Chips vs. Chips

Morcombelake bus stop

From time to time someone publishes a book that makes a zeitgeisty splash: it seems to help if its arguments can be reduced to a simple takeaway formula by reviewers, obviating the need for anyone else actually to read the book. In fact, ideally, this formula will at least appear to be encapsulated in its title: no need even to read any reviews! I'm thinking of books like Small Is Beautiful, The Shock of the New, The Black Swan, and so on. What, you've actually read them?

For a short while recently, it seemed that a book by French political scientist Olivier Roy, The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms, might be the latest candidate to fit that description, but its moment has probably already passed. It's a translation of L'Aplatissement du monde: La crise de la culture et l'empire des normes, a title which actually conveys the apparent contents more accurately: roughly "The Flattening-Out of the World: the crisis of culture and the empire of norms". I assume there's some kind of sideways glance at one of Roland Barthes' more curious books going on there, too, the one on Japan, Empire of Signs. Now there's a book you'd never get from its title, much as you might presume you could.

The main bit of Roy's argument that stuck with me from the reviews was that our contemporary global pick-and-mix culture is destroying "cultures". That is, that the authenticity of long-established national and local cultures is being undermined by our constant consumerist flirtations with what, for example, used to be dismissed here – in an earlier, more robust version of British "authenticity" – as foreign muck. Today, that would be non-native food fads like kefir or kimchi, but formerly any new and deeply suspect items imported from dodgy overseas locations: quasi-pornographic ingredients like olive oil, garlic, and capsicum peppers [1]. Some stiff-necked types back then, I'm sure, will have blamed the loss of an empire on our new-found fondness for pasta and pizza.

There are reviews of Roy's book here and here, and no doubt elsewhere, too, should you want to make up your own mind about it. Whatever its merits, the "undermining local cultures" bit seems a very tired old argument to me, and despite the leftist credentials of the author the very essence of a certain brand of conservatism. But then I haven't read the book, and have no intention of doing so.

In France, however, to take a stand against a globalising food culture does make a kind of sense: the national culinary tradition is often claimed to be an essential part of what it means to be French. Unless, I suppose, you're of North African heritage and living in a run-down banlieue of Paris, or even some British expat in a refurbished farmhouse in the Dordogne, craving Marmite, proper tea, and a comforting plate of baked beans on toast. But apparently the youth of France are showing little interest in haute cuisine or spending the necessary hours in the kitchen preparing traditional staples of the French diet like boeuf bourguignon or coq au vin, and have fallen prey to le fast-food and McDo, like the youth everywhere else.

But if you are a Brit living in Britain, really? Let's have more of that foreign muck, please! Come on, guys, undermine our authentic national culture as much as you like! For anyone over sixty, memories of the British kitchen in the past are like a nightmare from which we finally began to awake somewhere in the 1980s. Does anyone truly long for the actual domestic boiled-beef-and-carrots "tradition" of fried breakfast, tinned peas, jam sandwiches, overcooked vegetables, and stodgy puddings with instant custard? For years now I have been keeping an eye on the supermarket aisles where the Fray Bentos tinned pies, bottles of Camp coffee, Bird's custard powder and other assorted relics of the pre-refrigerator British diet are racked, and have never yet seen anybody put one of those culinary curiosities into their basket. Maybe they're really there as a sort of "remember the 1950s?" museum-cum-warning: You've never had it so good. No, really! Mind you, when the Russian hackers finally cut off our electricity, those shelves will empty even faster than the ones carrying family packs of toilet roll.

Porthole view of Clevedon Pier

I don't know about you, but I do like a bit of chocolate, and my chocolate of choice is Lindt Excellence 70% (inexplicably, my partner prefers 90%): not because I'm some sort of snack snob, but simply because it's so much nicer than anything our "native" manufacturers like Cadbury's have ever come up with. There was a time, of course, when I, like all British kids, knew no better. A shilling (5p) bar of Cadbury's Whole Nut seemed pretty damned sophisticated to me. But at Easter 1965 we had a primary school trip to Switzerland (which was unusual, and I should write about that sometime), and I don't think there was one of us who didn't come home changed, and changed utterly, taste-wise, when it came to chocolate. Some kids had practically filled a suitcase with Suchard, Toblerone, and those mauve-wrapped Milka bars [2]; goodness knows what they had done with their clothes. In fact, for many years most British self-styled "chocolate" could not be marketed as such in Europe, because of its unacceptably high content of vegetable oils and milk. Frankly, at its worst, our chocolate was little more than flavoured wax – anyone remember those cheap Superba bars you used to be able to buy in Woolworth's? – compared to the ambrosial substance made by cocoa-dusted angels in Switzerland, Belgium, and other select euro-franchises of heaven.

But, thinking of the miraculous cocoa bean, you do have to wonder how quickly unfamiliar foodstuffs from overseas become incorporated as a staple of the local "traditional" culture. Never mind kimchi and kefir, what about rice and spices? Or potatoes? Tomatoes? Chillies? Peppers? Where would our national love of hot gloop be without cornflour? And what could be more traditionally British than a tin of Heinz baked beans, an American concoction marketed by an American company which incorporates not a single "native" British ingredient other than salt and a splash of vinegar.

And then there's the "tradition" of a curry or a Chinese meal after a night out. I'll never forget the night in 1971 that a friend finally persuaded me to try a crispy spring roll as a tasty alternative to a greasy pink sausage in batter as a post-pub takeaway treat. Or later that same year when our teacher took the sixth-form German group on a theatre visit to Cambridge, and treated us all to a proper "Indian" afterwards. It was my first ever experience of an Indian restaurant: I had a chicken biryani that I can still recall with pleasure over fifty years later. Of course, even the magnificent cuisine of India itself has happily incorporated "foreign" ingredients, not least some other members of that extraordinary New World vegetable diaspora, those tasty (if sometimes deadly) shape-shifters, the Solanaceae. Cooks everywhere know a good thing when they see it (or, better, taste it). Even, eventually, in Britain.

