Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today’s essay is a long read by Vittles editor Sharanya Deepak about delicious and chaotic South Asian Italian dishes, from keema spaghetti to pink sauce.

This essay is taken from our second print issue, on the theme of ‘Bad Food’ – specifically the messy, unglamorous and chaotic aspects of contemporary food culture. You can read other pieces from the Bad Food Extended Universe here, but we highly recommend buying a copy. We have sold three-quarters of the print run so far and we are sold out of Issue 1, so don’t sleep on it!

Subscribe now

Buy Issue 2

The bedrock of Italian cuisine, I have been told my whole life, is minimal ingredients, freshness and proper, by-the-book technique. It is allegedly a cuisine rooted so firmly in tradition that there is a special state-led cabinet and culinary police force employed to determine who may be causing it harm. I sometimes wonder where Aunty Pasta in West Delhi fits into this lineage. Aunty Pasta is a small street stall just outside Karol Bagh metro station – a place that is a stranger to moderation and discipline, culinary or otherwise. Here you can buy everything from a retro MacBook to thrifted Yeezys to Pakistani salwars; around the stall, there are juice stalls, roadside sandwich grills, hundreds of people shopping for trinkets, and a couple of other people selling momo chutney-pasta made to Aunty Pasta’s recipe (only one of which is a permitted franchise).

At her stall, Aunty – as many Nepali women migrants in the city are known – whips up a concoction of sliced penne, oil, diced green capsicums (peppers), mayonnaise and Maggi masala, all mixed with an MSG-laden momo chutney that she pours into her seasoned iron kadhai from a plastic mug. The dish’s ingredients are essentially the same as those that go into a regular momo, but selling something less traditional helps Aunty to stand out and survive. The pasta – which has, since its invention around a decade ago, been subject to a cycle of influencer adulation, followed by mockery – is good in the way that a packet of crisps at a train station is good: it prompts buying a cold, fizzy beverage, and tastes mostly of starch and oil.

Across India, Italian ingredients continue to crop up in unlikely forms. Not too far from Aunty is ‘Billu’s Hut’, which takes several – more far-fetched – risks. On the menu is achari chaap pizza, Punjabi-sauce pasta, pasta Mexican, Punjabi paneer pasta and corn-nachos pasta. In North Delhi, another street vendor sells an Indo-Chinese macaroni dish to students at Delhi University; here, pasta and noodles are tossed together with oil, spices, ketchup and soy sauce (if you balk at the thought of combining pasta and noodles, I can point you to an influencer review I once watched, which said ‘maida maida hota hai’ – that flour is flour).

Yet it is the tamer, more traditional takes on the cuisine – pink-sauce pasta, malai tikka pizza – that have white folks everywhere gasping in uncanny-valley horror, as if the sanctity of their Tuscan holiday has been destroyed by South Asians adding spices to their pasta several oceans away. Last year, at a party in London, an acquaintance told me that when his girlfriend of Italian origin visited India, ‘it was hard for her’ to see the garlic-filled, spice-laden pasta sauces. ‘She had a difficult time,’ he said soberly, as if narrating incidents of systemic inequality.

Across the subcontinent, Desi spins on Italian dishes continue to shock the European canon. There is makhani-sauce pasta, roti lasagne, pizza with chicken tikka or beef keema, and spice-filled pasta sauce sprinkled with whatever mixes people have at home. In West Delhi this year, I ate spaghetti with a pesto made from mint and green chillis – it tasted like a Maharashtrian thecha. As I write this, my little brother tells me about a pasta his Kashmiri friend made with leftover aab gosht – mutton cooked in milk – which was the best carbonara he ever ate. This is a world where nobody seems to care about European scrutiny, where any culture of the West is mere flourish to adapt for maximum entertainment. When I spoke to a cafe owner in North Delhi, she told me Italian food was popular with local clientele. ‘Authentic pizzas and pastas’, she said, ‘inspired by people like Massimo Dutti, famous Italian chef’.

