British food. I merely have to mention the words, and images of fish & chips and marmite sandwiches probably appear in your head. Or perhaps a little bit of vomit appears in your mouth as you think about the utterly disgusting concept of breading a boiled egg, wrapping it in bacon and then deep fat frying it! Yet these are just a few of the so called “delicacies” of that you’ll find in Blighty.
Burgundy Lion notwithstanding (they are ,after all, a British style gastro-pub with a decidedly Canadian flavour, i.e. English poutine!??!), British cuisine, is generally pretty awful. The proof is Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsey, two celebrity chefs from the U.K. The former has declared war on British junk food in schools and has written many a book about Italian cooking. The latter now seems to spend more time in the U.S. on various reality shows, than he does in his kitchen back home.
Brits are among the unhealthiest people in the world, largely due to a lethal diet of cigarettes, booze and heavily fried snacks. Evidently, there are places in Glasgow (the cardiac arrest capital of Europe!) where the life expectancy of a man is literally the same as it is for an Iraqi man living in a war zone. This Scot, however, doesn’t have the excuse of possibly being blown up by an IED on the streets of Baghdad! Rather, his short life will probably be due to his love of the infamous, and surprisingly tasty, fried mars bars.
While there are exceptions to this, of course, such as British beers, many of which are quite awesome and generally better than what you will find over here. There is British Asian cuisine (e.g. chicken Tikka) and the many other ethnic foods you’ll find in almost any major city. Most of which are vastly superior to the native dishes that Brits seem to crave, but that leave the rest of the world completely perplexed. Has any non-British person ever acquired a taste for mushy peas, for instance? No, of course, not! Don’t be an idiot! But as the last French empress Marie Antoinette never said, “let them eat Jaffa cakes!” I think I’ll stick with my French pastries, thanks.
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