This blog is an attempt to chart the ongoing Brexit saga through the medium of food. Don’t worry, I’m not attempting to sculpt Michael Gove in Victoria Sponge or change history through People’s Vote cupcakes. This is strictly a written affair. But things happen so fast in Brexit Britain that even huge political events become difficult to process and the little stories pass us by. Hidden in snippets and anecdotes about food might be a few clues about the meaning of Brexit Britain. I have no idea where this story will be going but, hopefully, we’ll learn a few things along the way.
Food is not an accidental choice. It is what I know a bit about so it was an obvious choice. But also food has been one of the central ways in which the British have imagined their relationship to Europe over a long period of time. As Michaela DeSoucey argues in her article on Gastronationalism, foods are ‘cultural and material resources that affect and respond to political agendas’. Euroscepticism has often been expressed through food. Peter Anderson and Tony Weymouth identify a long history of hostility towards the EU in the British press in which the EU is often portrayed as ‘a foreign-dominated forum for fish wars and sausage spats.’
In the run up to the recent EU Referendum, food seemed ever present in both Leave and Remain campaigns, in oft-repeated images of straight bananas, depressed dairy farmers and migrant asparagus pickers. But the Leave campaign appropriated gastronationalism and made it part of Eurosceptic discourses. These discourses represented any perceived threat to British food practices as attacks on our cultural traditions. British identity was represented as distinct from Europe each time we were told that we needed to defend Britain’s right to custard cream biscuits, bendy bananas and prawn cocktail crisps from the bureaucratizing power-mad EU who wanted to undermine our way of life.
So what happens next? In this possible/probable year of Brexit, I want to collect snapshots of how food is used in these ongoing debates, to create a record of what is happening and, hopefully, to try to begin to make sense of it all. If you spot things I miss or have ideas about what it all means, I’d love to hear from you.
Brexit Food Blog 