Food

Opinion & Thought

Had

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I wish I did not keep getting a vague feeling of being had: of being short-changed by life in present-day Britain: of occasions where reasonable expectations are rarely met. While one might have to cut some slack for the longer-term effects of the pandemic, and social changes such as the shift of almost everything online, too often it feels as though the concept of fair value has disappeared.

I’ve just finished reading C. Thi Nguyen’s book The Score, which surely is a candidate for the geek-book of the year, but it nonetheless shines strong light on some relevant concepts. First amongst these is something I have long been preoccupied with, namely the way in which explicit targets corrupt genuine value. Nearly fifty years ago, the incoming Thatcher government would have had us believe that target-driven privatisation was going to provide wider choice and lower costs; half a century on, it is apparent that state monopolies have simply been replaced by even more powerful and insidious private ones, which now have virtually total control over the way markets, even countries, function.

Nguyen calls targets Metrics, by which he means the ways in which modern society has come to benchmark almost everything. He argues that the benefit of this comes from fungibility – in other words, the ability to quantify standards and procedures irrespective of which interchangeable human-being happens to be on shift today. And so, we get standardised products no matter who is frying the burgers. But he also argues that the downside of metrics is that they all-too-easily become targets in their own right, often behaving in perverse ways.

One of his most arresting examples is certain (presumably American) Law Schools, whose success metric bizarrely included the number of applications rejected – presumably in the interests of remaining exclusive. The outcome was an increase in offers made to patently unsuitable candidates, purely so that they could be rejected and the metric met.

I felt a surge of recognition at this story, as my own experience of the British education system over several decades was similar: since emphasis was placed on league tables and exam results, almost the entire education system has shifted from teaching subject matter for its own sake to teaching students explicitly how to pass exams (gaming the system might be a better description). Exams whose results are invalidated by the fact that they are all too often not supported by genuine student insight. From this emerges a mindset that cannot accept justified failure on the part of some as the price for genuine success by others – and along the way, both groups of students are sold short. Few teachers dare to swim against this tide; I was one of them, and I paid a heavy price for doing so.

But to return to my initial sense of being short-changed…

Metrics have the additional effect of measuring the measurable, rather than the valuable. And so the emphasis shifts away from what is truly of value towards that which can be measured. Everything is effectively dumbed down because simplistic things are most easily measured – for example, the amount of money a sales assistant took in their shift – but not the quality of service they provided, or the satisfaction the customer did or did not experience. And that’s where the feeling of having been had comes from.

I think this mindset has now infected almost every aspect of life in the U.K.  Somewhere in my residual awareness is a sense of a fair transaction; I accept that one cannot have something for nothing and I expect to pay a fair price for things I buy. In some cases, I am prepared to spend quite a lot, but I expect good quality of service and product in return.  Would that the other parties in such transactions still seemed to think the same thing. But fair service seems to have gone by the board; what matters to most commercial organisations is solely the metric that delivers the largest annual profit. From this perspective, the sole reason for the troublesome existence of The Customer is to feed the corporate bottom line. Whether they get good value for money – or even a fit-for-purpose product – is simply not an issue.

There is an aggregate effect here too: there seem to be two models for company profit: one sells disposable junk at a bargain basement price, while the other sells premium products to the vanishingly small percentage of the market for whom being fleeced is not a concern. And in some cases, the only difference seems to be the price of the twt….

 In between the two, those who are willing or able to pay moderate amounts for decent quality have been squeezed. The situation seems to have become more extreme as the income of the wealthy few has soared, and with it the prices of products that want to preserve their “exclusivity”, while I guess, if you are prepared to settle for cheap junk, you don’t care less in the first place. This is another manifestation of inequality, and it shows even in my local town. Home to around 200,000 people and relatively affluent, it is not a backwater – and yet its retail offering has been hollowed out so that it really only serves these two markets. Choice is an illusion, though to be honest, I doubt this is an issue that probably concerns the vast majority, for whom cheapness seems to be the only criterion in town.

It has been made worse by the widespread disappearance of local businesses, ones for whom good customer service and value were essential aspects of what they provided. A particular hurt has been the disappearance of the last specialist menswear shop in my town, which served me for thirty years with intermittent purchases of good quality clothing. I can hardly begrudge Duncan his retirement, but it has left a hole. There is now nowhere locally where I can buy any clothes that I am prepared to part with cash for.

In the search today for a new summer suit, I have instead been investigating one of the longer-lasting (now only) high street brands, which at least still seems to offer a reasonable selection. They even offer some suits made from good-quality Italian fabrics. On my first enquiry, we ascertained, however, that the cutting and stitching was nonetheless done in China to a British template, albeit apparently at a factory that did seem to know what it was doing. So not really an Italian suit at all. I went back for a second look today, and a different assistant assured me that beyond doubt the suits were manufactured in Italy. I did not push for a second look at the label: the “Made in Italy” label is not applied to anything lightly, and I knew it would not be there.