The origins of Italian food in South Asia are unclear, but most people I speak to say the same thing: Desi Italian is less inspired by Italian cuisine than it is by its twisted American counterpart. It was only decades after southern Italians migrated to the US in the 1940s that their food began to trickle down, like much else in American culture, to urban South Asia. The other thing that most people tell me is that some of the first Italian food made in India must have been started by some well-travelled Gujaratis. Writer Paromita Vohra mentions Snowmans in Bombay, where you could find pizza rolls. Cookbook author Saee Koranne-Khandekar tells me about Café Churchill in Colaba, which made a ‘wonderful’ roast potato and chicken lasagne. Not every exciting Indo-Italian creation came from Gujaratis. Editor and writer Supriya Nair remembers the classic Udupi restaurant pizza in Hotel Shabari: ‘All Udipis had the same pizza menu for the longest time – eight-inch pizza with tomato sauce, onion, capsicum, and a mountain of Amul cheese on a biscuity base.’

Even if no culinary heritage can be traced to a singular source, in Bombay the documented history points to one restaurant: Trattoria. Tratts, as it is popularly known, was opened in Cuffe Parade’s President Hotel in 1981 by Ajit Kelkar, who then headed the TAJ hotel group. Trattoria quickly became famous for its large selection of cafe-style Italian dishes (prawn cocktail, vodka pasta), served in a banquet room with an open kitchen and comfortable sofa chairs; it remains hugely popular today. ‘You should go after midnight,’ Alex Sanchez, a Bombay-based American chef and restaurateur, tells me. ‘It’s just full of people eating aglio [e] olio’. Before Trattoria opened to customers, chefs were sent to train in Italy, but also, crucially, Manhattan. In Bombay – the city that housed the Indian film industry – any establishment that promised a new vocabulary of glitz was sure to work. The idea was to sit in chandelier-filled rooms and eat dishes with names no one could really pronounce.

Even so, like anything new, Italian food needed to be sold to Indian diners. In 2001, when the restaurant writer and television host Rashmi Uday Singh listed the restaurant, she mentioned the ‘cappuccino tarts’ and ‘eggless’ dishes for Hindus and Jains. She also mentioned what was a primary draw in the city of Bombay: celebrity sightings (in this case, a young Jackie Shroff). Very soon, Trattoria became a signifier of new European cuisine, a safe choice for Indian elites living abroad when they were in town – Salman Rushdie, for instance, is said to have stayed at the President. But none of this could have guaranteed a trickle-down into the rest of Bombay’s eating culture. How many people – then and now – could afford to stroll into the President for a prawn alla vodka?

One of the restaurants that has long claimed to have made Italian food more accessible is the all-vegetarian Little Italy in Pune, opened in 1989 by Raj Mehta. When I ask Amrut Mehta, Raj’s son and the current CEO, how the idea for the restaurant came about, he echoes everyone else: ‘You know, we are Gujaratis – my dad had the acumen. When he met an Italian chef, he thought it was a good idea’. Little Italy started as a small operation that catered to European tourists visiting the Osho Ashram in Pune – the same ashram that features in the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country. In the 1990s, an Indian clientele started visiting the restaurant, and within a few years, when a branch had opened in Bombay, Little Italy had tweaked their recipes in favour of the Indian palate. Thin-crust crispy pizzas, well-cooked pasta (al dente won’t cut it) and a tomato sauce with more garlic and spice than the Italian way. Mehta also tells me that while Europeans like simple, one-dimensional flavours (others I speak to are less diplomatic, calling this preference ‘bland’), ‘Indians like spices. As a business, we need to keep that in mind’.

Today, across Little Italy’s fifty branches, many of the dishes that are popular are the ones that first made the restaurant’s name in the nineties: pastas like ‘Barberesca’ – a cream sauce with broccoli, tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes, tempeh, chilli pepper and parmesan; and pizzas like Bombay, topped with spicy tomato sauce, onion, capsicum, cottage cheese, coriander and mozzarella. ‘And then there’s the thing we introduced years ago that people still love,’ Mehta says, fifteen minutes into our phone call. ‘Pink sauce.’

When I hear this, I double-check for confirmation. Discovering even the alleged inventor of pink sauce is like finding out which caveman rubbed flint to make fire. Pink sauce rules the trifecta of sauces that form the lexicon of Italian food in India. There is ‘red sauce’, made with tomatoes and spices (mostly described as ‘rich’ and ‘tangy’); ‘white sauce’, made with cheese, cream and flour (generally referred to as ‘creamy’ or ‘melty’); and pink sauce – the best of both worlds. I ask Mehta for the origin story. ‘I’m not sure, but I think one day, a gentleman mixed up two dishes on the table’, he replies, contemplating. Even if what Mehta says is myth, it is a plausible one – this kind of customisation and blending is inherent to how Italian food is eaten in India.

