Meat 'n' two veg?
What comes into your mind when you think of British food? Fish and chips might be your first thought, closely followed by 'meat and two vegetables' type of dishes. One widely held perception is that British food is bland and uninteresting and while this perception is held for a reason - some of our food does meet this description! - we also have a long tradition of interesting and tasty regional dishes as well as having embraced dishes and cuisines from around the world.

Regional cuisine
The four countries of the UK have produced some diverse foods and dishes including over 400 types of cheeses, haggis, soups such as mulligatawny, black pudding, Lancashire hotpot, Welsh Rarebit, Norfolk pork sausages... So, definitely not just roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. There has been a huge resurgence of interest in these 'traditional' British dishes in recent years reinforcing their importance to our national culture.

What do people eat?
However, do people in the UK actually eat food like this most of the time? The closest answer is that although certain dishes have maintained their popularity with those who like them (black pudding is a regular feature of many fried breakfasts, or 'fry-ups') the foods that are eaten by British people everyday often have their origins in other countries.

Influence of travel
The experiences of British travellers over the centuries has helped the inclusion of so many other national dishes in our food culture. It has been further influenced by migration into the UK, particularly in the last century. To use curry as an example, British recipes for curry date back to the 18th century and the UK’s first ever curry house was opened in London in 1809 – the Hindostanee Curry House in Portman Square. In the 20th century, the first curry houses in the North West of England started in the 1950s to feed the men who had come from the Asian sub-continent to work in the region’s textile mills.  Manchester’s Curry Mile – the UK’s biggest concentration of curry restaurants – started to spring up in the 1960s and is more popular than ever today.

Convenience culture includes food from around the world
The influence of other countries' foods and dishes is particularly obvious in where we choose to go out to eat and what takeaway and convenience food we buy.

The UK, as with many other countries, has a convenience food culture - our lives are getting more busy and hectic, meaning that we often have to eat quickly. This is matched by the availability of ready packed and takeaway meals, most of which have their origins in cuisines from around the world – Italian pasta and pizzas, Indian and Pakistani curries, and Chinese dishes are perhaps the most popular, followed by Mexican, Thai and Japanese.

Where do we buy our food?
Supermarkets
We also like convenience when we are buying our food – the so-called ‘big five’ supermarket chains in the UK now account for about 70% of the food retail market here. This isn’t surprising given that on average a store such as Sainsbury’s offers tens of thousands of different items on its shelves.  Sales of convenience food were worth £11bn in 2001 in the UK and are estimated to grow by 33% in the next ten years.  Customers are also offered incentives such as reward schemes, easy parking and long opening hours (in large cities 24 hour opening is common) to fit in with busy lifestyles.

Local shopping

However, the other 30% of the market is made up of local shops such as Farmers Pride in Longsight, Manchester.  They offer a good range of fresh fruit and vegetables, cured hams, cooked meats, and Irish groceries – Longsight has an Irish community dating back to immigrants coming to work on the Manchester Ship Canal and so some of the customers of Farmers Pride are older people who are very loyal to Irish products.

The owner Paul Gregson has been in the food business since 1972 when he started working for a local Manchester chain of supermarkets called Liptons.  Since then he says that the variety of foods available has increased tenfold and there has been a disappearance of seasonal food – now fruit and vegetables can be imported at any time of year.

When asked about competition from supermarkets Paul said that small shops have had to specialise in order to keep their customers and get new ones and the quality of the food is often better as a result.  This doesn’t mean that customers get a more limited choice – on the day the picture was taken Farmers Pride had potatoes from Lincolnshire in the UK, Cyprus, Egypt and Ireland for sale.

Smaller more specialised shops also often offer better service to customers – they are more likely to have skilled staff who know about what they are selling and how it can be prepared and cooked.