Imperative cooking: a new club
POLITICIANS ARE out to stop you and me from buying the meat we want, from well-hung beef to lambs' brains, fresh tripe, giblets and blood for boudin and morcilla. They already have their shoulders against our front doors and, by the new year, will be in, marching about the house and order- ing us to stop cooking a whole range of dishes we love. At least the effect will be just as if these louts were in the kitchen, for good meat-cooking depends upon being able to buy the right raw materials and it is these they are going to forbid. The new regulations on slaughter-houses require structural changes to the buildings and additional standards, and hence inspectors, which will impose costs which many small ones will be unable to bear. They have a right of appeal, says the Ministry of Agri- culture, Fisheries and Food (Maff), to Brussels: fat, or rather lean, chance.
There is no evidence that these extra standards are necessary. Worse, Maff has no evidence that consumers want them. When I put it to them that they did not care what consumers wanted, they said this was 'ridiculous'. But what other conclusion is possible when they do something which affects consumers without bothering to ask their views? At least three lots of politi- cians and bureaucrats are involved in this philistine and authoritarian campaign: Maff, the EEC and local authorities which do the inspection. Political analysts will no doubt argue about which lot is most to blame; good cooks don't particularly care.
No one, of course, knows how many slaughterhouses will go under. Maff breezi- ly suggests some may not. But they have done no research to find out. Nor do they seem aware of the impact on the kitchen and dinner table. This will be most devas- tating when slaughterhouses attached to or which supply — small butchers close. Those butchers, already a tiny minority, are the only places good cooks can get the range of meat ingredients they want, in the state they want. I don't want sheep's brains frozen in a plastic tub. I want to see Mr Simpson go out the back, collect the fresh head from the sheep he killed yesterday, split it open and tease out the brains. They will end up the same evening in black but- ter, beignets or even with coriander.
The core of the whole matter is that con- sumers want different things. There may be spineless, ignorant housewives trembling with anxiety about the remote chances of a spot of diarrhoea induced by some unlikely contamination; though the evidence sug- gests their own sloppy practices in the kitchen are more likely to give them it. There are many more cooks who don't know what brains are, could not cook them and would be too lazy to bother to do so properly. They are quite happy daily frying mean slices of underhung steak in some- thing polyunsaturated. The tremblers should be catered for by special butchers with five antiseptic stars. All we good cooks ask for is a few butchers and slaughter- houses selling what we want. We do not want to inflict it on the masses. That would be a waste. In food, as in most other things, consumer interests cannot be represented by a standard product or process.
So what is to be done? Although Maff say they are pressing for equal implementa- tion of these bossy, homogenising direc- tives, it is clear from past experience that the Frogs and Eyeties will not implement them. Readers should press their MPs to make Maff switch tack. No enforcement until the Frogs and Eyeties have enforced these and a host of other directives, such as those on fishing quotas.
More generally, the recent politicisation of buying, selling and eating food is highly alarming. The Government has no answer to the economic crisis or the rise in crime but plenty of time to tell us what to eat. Mr John Gummer's health police have invaded the privacy of our kitchens to remove half the menu, while, from the wireless in the drawing-room, Mrs Peter Bottomley prop- agates her ten-year state plan for healthy living. Neither was invited to the house. Both show appalling manners in forcing their way in. Mr Simpson, the slaughterer- butcher, has given thousands of people pleasure. Neither minister has given any- one any equivalent pleasure and now they are stopping old Simpson doing so. It is they who should go, not he. Which first? I had thought Mrs Bottomley. While Mr Gummer goes along with the interference, she seems positively proud of it. So readers are hereby invited to join the 'Enemies of Mrs Bottomley' (write c/o The Spectator). But I warn Mr Gummer that if Simpson is shut down and I cannot get my raw tripe and brains he will go to the top of the list.
Digby Anderson
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