When San Francisco-born, Eleven Madison Park-trained Sanchez arrived in Bombay to head up the kitchen at The Table in 2010, he patiently addressed requests to add more chilli, salt or cream to plates that were sent back his way. ‘Like Italians, Indians are extremely particular about what they want,’ he tells me. But what on earth was pink sauce? ‘I made a few versions using what I knew from working in Italian restaurants elsewhere, but nothing worked. My line cooks would laugh at me, and I would say, Fine, guys! You do it! And they made a sauce with lots of garlic and chilli, adding cheese and enough dairy to make it pink. The sauce had to overwhelm the pasta’, he says. Eventually, Sanchez devised a pizza using pink sauce, called it ‘Pink Panther’ and put it on the menu at Americano, the restaurant which launched in 2019 that he co-owns. To no one’s surprise, the dish is the restaurant’s top seller. ‘It’s my little joke’, Sanchez tells me. ‘Reclaim pink sauce!’

If India has pink sauce supremacy, in Pakistan – where ‘vegetarian’ and ‘eggless’ are not concerns – Alfredo fettuccine is the primary player. ‘It’s everywhere, man! Everywhere!’ Alia Chughtai, a Karachi-based journalist, tells me, when I ask if she has encountered the recipe. The Pakistani version of the dish (and the only one with which I am familiar) is fettuccine – or whatever other pasta is on hand – cooked in a cream and flour sauce, then topped with spiced, baked or fried chicken breast. ‘People will top it up: green chillis, red chilli flakes and whatever else they want’, Chughtai adds. In his track ‘Introduction’, rapper Faris Shafi rhymes ‘Alfredo Fettucini’ with ‘red ho Lamborghini’. On email, writer Ahmer Naqvi tells me he ‘remember[s] a time when there was a “meri beti Alfredo fettuccine banana jaanti hai” vibe ongoing among middle-class families’, referring to the notion that a woman’s ability to cook the dish was used to advocate for her eligibility as a good hostess and wife.

On both sides of the border, Desi-Italian food seems to be a way to summon a fictional universe modelled after the Western world, an ‘elsewhereness’ that is aspirational but not imitative. ‘I like this,’ an American friend once said as we ate in a family-dining Western restaurant; she had ordered a macaroni salad with crispy corn and peppers. ‘A brown people’s version of white people’s lives’.

Packaged dry pasta was first introduced to South Asian markets in the 1970s; since then, billions of recipes – as infinitely varied as every household’s dal – have become a part of the repertoire of Desi-Italian cuisine. The Italian simulations of the restaurant world are timid compared to what happens in South Asian home kitchens. Many people I speak to mention dishes like ‘pasta sabzi’ or ‘chhonk vaali macaroni’, in which macaroni is cooked with a ‘chhonk’ – the everyday tempering of rai, haldi, jeera, mirchi (mustard, turmeric, cumin and red chilli powder) used for dishes like dal. Koranne-Khandekar tells me about her mother’s dish, inspired by a Tarla Dalal recipe, of spaghetti mixed with cream, sautéed onions, tomato sauce and ketchup, layered with a medley of vegetables and canned pineapple then topped with grated processed cheese and baked. When cooking Desi macaroni, ketchup is often present. Taiyyaba Ali, an independent chef who runs pop-ups, tells me that pasta dishes act as a place to ‘use Western and thrifted ingredients – like Domino’s oregano seasoning – that didn’t otherwise fit into an Indian repertoire’. For many mothers, pasta was a base starch, like flour or rice. ‘No one knew they were being “disobedient”’, Ali says. ‘There was no sense of the original recipe.’

By the 1990s, local pasta companies and small shops were selling new pasta shapes, while macaroni recipes – often marketed as ‘lunchbox staples’ – became a feature of women’s magazines. Some of these dishes – like Pakistani keema spaghetti (which also uses ketchup) – are so popular that they have become an institution. During the pandemic, Chughtai, like many others across South Asia, temporarily ran a delivery kitchen called Tangerine Tiffin, which had keema spaghetti on the menu as ‘Ammi vaaley keema noodles’ – Mum’s keema noodles. It was her most successful dish. ‘To me, keema spaghetti has never been Italian, always Pakistani’, cookbook author Maryam Jillani tells me. In a piece about the dish, Jillani writes that it was influenced by the method of ‘bhuna’ (through which the meat is cooked until it separates from the spices), noting how such recipes are modified not just by preferences of taste but also technique.

