Ninth Symposium on Chinese Dietary Culture 2006
'Chinese Food in Britain: Consumer Culture and Taste'
Tomoko Tamari and Mike Featherstone
Presented at the Ninth Symposium on Chinese Dietary Culture, Taihoku, Taiwan, 2006. Chinese Dietary Association Proceedings, Taiwan, 2006. A Chinese version appeared in Jiangxi Social Sciences, no. 8, 2007 pp234-244.
Image: Chinatown, London. Courtesy of Luca Vavassori via Unsplash.
Introduction
Over the last twenty years in the West there has been an expansion of interest in the food of other cultures. Foreign food, often confined to the outside and deprecated, is now increasingly taken in. There is a greater variety of cuisines and types of food available in restaurants, cafés, supermarkets and specialist shops. In part this can be seen as an effect of the process of globalization with increasing numbers of migrants taking their food with them as they move around the world. Yet it is also the result of the activity of the expanding global food industry, with large corporations transporting raw and cooked food, along with the promotion of food brands and restaurant chains. Food has also become part of the global media, not only with specialist magazines on all forms of cookery in the home, but the expanding range of television channels and the Internet, providing further outlets for learning about food and the ways to integrate food into consumer culture lifestyle activities. There are programmes on ‘authentic’ regional and national cuisines: how to rediscover and recover lost culinary arts. There is also a greater interest, certainly in Anglo-Saxon countries, in the merits of innovation and experimentation, the interest in the creative chef’s capacity to produce global fusion food for the new middle class and upper class audiences seeking taste education and new culinary sensations. These processes, then, can hardly be seen as uniform products of globalization. Different societies possess different food histories, levels of food commercialization, along with customs and attitudes towards eating out and preparation of food at home. Indeed, if consumer culture is about the formation of taste cultures and the operation of distinctions which mark the boundaries between groups, the capacity to distinguish, appreciate and search for fine distinctions in the smell and taste of food, along with the aesthetics of food presentation and framing of the eating experience, can be assumed not only to be important, but to follow diverse paths.
It is a commonplace that the English do not possess a national cuisine of note. Global ethnic food may well be in fashion, but while there are now Ethiopian and Mongolian restaurants in metropolitan centres, there are hardly any English or British restaurants participating in the boom. Indeed, for many this has become something of a topic for jokes, especially from those writing from within nations which assume that they take their food more seriously and can point to the formation of a national cuisine as part of their historical cultural heritage, such as France. The reasons why this happened in 3 England and not France, are complex and have been subjected to a good deal of debate (see Mennell, 1996). On the positive side, it can be argued this lack of a strong sense of culinary superiority and fixing of tradition, has made English food more open to other influences, most notably in the post Second World War era. What passes as English food today is contested: curry is now apparently more popular than fish and chips or roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, with steak and kidney pudding hard to find on the menu.1 In the history of the opening up of English food to other cuisines, Chinese food has played a central role. This paper seeks to investigate the place of Chinese food within English culture and discuss its relationship to taste cultures within the development of consumer culture. It can be argued that the shift towards a greater interest in lifestyle construction on the part of the new middle class has encouraged a greater experimentation with cultural goods and experiences, particularly since the 1960s. The success of Chinese food should be understood within this expanding context of consumer culture.