Interview by Amelia McGarvey
Portrait by Aleksandra Boruch

AM Your book shares the same name as your podcast, The Full English, and covers a lot of the same themes. What inspired you to switch from podcasting to writing?

LB I did a PhD in historical sociology, whilst working as a chef, and the podcast was a way of combining my academic work with my cooking. Statistics show that we have some really peculiar eating habits in this country: we eat more processed food than any other country in Europe, we have some of the shortest and most overweight children in the world, and yet we’re seen as a tall nation. We have a confused relationship with food culture in Britain. When people talk about eating at a nice restaurant, they typically imagine a place which serves “modern European” food. But where are all the English restaurants? Britain was not founded so much as a nation-state as an empire; in a way, Britain doesn’t really exist. But Italy developed as a nation quite late as well; it developed its own national cuisine to reflect this. As the phrase goes, we made Italy, now we have to make the Italians.

AM You interned at a Michelin restaurant, a bakery and a fishing boat as part of your research. How did each experience inform your work?

LB  On the fishing boat, we were fishing for whelks. No one in Britain eats whelks but we farm them because the government invested in loads of boats to fish seabass, and then the seabass became overfished, so the industry turned to whelks instead. None of the crew ate whelks; when I asked them their favourite fish, a lot of them said fish fingers or canned tuna. Brexit showed that Britain imagines itself as a maritime country, yet fish is not really part of our culinary DNA. People don’t tend to eat fish beyond cod, haddock, prawns or salmon, and all of that is imported.

AM Your chapter on sourdough bread shows how people oversimplify the idea of heritage. How does that myth-making around “authenticity” map onto anxieties about who belongs and who doesn’t?

LB Sourdough is interesting because it’s a complete invention. It is touted as a time-honed baking tradition, but it’s all marketing. Why do people feel the need to invent these things? It speaks to a desire for belonging, of wanting to connect with the past and belong to a particular place. What I try to emphasise in the book is that all these forms of artisanal cooking, like all craft-based traditions, are important for people’s sense of pride and place, even if they’re completely fabricated

AM In your podcast episode about St John, you talk about an “ironic ethno-nationalism” which defines the New Labour era of British restaurants that came hand in hand with a proclivity for shock and squeamishness. How do you think these two traits interact?

LB They share a perceived masculinity, in that sense of eating liver and talking about how much you love blood. In Britain, we have a pre-Empire narrative of ourselves as beef-eating John Bull types, strong but simple folk. The reason the King’s Guard are called the Beefeaters is that they were literally fed rations of beef. It goes back to the ways in which our national identity is shaped by war: we are a strong nation made up of blokes who like to eat meat.

AM With geopolitical and environmental events threatening our ability to import food, fuel and fertiliser, how will our understanding of English cuisine be disrupted over time?

LB Climate crisis and global trade disruption should direct us to think mor about domestic production. We can’t be dependent on everyone else for our most basic necessities, though we have such a long tradition of that in Britain. We are a nation of shopkeepers and traders; we tend to buy products from elsewhere and bring them to ourselves. We’ve been doing this for the past 200 years. What would it mean for us to start thinking about our food system in a more holistic, serious way? The basic problem is that the state has become neutered. The food system is not going to become more sustainable, more nourishing or more delicious if we just allow people to get on with it. You might get a couple of benevolent farmers wanting to do a bit of regenerative farming, a bit of rewilding, but most of that is marketing, and only appeals to a small number of consumers. The state needs to be more involved in how we grow food again, so we can make our industry a source of pride.

AM Has the way we eat always been political?

LB When someone says that they don’t know what a flat white is or that the reason you can’t buy a house is that you eat too many avocados – none of that is new. There was a profound culture war in the 18th century over French cultural influence. A lot of what we think of as iconic English dishes like pies, roast beef or Yorkshire puddings were invented as part of this culture war against France. Food tells you where you’re from and what kind of person you are; it has always been political.

AM What is the link between agriculture and the land-owning aristocracy?

LB We can’t get over our aversion to poshness whilst good food remains unaffordable for most. We need to change the incredibly inequitable land ownership in this country, where, according to Guy Shrubsole, 1% of the population controls 90% of the land – unsurprisingly, most of those people are the old aristocracy. There are landowners whose inherited land goes back to the Norman Conquest. These are the people who are often most drawn to schemes like rewilding, but largely only for reasons of tourism and marketing. They won’t change our food systems. We need to make the state more powerful and bring in more democratic control over the way we eat, from the ground up.

AM Having finished the book, do you feel more or less confident about the state of English food?

LB Neither hopeless nor confident. I’m just intrigued. Once the book is out, I want to do a series of restaurant pop-ups across the country, where I attempt to cook modern English cuisine. It has made me question what that even looks like. We’re speaking now in the middle of a heatwave: who is going to want to eat the animal fats and boiled vegetables we associate with English food? That brings me back to sourdough: there’s no reason we can’t invent new things and just call them traditionally English. There’s a lot of scope to play. .