One common theme unites the Italian dishes that have become popular in the subcontinent: each has some element that feels familiar to South Asian diners. Unlike French cuisine, which people associate with raw meat, egg-based sauces and stoic fine-dining establishments, ‘there is a heartiness to Italian cuisine’, according to Koranne-Khandekar, that matches South Asian preferences. Naqvi loves Italian food because ‘the tomato-garlic-oil combo feels very similar to karahi gosht, which could be Pakistan’s national dish’. According to pasta chef Sambhavi Joshi, the Italian dishes that have caught Indian attention ‘have the same full, creamy mouthfeel as butter chicken and dal makhani’. Over a meal, a table of my friends concur that ‘pizza dough is just glorified tandoor ki roti’, which reminds me of the period when I would only eat pizza from one spot that made it on naan. Nair, meanwhile, mentions the ‘lactose availability’ of Indian diners. ‘So many Italian recipes are – especially in Bombay, and Gujarat – an excuse to eat cheese’, she says.

This is why, since the 1990s, pizzas – made on store-bought doughs, and sometimes rotis – have become similarly popular with South Asian households. ‘When I was growing up [in Islamabad], my mother bought pizza dough from the Afghan bakery, pre-made marinara sauce and picked her own toppings.’ Jillani tells me. ‘While she didn’t code any of this as “liberation”, I’m sure it must have been fun to be able to do something outside the traditional repertoire.’ In India throughout the nineties, when economic liberalisation had set in, products like FunFoods Pizza Sauces, branded pizza cheeses and, later, ‘taste makers’ (packets of spices that often tasted vaguely like Domino’s seasonings) made home-style pizzas ideal for hosting. By the noughties, ‘pizza’ had become a theme or abstraction to dispense as party snacks, like the ‘herbed pizza strips’ from Tarla Dalal’s The Complete Italian Cook Book (which was published in 2000 for an audience of mostly elite Indian housewives).

Today, the dry pasta market in India is valued at more than $1.4 billion, topped by older brands such as Bambino but also newer ones that sell pasta made from gluten-free Indian grain like jowar (sorghum). There are Italian cheeses sold by big brands like Amul, plus small-batch versions made by (and sold to) the upper classes in friendly organic stores, where they are stocked alongside handmade ceramic and soaps. There are also ranges of ‘Italian spices’ (‘itself an oxymoron’, according to Nair), sold by trusted small-sale sellers like Bharat Masala and multinationals like Maggi.

In Pakistan, this is taken up a notch: the brand Bake Parlor’s macaroni mixes range from ‘Balti Macaroni’ and ‘Tikka Macaroni’ to ‘Shashlik Macaroni’, ‘Chicken Ginger Macaroni’ and ‘Bihari Tikka Macaroni’. The website has recipes, too, for dishes like Balochi tikka lasagne and penne pasta pizza sticks. (To make the pasta-pizza sticks, penne, olives and cheese are loaded onto a skewer and dusted with spices and the brand’s pizza sauce, like a doughy, Italian-flavoured seekh kebab.)

As the market evolves, so too does home cooking. No one is simply throwing macaroni shells in a tadka pan anymore. There is chilli-garlic pasta, schezwan spaghetti, and cheesy pressure-cooker macaroni. Rajeswari Vijayanand, who runs the blog and channel ‘Raks Kitchen’, uses Italian pantry ingredients to suit her Tamil cooking – she tells me about her recipes for pasta sundal and orzo payasam. ‘Sometimes people in the comments will say, “this is disrespectful,” But I am a home cook – I use the tools of instinct and memory’, she says. People with more access to the global pantry might use ingredients like tahini, harissa and miso in their recipes, along with contemporary brands of upscale, small-batch produce. ‘There is cuisine, and then there is cooking’, Sanchez says when I ask about Indian-Italian dishes. ‘When it comes to cooking, “correct” is not a useful conversation. In a way, Indian-Italian cooking is a huge compliment to Italian cuisine.’