The question is, why would I spend money at a shop where either a) the company does not care about dissembling on the provenance of its clothes (the “Italian fabric” was writ large, while “made in China” was quite the opposite) and b) where the staff is either unknowledgeable or dishonest enough to tell a straight lie even to a customer who was proposing to spend a not inconsiderable sum?

A similar thing can be seen with food outlets; in theory, the increase in such places on the high street ought to be a cause for celebration – and we are still some way from the density of cafes and restaurants found in many continental places. But it is not – because they deal almost exclusively with food treated in the same way as junk clothes: a huge, spurious choice of various incarnations of mass-produced chain-food pap, and virtually nothing for those who want choose a different deal, who would – yes- be prepared to pay (an amount) more for something of genuine quality. That still tends to be the difference between British towns and their continental counterparts.

The answer, of course, is that 99% of the time, they get away with it. People who know or care about these things are so few and far between that we make next to no dent in the companies’ income whether we decide to buy or not. In the UK in particular, the mass market buys almost entirely on price, while what matters to those on the selling side is simply whatever ruse they can deploy to maximise their revenue; all else is irrelevant. Even, it seems to the point of not caring about those sectors of the market who want something else. It is a matter of put up or shut up. To avoid repetition, I will skip details of several other recent experiences; suffice it to say the above were not unique events.

There is, of course, an aggregate impact of all this: I am a strong proponent of local shopping. Town and city centres are essential parts of their communities and I would be very happy to purchase as much as possible in such places. And you can’t feel fabrics or taste food online. But what am I to do if my needs are increasingly ignored? If I am not able to spend my money on things I genuinely want, then I cannot – or will not – patronise such shops. I am not prepared to feel that I have been had. We are left with places that largely purvey junk – while those with the means and (maybe) the taste patronise somewhere else entirely.

I am then left with no alternative but to do the legwork virtually – and shop online, where at least I know that the sales assistant (me) will give the customer (also me) the care that his purchase deserves.

Food, Opinion & Thought

Vanilla

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It’s the hot chocolate that gives it away. A week or two ago, we were in a fairly average café in our local town, and I ordered one. It arrived promptly enough but turned out to be – as expected – the usual disappointing fare of over-sweet Cadbury’s powder, though in this case worsened by the fact that it was over-dilute and tasted mostly of water.

A few hot chocolates previously, I was in Lille, where chocolat chaud arrived as melted chocolate and a jug of hot milk. The same is normally the case in Italy, where hot chocolate has the consistency of double cream and almost needs to be spooned.  Inspired by this, at home we have taken to using Molinari which is at least available online in the U.K.

The trouble is, one’s palate adjusts to the flavours one consumes, which makes the insipid British offerings all the worse for us… We have the same experience with coffee; at home, we habitually drink Illy Italian coffee and make it with a Gaggia espresso machine, which delivers something like Italian strength – which is now our natural point of reference. What we mostly find in the coffee shops on British streets, despite their proliferation, is brown bathwater. Despite the coffee shop hype, and multiple gimmicky flavourings,  the baseline product repeatedly disappoints.

A couple of decades ago, I welcomed the spread of coffee shops across the U.K. It seemed like a major step forward for civilisation. In particular, I recall an early branch of Costa at Liverpool Street station, when it was still independently owned, and still felt like a proper Italian coffee bar, complete with polished granite counter, chromed high stools, proper pastries, and baristas who knew what they were doing.

Sadly, in recent years, I’ve all but given up on getting a good coffee in the U.K., at least outside a specialist restaurant. Coffee shops have become just another retail outlet clone for big business. Both Costa and Pret a Manger (hitherto my fall-backs for a half-decent cup) seem to have travelled the dumbed-down route. In lieu of decent drinks, both now offer the same buckets of dilute brown precipitate as Starbucks, to be sucked through the plastic lid of a cardboard takeaway cup. As with most things in Britain, we are only ever given a diluted version of what happens elsewhere.

My guess is that the loss of distinctiveness of such brands is not unconnected to the fact that both were bought out by large conglomerates, which broadened the reach but, in the process, completely destroyed the product. My second guess is that this trend is another import from the U.S.A, whose coffee, if the average Americano is anything to go by, is even more anaemic than ours. Once again, quantity over quality. It seems that the mass-business model is not to offer anything that might offend anyone by being too tasty. But in the process, they only end up giving even greater offence to those of us who prefer something more distinctive.

