Paul Krug­man didn’t win the Nobel prize for eco­nom­ics for this. But maybe he should have. It’s a med­it­a­tion on Brit­ish food and why it was once so dread­ful. (And there’s surely a les­son in there about edu­ca­tion and media consumption.)

For someone who remem­bers the old days, the food is the most start­ling thing about mod­ern Eng­land. Eng­lish food used to be deservedly fam­ous for its awful­ness — greasy fish and chips, gelat­in­ous pork pies, and dish­wa­ter cof­fee. Now it is not only easy to do much bet­ter, but tra­di­tion­ally ter­rible Eng­lish meals have even become hard to find. What happened?

Maybe the first ques­tion is how Eng­lish cook­ing got to be so bad in the first place. A good guess is that the country’s early indus­tri­al­iz­a­tion and urb­an­iz­a­tion was the cul­prit. Mil­lions of people moved rap­idly off the land and away from access to tra­di­tional ingredi­ents. Worse, they did so at a time when the tech­no­logy of urban food sup­ply was still prim­it­ive: Vic­torian Lon­don already had well over a mil­lion people, but most of its food came in by horse-drawn barge. And so ordin­ary people, and even the middle classes, were forced into a cuisine based on canned goods (mushy peas!), pre­served meats (hence those pies), and root veget­ables that didn’t need refri­ger­a­tion (e.g. pota­toes, which explain the chips).

But why did the food stay so bad after refri­ger­ated rail­road cars and ships, frozen foods (bet­ter than canned, any­way), and even­tu­ally air-freight deliv­er­ies of fresh fish and veget­ables had become avail­able? Now we’re talk­ing about eco­nom­ics — and about the lim­its of con­ven­tional eco­nomic the­ory. For the answer is surely that by the time it became pos­sible for urban Bri­tons to eat decently, they no longer knew the dif­fer­ence. The appre­ci­ation of good food is, quite lit­er­ally, an acquired taste — but because your typ­ical Eng­lish­man, circa, say, 1975, had never had a really good meal, he didn’t demand one. And because con­sumers didn’t demand good food, they didn’t get it. Even then there were surely some people who would have liked bet­ter, just not enough to provide a crit­ical mass.

And then things changed. Partly this may have been the res­ult of immig­ra­tion. (Although earlier waves of immig­rants simply adap­ted to Eng­lish stand­ards — I remem­ber vis­it­ing one fairly expens­ive Lon­don Italian res­taur­ant in 1983 that advised diners to call in advance if they wanted their pasta freshly cooked.) Grow­ing afflu­ence and the over­seas vaca­tions it made pos­sible may have been more import­ant — how can you keep them eat­ing bangers once they’ve had foie gras? But at a cer­tain point the pro­cess became self-reinforcing: Enough people knew what good food tasted like that stores and res­taur­ants began provid­ing it — and that allowed even more people to acquire civ­il­ized taste buds.

So what does all this have to do with eco­nom­ics? Well, the whole point of a mar­ket sys­tem is sup­posed to be that it serves con­sumers, provid­ing us with what we want and thereby max­im­iz­ing our col­lect­ive
wel­fare. But the his­tory of Eng­lish food sug­gests that even on so basic a mat­ter as eat­ing, a free-market eco­nomy can get trapped for an exten­ded period in a bad equi­lib­rium in which good things are not deman­ded because they have never been sup­plied, and are not sup­plied because not enough people demand them.