Before we continue, I must – as one is forced to – declare that I actually like Italian food. I have loved eating arancini in Rome. I have been fed aromatic soups and spaghetti alle vongole, lovingly made in huge pots, by my friends in Naples. Food in Italy, much like food anywhere, is delicious. I question only the treatment of those who dare trespass on the rigidity of the cuisine, especially when the policing comes from outside the country. It has been disgruntled British acquaintances who have lectured me about freshness if I dare so much as look at a bottle of Sriracha when hastily making pasta. Once, at a mediocre restaurant I worked at in Brussels, I was asked to tell an Indian family not to add chilli flakes to their lasagne, as if it hadn’t been made with substandard produce from Lidl’s discount aisle.

By the time I returned from my life in Europe, I had internalised all this snobbery. ‘God, overcooked pasta’, I muttered when I watched a friend eat a spicy pasta arrabbiata and order ‘extra sauce’ on the side for his free garlic bread. ‘You know it’s after noon’, I said at dinner with cousins when someone ordered a cappuccino (in response, my chair was dragged and positioned at a corner so everyone on it could throw croutons at my head). The idea that we must protect the sanctity of Italian cuisine reflects what I like to call ‘political proximity’, where things are sometimes brought into the white, Western canon, their value rendered by how much they appeal to a European appetite for culinary adventure. Even if those things are new, they must be unthreatening; it doesn’t take much for something to become too novel – not exciting anymore, but a threat of some kind. To its protectors, Italian food is safely exotic – delicious, exciting and a little different. Crucially, it is owned by white people, which makes it just foreign enough.

Earlier this year, I spoke to Alberto Grandi, the co-author, along with Daniele Soffiati, of La Cucina Italiana Non Esiste (‘Italian Cuisine Doesn’t Exist’). He told me that, these days more than ever, the Italian public believe that the world is hell-bent on destroying Italy’s cuisine. ‘Italians are convinced that everyone else in the world eats disgusting food,’ he says. ‘It allows the image to be formed of Italians being the perfect, rustic makers and consumers of cuisine.’ Grandi’s work, which has summoned the ire of puritanical chefs and food writers everywhere, argues that the idea of a unified Italian culinary tradition is steeped in marketing rather than truth. ‘In politics, it is easier to send the message of a “hypothetical enemy” [in this case, the ones tampering with Italian recipes], rather than a meaningful one that is based on what people really need.’

Today, Italian cuisine is propped up by the Punjabi farmers making parmesan and the Bangladeshis who run restaurant kitchens in Venice. Reuters reported that, in 2023, non-EU workers made up 34% of new hires of cooks and pizza-makers, with the proportion of non-EU kitchen assistant hires (such as cleaners and dishwashers) even higher at 58%. ‘Of course, this is not acknowledged’, Grandi says. ‘Because if it is, how will they sell the myth of one traditional cuisine?’ I think of all the South Asians cooking in Italian kitchens, policing their own instincts. When I tell Grandi about pink pasta, he is unfazed. ‘Did you expect shock? Because I am Italian? I am not shocked. Adaptability is the foundation of Italian cuisine.’

Meanwhile in India, the idea of being devoted to the true Italian method is a new way for the elite to distance themselves from the public. At her restaurant Casa Pasta Bar, Joshi serves pasta made from local, single-origin Indian grain, which she says ‘is a very Italian thing to do. But often, people don’t understand, and say, “This is not Italian” – because I have not used “durum semola” imported from Italy’. Archit Puri, a strategy consultant who works closely with restaurants, tells me that what used to be experimental is now the basis of a ‘pizza-pasta-burger repetition’ among venture-capital backed, consultant-run restaurants that are solely geared towards profit. ‘While the first Indo-Italian dishes were experimental, they have now become the norm. People use fancier names for the dishes like red sauce pasta and use them to replicate the same menu everywhere’, he says. But outside the rigidity of industry, the experiments continue, led by the dynamism of the home kitchen, small restaurants and innovations on the street.

The day I ate at Aunty’s Pasta, I got into an argument with two identical-looking lads who, wanting to speed their motorcycle through the road – which had been destroyed by crowds and rain – bullied and shouted at an older man with a heavy pushcart. As I ate, my argument widened, ending only when one of the boys conceded. ‘Haan hain hum badtameez chutiye!’ he yelled, calling himself an asshole before I could. If food is about one’s environment, these aren’t the rolling hills of Emilia-Romagna. In South Asia’s cities, pleasure is a sacred, evasive thing, which must be experienced (whether ‘tangy’, ‘melty’ or ‘creamy’) in the dense, pacy bustle of life.