Apparently, the growth in the café sector in the U.K. at present is with independents. We do have some locally – but sadly they mostly seem to have used the chains as their template, both in terms of ambience and product.  https://www.lovetoast.co.uk/toastwitham   They talk the talk about loving coffee – but my experiences of drinking there revealed the same over dilute buckets as everywhere else.

From hot drinks to life in general.

What concerns me here, is why the British public puts up with this treatment. Which comes first: the companies diluting standards, and with it, expectations – or a public whose taste is so vanilla in the first place, that the companies know they won’t sell anything more distinctive?

I don’t have anything against genuine vanilla either – it is a very pleasant flavour used properly (which is not in gimmicky flavoured coffees…) But there’s a reason the word has also come to mean bland – and in that respect, it seems to describe British taste perfectly. In fact, those flavoured coffees tell a tale of their own: of a market that values gimmicks over good basic quality. Novelty to distract from the inferior quality of the basic offering.

One might have hoped that by now the much-vaunted British food and drink revolution of the Nineties and Noughties would have embedded itself in the national psyche of successive generations, but in actual fact, Vanilla seems to be getting worse. The end-product of that ‘revolution’ with regard to food seems to have been the gourmet burger – which ultimately is still just a burger –  and an increased range of pseudo-ethnic outlets which, from what I can see, just offer various incarnations of fast food. Packaging it as ‘street food’ doesn’t deny what it ultimately is: processed junk.

One might also have thought that increased health awareness would have had an impact, but my close professional contact with the current generation of teens suggests they eat more junk than ever before, and a lot of them don’t touch anything that isn’t Coke or ‘flavoured’ water when it comes to drinks.

One of the repeated experiences I have across the Channel is places where one’s senses are fed rather than ignored. I can’t help it: it just happens. Time and time again. As I wrote a short while ago, the experiences of different countries do strongly suggest that tastes and expectations are not the same everywhere. One can debate whether the products on offer reflect the market or dictate it – but either way, I am still bemused why British tastes are just so, well – vanilla. Anaemic. Or as one writer put it, Taste Free.

It is not only hot drinks: as I’ve bemoaned before, the same goes for standards in everything: the overriding principle is Bland. I’ve learned never to trust the reviews on Trustpilot – most people seem to have completely different benchmarks). Everything seems to need to be diluted, its teeth and claws removed, before it is acceptable to the anodyne ‘Great’ British public. Or are many other people also sitting there in their local Costa secretly disappointed at the offering? And if so, then Why?

Despite much mulling of this over the years, I still am not much closer to an answer. When presented with such an opinion, many people become indignant, as though national pride could and should not be affronted in this way. But if they are part of the problem, they are scarcely going to understand it. For them, Italian coffee will just seem unbearably strong. Maybe the climate has something to do with it, or maybe it’s what a historic Protestant ethic of self-denial does to our feelings about sensory indulgence? But then, other northern European countries, just as cold and just as Protestant, don’t seem to have the same difficulties producing decent Kaffe und Kuchen and indeed good quality other things too…

I suspect that knowing your own preference is part of it, something else where, in the taste stakes, it seems that  many Britons are still in the starting blocks. It is certainly the case that stronger tastes become – ahem! – more Marmite – you either like them or you don’t.  If you do not know your own preferences, you cannot be discerning. You will meekly, passionlessly, accept what you are given, in a way I suspect the French consumer, for example, rarely does should it be substandard. Until people boycott places that offer inferior products, those places will carry on getting away with it.

A recent YouTube watch, mulling the British mindset seemed to major on “easy going” as a British characteristic. Perhaps: so easy going as never to stand up for decent standards when they are needed.

It doesn’t give me satisfaction to have these experiences. It is a great disappointment that life on this side of the Channel sometimes seems to be lived in diffident shades of grey compared with what happens elsewhere. I can’t see any other real reason why it should be so – except that the culture itself is now so diluted that people never want to do the work to appreciate anything more distinctive. So used have they perhaps become to the bland offerings of big commerce. In other words, it is as it is simply because the majority of people are themselves now so vanilla that they are content to let everything else be, as well.

Arts, Architecture & Design, Food, Opinion & Thought

Props

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On our dusk walk back to the station during our visit to Lille, our eye was caught by a brightly-lit interiors shop. As with so many shops on the continent, it was the enticing window display that did it. Before we knew, we were inside. We had gone to Lille minus hand luggage, which is just as well, since we exited sporting two very large bags containing four nicely textural wool cushions for our sofas. It was also just as well that we had restrained our other purchases that day to a box of pâtes de fruits from Méert, since we had quite a job getting through Eurostar check-in and onto the train.