Deceptively broken chair, Southampton

In the end, all appeals to cultural purity and tradition have to be regarded with suspicion, whether from the left or the right, politically. I shared some thoughts on this in a post from 2010, The Italian Job, when a set of my photographs was being shown in a town known either as Innichen (to German speakers) or San Candido (to Italian speakers) situated in the Italian Dolomites; a territory which, before its post-WW1 annexation by Italy, was once a part of Austro-Hungary known as the "South Tyrol", and is still divided, culturally and linguistically, more than a century later. The big step from national pride to intolerance and violence against incomers and cultural "others" was all too easily taken in the hot mess created by the decline of empires and disruptive wars, a mess that has never gone away and is being dangerously over-heated again today by mass migrations away from climate change, kleptocracies, and intolerant authoritarian regimes. "Too much too soon" is never the safest way to mix things up, especially when it comes to people, and even "little and often" can become explosive after a while.

So is the world being "flattened out", culturally, as Olivier Roy and many others have suggested? Up to a point, unquestionably, yes. Setting aside McDonalds, Microsoft, and the like, the fact that our very own English language – surely not one of the easiest to master – has escaped into the wild and become international property is a symptom of this. Every day I am humbled by the confident idiomatic command of my mother tongue by politicians, journalists, scientists, writers, and public figures of every type and nationality when I hear them being interviewed on the radio. Are there British politicians today who could hold their own under interrogation on, say, Spanish or German radio? I doubt it. But do these fluent speakers of our pushy lingua franca still treasure their own language? Of course they do. Do they resent the cuckoo-like domination of English in pretty much all international discourse? Even in a Europe from which we flounced away a few years ago? Apparently not, not even in France – well, not much, anyway – a country with a long-standing language-anxiety issue that amounts to a tradition in itself. Although it is undeniable that we have our enormous and muscular American cousin standing behind us at all times, who speaks a snappier version of our language in a much louder voice, and always carries a Big Stick tucked under his arm.

It is also true that anyone's mother tongue is less and less likely to be one of the hundreds of endangered languages (list here). It is said that one of these languages will die out every 40 days, a "little and often" shift towards the more widely-spoken languages that is a bottom-up kind of flattening out. Linguists tend to regard that as a tragedy, and celebrate the fact that there are still 840 living languages on Papua New Guinea. But I doubt many PNG administrators feel the same way and, inevitably, English is the language of government and the legal and education systems there, with Tok Pisin, an English-based creole, the most widely spoken language.

Incidentally and not entirely irrelevantly, here's a real TV treat for David Attenborough fans from 1957. If you followed the link, that is very much the black-and-white world I was born into in 1954 – intrepid man in khaki shorts encounters strange "natives" in faraway places – and there is little doubt that the world has lost much of its enticing variety and strangeness since then. I mean, you can't find a proper cannibal or head-hunter anywhere, these days, can you? But – what's that? – do I hear mutterings out there (in academic English, naturally) about "orientalism" and "white privilege"? Sure, there's that, but come on... A world without even an imaginary heart of darkness would be a very flat place indeed.

The big question, of course, is does any of this matter? Is a vision of a few broadly similar world cultures speaking a handful of languages, all eating a pick and mix world-diet bought from the same few supermarket chains, and all watching the same streamed TV programmes every night a dream of a better world or a dystopian nightmare? Are those who oppose this apparently irreversible direction of travel – sometimes "by any means necessary" – the good guys or the bad guys?

These are Big Questions to which I have no answers, you won't be surprised to hear. So here's another big one for you: do you think, in time, we Brits might be compelled by linguistic force majeure to refer to "crisps" as "chips", and eat "fries" instead of "chips"? I sincerely hope not, and if we did I'd be annoyed and have a bit of moan about Young People Today, but I'd probably not be inclined to go to the barricades over it, or encourage a potato farmers' tractor blockade of Whitehall. That's much more of a French response to such provocations but, as we like to say here: vive la différence!

Although, apparently, like cul-de-sac, sacré bleu, and even c'est la vie!, no-one ever does actually say vive la différence! in yer actual France. In much the same way as there are very few actual cowboys in America, and no-one in Britain has ever referred to an umbrella as a "bumbershoot". It seems bits of different cultures are prone to leak into each other in a uniquely distorted and sometimes unrecognisable fashion, in what is more like an ongoing game of international Chinese whispers than any dismal flattening out into a grey, entropic cultural pancake / tortilla / chapati / focaccia / matzo / etc. (you get the idea).

So who knows what weird series of mash-ups will eventually result? Although I'd suggest that the English language itself, this amazing linguistic car-crash – bent out of shape so many times but never written-off, now much simplified and incorporating cannibalised bits of various other contenders and, incredibly, leading the race (for now, anyway) – may give us a hint of what is yet to come. Yes, folks, here comes the Franken-future!

And well spotted, you're quite right: these four photographs have no apparent relationship whatsoever with the rambling content of this post. They just sort of leaked in.

Bristol flat kitchen

1. The only place you would find olive oil when I was a kid in small-town Britain was in a chemist's shop, sold in small corked medicine bottles, its sole known use being to soften ear wax prior to syringing. I imagine there were secret places in Soho where garlic and – crikey! – root ginger could be bought, furtively, probably as sex aids.

2. Not to be confused with Nestlé's aberration (always pronounced "nessles" here BTW, unless you're looking for trouble), the Milky Bar, an emetic confection of "white chocolate", much advertised on TV when I was young, featuring some wimpy bespectacled boy in a cowboy outfit: The Milky Bar Kid. Bizarre.