While the first innovations may have been coded into a genre, they continue, as always. On the internet, there are recipes for Bangladeshi ‘nashta pasta’ or ‘breakfast pasta’ – pasta mixed into spiced scrambled eggs. In Toronto’s Pizza Karachi, people flock to eat pizzas with toppings like Bihari sauce, Afghani tikkas and soft pieces of reshmi kebab. Last week I chatted to Amit, a young vendor making a street-style makhani pasta near where I live. I told him that this recipe may upset Italians. ‘Why?’ he replied. ‘Isn’t everyone adding masalas and malai in their pasta?’ Amit remained confused as I explained further, then asked me to show him videos of famous Italian chefs. ‘It’s not like I can put any of these men out of work’, he said, as someone nearby asked me if Massimo Bottura was in fact Steve Jobs. ‘Zindagi kabhi mushkil hai kabhi tamasha, aisa-vaisa hua toh maaf kardena’, he continued as I wiped down my last bit of makhani sauce. Life here is all hardship or spectacle. So forgive us if we take it too far.

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Credits

Sharanya Deepak is a writer from and currently in New Delhi, India. She is also an editor at Vittles Magazine.

Svabhu Kohli (they/them) is an independent visual storyteller whose work explores the interconnections between people, place, and the natural world through layered narratives rooted in magical realism. Their book The Desert Queen received the 2024 Stonewall Honor Award. Kohli’s practice bridges art, ecology, and storytelling to nurture deeper relationships with the living world.

A note from Sharanya: I’d like to thank everyone I interviewed for this piece. Special shukriyas to Supriya Nair, Ahmer Naqvi, Alberto Grandi, Paromita Vohra, Archit Puri, Sofia Grandi, Sanam Maher and Taiyaba Ali.

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today’s newsletter by Heather Parry looks back twenty years to the media panic in Rotherham which followed Jamie’s School Dinners. This is the fourth online-only dispatch from the Bad Food Extended Universe, which is the theme of Issue 2 of our print magazine. You can order a copy here.

We are also delighted to announce that we are partnering with the SOAS Food Studies Centre to run an essay competition this year exclusively for alumni of the Centre’s MA Anthropology of Food, to help bridge the gap between academic and popular writing on food. You can read more about it here. On 11 April, there will also be a day event on food writing which is open to all members of the public – you can sign up for the event here.

In the early 2000s, your options for contextualising Rotherham on a national scale were limited: the Chuckle Brothers, David Seaman, William Hague. Self Esteem had not yet formed Slow Club. The Arctic Monkeys had not yet immortalised the town’s name on Fake Tales of San Francisco, as the real birthplace of a grifting liar. Back then, Rotherham felt like a place isolated from the progress that seemed to be happening elsewhere, stuck in the tidal drag of slow decline.

In Rawmarsh, the Rotherham-adjacent village where I grew up, food choices still tended towards the traditional, both at home and in the school canteen: meats, boiled vegetables, big strong puddings. The arrival of a few Chinese takeaways doing chow mein with ‘gravy’ (a capitulation to the local dialect rather than an accurate descriptor) had done little to diversify the general landscape of food outlets, which focussed on excellent fish and chips, decent roast dinners and pub lunches that revolved around pies. However, by the end of 2006 – when the immovable object of Rotherham met the unstoppable force of Jamie Oliver – everyone in the country knew about my hometown and its food.

In 2005, Channel 4 launched Jamie’s School Dinners, a show in which the celebrity chef attempted to move a London high school’s lunchtime offerings away from processed food and towards something ‘healthier’. The show instigated a national conversation, highlighting the impact that a lack of nutritionally dense meals could have on students’ learning, alongside the shamefully low cost of school dinners (data at the time showed that Rotherham spent less per child on primary school meals than any other local authority in the country, with just 37p spent on ingredients for a school lunch charged at £1.50 per head.) Following Oliver’s lead, the British government announced £280 million of spending to tackle the school meals issue in England just two weeks after the programme ended. The next year, they introduced a piece of legislation called ‘The Education (Nutritional Standards for School Lunches) (England) Regulations’. This stated that secondary schools had to offer red meat three times a week, fish twice a week, and fried foods no more than two days a week. Banned altogether were firm favourites of the British teenage diet: burgers, chips, crisps and ‘fizzy pop’, plus chocolate bars and cereal bars.

