{"id":1132,"date":"2010-09-07T06:34:32","date_gmt":"2010-09-07T13:34:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/?p=1132"},"modified":"2010-09-07T06:36:59","modified_gmt":"2010-09-07T13:36:59","slug":"mmmm-england","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/2010\/09\/07\/mmmm-england\/","title":{"rendered":"Mmmm… England"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’re currently ending the University of Sussex leg of the trip: Kat’s conference. She should probably be writing about that since it’s her party, but since I’m the one with my feet up all day in a residence room, I have more time to actually do it.<\/p>\n

I’m actually enjoying what feels like a vacation from the vacation. I walked around Brighton and the university. Read a bunch. Surfed the web. Good stuff.<\/p>\n

But as I near in on my third day at the university, I’m starting to feel like a hunter-gatherer: most of my time is being spent trying to ensure an adequate food supply.<\/p>\n

I was prepared to come to England and learn that everything I had heard about British food was exaggerated. I really was. <\/p>\n

But, the food options available to me (here and London) seem to fall roughly into three categories: (1) pub food, (2) pre-wrapped sandwiches, and (3) restaurants that are too expensive for an average meal. There is also a minor fourth category: (4) food from elsewhere on the planet, adapted to British tastes.<\/p>\n

(1) The pub food is good, for what it is: unseasoned meat and starch. For example, pies<\/a> (meat filling and crust) and fish and chips<\/a> (right there in the name). I’ll also throw into this category the full breakfast<\/a> and while there is a certain awesomeness to it, it’s still fundamentally meat and starch. This can only sustain one for so long: barely a vegetable to be seen.<\/p>\n

(2) Douglas Adams was certainly exaggerating somewhat, but this quote rings true:<\/p>\n

There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do.<\/p>\n

‘Make ’em dry,’ is the instruction buried somewhere in the collective national consciousness, ‘make ’em rubbery. If you have to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing ’em once a week.’ <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Marks and Spencer seem to have been able to step cautiously away from this advice, but one store can only stray so far outside the norm.<\/p>\n

(3) We did have a very nice meal in London at a place<\/a> that was a little too expensive to go to regularly. Oddly, it was still full of men standing around, drinking beer, but not eating.<\/p>\n

(4) In an effort to break into option 4, I just bought a “mexican bean wrap”. Much to my dismay, it was actually a cleverly-disguised option 2 sandwich. It was a pita (!) containing about a tablespoon of bean-like substance (with the volume of the thing being made up by pita, not filling). The pita was stale enough that the term “steel reinforced” came to mind.<\/p>\n

Really, Marks and Spencer has been keeping me alive. A few days ago, Kat and I got a couple of cornish pasties (pub-style meat + dough) and some prepared food from M&S to round out a meal. I took one bite of some pasta salad and realized that the parsley on it was both green and uncooked. I was so happy to have a vegetable (small though it was) that I turned to Kat and said words to the effect of “this is mine and you can’t have any!” I did eventually share.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’re currently ending the University of Sussex leg of the trip: Kat’s conference. She should probably be writing about that since it’s her party, but since I’m the one with my feet up all day in a residence room, I have more time to actually do it. I’m actually enjoying what feels like a vacation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1132"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1139,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1132\/revisions\/1139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}