggs, avoided VAT.

The political elite, many of them Wood Burning Stovers, mocked Gideon ‘George’ Osborne, son of a baronet and owner of a £3 million Notting Hill house, for failing to understand the diet of the hard-pressed working classes. Osborne’s critics had us believe that millions of Britons breakfasted, lunched and dined on pasties, rolls and onion bakes. Cheryl Cole, the Hyphen-Leighs’ pin-up of choice, was wheeled out to invoke the spirit of Oliver Twist, saying: ‘I would have been penniless as a teenager – and hungry – if I’d been taxed every time I had a hot pasty. Pasties, pizza, McDonald’s – we didn’t have a clue about nutrition. It was tasty and it was what we could afford.’

Just as bad was the sight of senior members of the shadow cabinet, including Ed Balls, trying to out-prole Osborne by sauntering into a Greggs (camera crew in tow) and casually ordering some pasties. Until Osborne made Greggs and its customers class martyrs – helped by the chain being championed by the Sun – it was widely derided, particularly by the likes of Asda Mums, for providing the lower orders with fatty, cheap pap. A ‘Greggs dummy’ was a phrase often used in the north east to refer to the sausage roll given to toddlers in their buggies to keep them quiet.

Of course selling £700 million worth of food every year means its customer base is extremely broad. Indeed, a cousin of mine who is an earl is so partial to a Greggs sausage roll that he invested some of the family fortune in the company’s shares. But then many of Britain’s aristocracy have always preferred nursery food over a ballotine de volaille and saffron infusions.

Even within something as seemingly innocuous as the lunchtime sandwich there are clear social distinctions, as evidenced in my own defiantly white-collar office. A fast-food burger or Greggs pasty is clearly unacceptable and only to be eaten ironically when suffering from a hangover. The Boots Shapers meal deal is for secretaries and junior staff in the advertising department only; the M&S sandwich, Pret à Manger wrap the safe option for the mass of mid-ranking reporters; while a box of Itsu sushi or Leon beetroot and horseradish soup is verging on ostentatious and suggests that office work is a tedious impediment to furthering one’s gourmet credentials. Columnists and those on the Arts Desk can get away with that. News editors show off by going to the local Italian delicatessen which whips up an overpriced, rather dry prosciutto and rocket ciabatta, but it comes wrapped in tasteful waxed paper. Of course, the really smart Wood Burning Stovers bring in their own sandwiches, ideally on home-made bread – or, better still, left-overs heated up in a wide-necked thermos flask. Perhaps Ottolenghi’s spiced winter couscous.

One colleague, with quiet pride, brought in home-cured bresaola. I was well and truly trumped and went back to munching on my re-heated mushroom risotto out of the Tupperware box.

These variations all occur within a very tight-knit group of (mostly) graduates, a fair few Oxbridge ones at that, working within a single office. Lunchtime choices are small, subtle public acts that allow you to set yourself apart within the restrictive office environment. Class has never been all about money. The cost of these lunches varies just a little, but the differing messages they send out are loud and clear. The home-made chorizo soup is less expensive than the Subway sandwich, but one is ‘middle class’ and one is not. If we are all middle class now, then we need to strive to distinguish ourselves from the ranks. Tucking into a sandwich from the country’s biggest eating-out operator just fails the test. Your lunch has to come from a more exclusive brand, or better still be completely unbranded.

Portland Privateers, in contrast, would rather slash the tyres on their BMW X5 than be spotted bringing a cellophane-wrapped home-made sandwich into their Mayfair office. They are remarkably unfussy about lunch, as long as it is a reputable brand. Most of them send out their secretary, or the work experience kid, for Itsu sushi or Birley sandwiches. Or they have miserable ‘water lunch meetings’ to prove how macho they are. This consists of bottled water and nothing else.

Finding unbranded food outlets in modern Britain can be a challenge. Expensive high street rents, cautious landlords, unimaginative town planners all conspire to encourage a familiar name over the door. But one of the reasons has been the relentless rise of the Middleton classes, those millions of families who within a generation have navigated their way through the choppy waters to end up at the front of the great class flotilla. If one of the abiding aspects of climbing up the social ladder is a fear of being found out, there is safety in clinging to an established name, a proven formula. The Berni Inns (founded in 1955), and all the chains that came after, allowed people to eat out, to enjoy a dash of glamour with scampi in a basket or lemongrass in the soup, but never be made a fool of. As people holidayed abroad and consumed hours of cookery programmes, restaurants became less daunting and visiting a chain outlet provided you with a failsafe option, whatever town you visited.

Berni’s place as a staging post on the climb upwards was taken by Browns, All Bar One, Pizza Express, Chez Gerard and Loch Fyne. In recent years we’ve reached the sunny uplands of Strada, Wagamama, Ping Pong, Yo! Sushi and Starbucks – all offering a bowl, or cup, of something exotic, all with unpronounceable names, all with strange, almost masonic rituals of how one orders and eats. But once we’ve cracked the formula, we have made it. The insouciance with which one mixes the wasabi into the dish of soy sauce, or orders a skinny Frappuccino, proves that you are a person who knows their mind and won’t be intimidated by any waiter or waitress – even if they have swapped their 1950s bow tie and pinafore for an attitude T-shirt and stud in their nose.