That same year, John Lambert – headteacher at Rawmarsh Community School (RCS), my old high school – saw in Oliver’s campaign an opportunity to end his students’ love of ‘junk food’ altogether. At the start of the academic year, a new menu was implemented in the school canteens with immediate effect; dishes on offer included chicken korma with vegetables, mixed grills and, allegedly, low-fat pizza. More controversially, Lambert decided to go a step further and lock the school gates at lunchtime, preventing the students from buying their own food from the trio of popular outlets (a sweet shop, a chippy and the unfortunately named Chubby’s, which sold sandwiches) at the school drive.

It wasn’t the updated canteen menu that captured media attention – instead, it was the almost immediate backlash to the students’ new-found lack of freedom that made the school infamous across the UK. Within days, disgruntled parents had mounted a campaign against the change, quite literally taking the matter of feeding the students into their own hands. Soon, photos of two mothers delivering pies, burgers and orders of fish and chips through the school’s closed gates were splashed across every national media outlet. The Daily Star reported the story using the headline ‘One Foot In the Gravy’. The Sun branded the mothers ‘Sinner Ladies’, and ran a cartoon depicting them as the ‘Fat Slags’ made famous in Viz. Even the New York Times reported on the story, warning readers that ‘weaning children who consider French fries a major food group is not easy. There is no nicotine patch equivalent for chicken nuggets.’

Academics Rebekah Fox and Graham Smith have since referred to the media response as a ‘moral panic’, and it’s hard to argue with that assessment. In September 2006, Giles Hattersley – now Executive Editor at British Vogue – wrote in the Sunday Times:

To an outsider, Rawmarsh sounds like hell; a place where fat stupid mothers fight for the right to raise fat stupid children … Rawmarsh is Jamie’s worst nightmare; shop shelves lined with cherry colas, toddlers eating Monster Munch in the street and the locals either bandy-legged twigs or, more often, fat – really, really fat in some cases. Some aren’t even ashamed of it: one fat man has taken his shirt off to eat a battered sausage in the afternoon sun.

Within a few days, Rawmarsh had gone from the sort of place you can only describe with vague geography (‘sort of between Sheffield and Doncaster’) to somewhere you could highlight with extreme specificity: You know the place where the mothers passed the junk food through the gates to the kids? Well, that’s my school, my town. Bad food, bad people, bad place.

As a Rawmarsh native, it was hard to look away from the media panic that surrounded the Jamie Oliver episode. Just over the Pennines, at university, my relationship to South Yorkshire was being reshaped and contextualised, everything from my broad accent to my phraseology suddenly marked as strange. Combined with the media panic and depictions of my hometown, the overall message seemed to be that where I was from was backwards, and the way we ate was wrong.

A few months ago, I spoke to Natasha Wilson, a former student at RCS who was fourteen at the time; she also remembers the episode well. Wilson had been a regular customer at the small businesses at the foot of the school gates, often getting breakfast from Chubby’s when her mother was busy: ‘One day a week my mum, when she was rushing out to go to work or something, she’d say, “There’s a couple of quid – go and get yourself a sausage sandwich on your way to school”’. With Chubby’s and the other outlets out-of-bounds at break and lunch, several mothers set up a covert delivery system for the students inside school grounds. ‘The parents would go to the shop, the shops would get it ready, and then they’d bring it back with, like, your name written on little bags. It was like some sort of seedy drug deal through the graveyard fence, but it was actually a bag of chips.’

It wasn’t just sausage sandwiches that the students were ordering from these places. Julie Critchlow, one of the mums involved, told The Times in 2006 that much of the food they were delivering was healthy, and that the accusation that the kids were given chips every day was ‘such a lie’. ‘We were taking all sorts – baked potatoes, salads, tuna sandwiches. You try getting teenage girls to eat a hamburger every day. Most of them won’t touch the things’, she said.