So once again, we returned from France with enticing stuff, an eventuality much more likely from there than here. And it started my mind rolling on why stuff is important; after all, I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about it…

In my head, I can hear a riposte to my frequent laments about poor quality in the U.K.: people who are secure in their identities and lives do not need emotional props to make their lives worthwhile. Maybe that is why the U.K. plays everything down: its citizens are already wholly secure in themselves….

If only the evidence supported it. Quite apart from the mental health crisis, it is not that the British eschew stuff: consumer culture has never been more dominant in the nation’s life, and shopping is apparently still a national recreation, even if now done online rather than on the high street. We have so much stuff that apparently self-storage facilities are a growth sector… But when we have so much, how can we possibly appreciate it all? 

I’m not going to decry stuff as a modern sin; people have coveted attractive objects since early human times. What has perhaps changed is the balance between quality and quantity: we are now so used to it, that stuff is as cheap psychologically as it can be monetarily.

So I am not going to apologise for, in effect, arguing for more veneration of stuff. Quite apart from purely practical necessity, personal possessions may well be props for our fragile egos, as they have been since early times. The secret lies in the appreciation: choosing more carefully in the first place, and then actively appreciating what we are lucky enough to have, rather than taking it for granted, throwing it away – and buying more. People have long had possessions – but the important bit is the treasuring – rather than taking for granted. If wool cushions can genuinely add a small amount of pleasure to one’s life, then why not? But choose carefully and don’t throw away and replace after a short period!

While writing this, my attention turned to the contents of our chocolate basket, sitting on the post-lunch table.  Even there, the issue was clear: Exhibit A (below) shows the contrast in how chocolate is presented in the U.K. and Switzerland. This is not contrived: the bar of Cadbury was given to me at Christmas by a student; the Lindt was our regular fare bought from a local supermarket, and is reasonably representative of how chocolate is packaged in Switzerland. And yet it is Cadbury’s that is the most popular chocolate in the U.K.: cheap – and almost taste-free. Once again, dumbed down ‘product’ triumphs over something altogether more rewarding.

I tried a square of the Cadbury but could eat no more. The packaging said it all: 20% cocoa solids and “contains vegetable fats other than cocoa solid”. Enough to have hitherto made the EU exclude the British product from being described as chocolate in continental markets. It tasted of nothing but sugar. The dumbed-down packaging says all one needs to know about the mindset of how such products are marketed in the U.K.: a childish candy, rather than the more complex, adult offering of the Swiss. To be fair, Hotel Chocolat and others are slowly educating the British public about the possibilities – but there is a long, long way to go….

While I’m generally a fan of mindfulness, I found the concept of appreciation journalling a bit over the top  – until it occurred to me that in part, this blog does exactly that: it makes the case for choosing and owning of stuff as something less trivial: a matter of active celebration rather than mere mindless routine. One might still have the guilt-trip about needless consumption, but one solution is to turn ‘mindless’ into ‘mindful’. Material possessions can bring real pleasure to our lives – if chosen carefully and appreciated to the full. And in terms of ‘total consumption’, I suggest that choosing better is more likely to decrease our overall consumption, since it reduces levels of boredom and the need for the constant replacement of what we own.

Purchasing may be fun, but the defining part of the process should not be that moment, so much as the ongoing process of appreciative ownership. Indeed, purchasing is more pleasurable when one has the anticipation of a meaningful relationship with what one is buying. I suspect the Saturday afternoon arms-full leisure-shoppers don’t get this: our culture shops on quantity over quality every time. Mainstream retailers probably prefer it this way – but if one does decide to patronise a more discerning supplier, one finds a rather different attitude, where fewer-but-better still makes sense…

The French, Italians and others seem to know this better. My impression is that they are not as indiscriminate in what they buy as many British. Food is a perfect example: the veneration takes on almost cult-like status with renowned foodstuffs, and the knowledgeable selection of ‘good stuff’ is the informed customer’s part in this ritual. It’s a courtesy to the producer to have a deep appreciation for, and discrimination of, what one is buying. It can apply to other things too: it’s notable that many of the world’s great brands come from these countries. But I am not suggesting that brands are essential; while they acquire their reputations for a reason, there are plenty of good products out there from unknown suppliers. It’s the quality, not the label that is important.

The word ‘prop’ has another meaning: as in the ‘properties’ that actors and artists use to express their lives and work, to make that work more intense and more effective. Every day is part of the drama of one’s own life; the careful use of props to amplify and express our experiences, even to affirm our identities, is not a crime, but an integral part of the human experience – at least if done in the spirit of genuine appreciation.  

But as with chocolate, in that respect not all stuff is equal.