English food is often perceived as ancient and reassuringly unchanging. Podcast host Lewis Bassett’s new book The Full English: The Ways We Eat and Why makes that view harder to sustain.
Bassett’s sociological approach shows how urbanisation, empire, industry and even Brexit have influenced the way the nation eats. Take the now ubiquitous sausage roll. Such a meat dish was once the preserve of the upper classes, but as Bassett states, modern mass manufacturing has allowed “people in Britain to regularly eat meals that were once the preserve of the wealthy”.
The Full English is not a history of English recipes, nor a conventional food history. Bassett combines professional kitchen experience with academic humanities expertise to explore why the English eat the way they do, and what those habits reveal about English society. The book’s central argument is that English food is unusual because of England’s particular route to modernity, which has entangled ideas about food with ideas about class and identity.
One of the book’s strengths is the combination of historical research and personal anecdote. Bassett goes commercial fishing and works in an artisan bakery then recounts his experiences. These excursions allow him to observe food culture at close quarters, but the sociological imperative sometimes comes at the expense of the food itself.
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