There was no consultation with the students about the change in menu; as student Andreas Petrou recounted to the New York Times, ‘They just told us we were having it’; meanwhile, Wilson remembers that ‘We basically showed up for the start of the year and they’d overhauled the menu, and everybody just went nuts over the fact that they’d taken all the fun stuff off.’ The aggrieved mothers’ response was industrious, but played into the idea of certain types of food being borderline contraband. Natasha gives a name to the mothers’ campaign: The Rebellion. ‘Sounds like Les Mis, doesn’t it?’

This sense of something illicit occurring – of the parents as reprobates – was exacerbated by the media. What was ignored in reports, however, was Rawmarsh’s sociopolitical context, and the decades of economic upheaval faced by those who lived there. While Tony Blair’s incoming 1997 Labour government had promised widespread national renewal, very little in the way of successful economic progress had made its way to Rawmarsh. Even in the early years of the new millennium, the decline of the steel industry – following the closure of the Templeborough Steelworks in 1993 – still cast a Thatcher-shaped shadow over the town. In 2001, Rotherham was listed as the forty-eighth most deprived district in England, and by 2006, Rawmarsh was listed by Rotherham Borough Council as an area of particular economic and social deprivation.

All of this affected people’s relationship to food, their choices and their openness to change. From the 1980s to the 2000s, neoliberal governments and council policies stripped away resident-owned shops on Rawmarsh high street and beyond, turning people towards multinationals and slowly eroding agency, especially with regard to food. For many years, there was a multi-purpose market just a fifteen-minute walk from the school; established in 1965, the market featured grocery stands and bakeries among other small businesses. By the early 2000s, though, this had fallen out of use, and was eventually subject to a compulsory purchase order (today, there is a Tesco and a Heron Foods in its place). Meanwhile, in 2000, Northern Foods – supplier of dairy products and desserts to stores like M&S, Sainsbury’s and Tesco – closed its Rawmarsh factory, causing the loss of 330 local jobs.

Now, I can’t help but look at the parents’ actions at the school as a flailing response to decades of economic and political disenfranchisement. When the Guardian referred to the situation as the ‘battle of Rawmarsh’, they invoked an event still heavy in the minds of people in Rotherham: the Battle of Orgreave on 18 June 1984, when thousands of striking miners picketed the Orgreave Coking Works, just seven miles away from the school. The protest resulted in almost 100 arrests for riot and violent disorder – the former crime punishable, at the time, by life imprisonment.

It is easy to dismiss these events as contributing factors in a lunch-based protest at a high school, twenty-two years after the fact. But when people are not consulted on changes that affect them, they will resist, just as students resisted the imposition of ‘Jamie Oliverism’ in Rawmarsh. At the time of the incident, speaking to the New York Times, Critchlow said of the school authorities: ‘They shouldn’t be allowed to tell the kids what to eat … They’re treating them like criminals.’ Another of the school-gate mothers told the Guardian: ‘This [protest] isn’t about us against healthy food, like they’ve been saying. It’s about how people change the rules.’

In early 2007, Jeremy Clarkson – a man who got his start in journalism writing for the Rotherham Advertiser – asked Jamie Oliver, when he was on the BBC’s Top Gear, about what had happened at RCS. This was an opportunity, perhaps, for Oliver to talk about the economic element of nutrition, or about how the many regions of the country had differing degrees of access to fresh foods, and distinct attitudes about what constitutes a good meal. Oliver did not take this route. Instead, he described the shock he felt upon seeing the Rawmarsh mothers – or, as he termed them, ‘big old scrubbers’, passing ‘Big Macs’ through bars to their children.

Eighteen months later, Oliver finally descended on Rotherham in person to film for Jamie’s Ministry of Food, a four-part Channel 4 series in which he set out to teach the residents of Rotherham how to cook. The idea that no one in Rotherham knew their way around a kitchen was supported by the show’s choice of interviewees – which included retired miners who had never prepared a meal and young mums who claimed to feed their kids mostly with takeaways – chosen from the pool of only 300 people who had replied to an advertisement for ‘non-cooks’.

Most notably, Oliver met one of the women he’d derided as a ‘big old scrubber’: Critchlow herself. Minutes before this meeting, driving in a van past the end of my childhood street, Oliver had told the camera that Julie ‘represents everything that’s wrong with our relationship with food in this country’. When he entered her home, Critchlow gracefully welcomed ‘the elusive Mr Oliver’ with a handshake and a smile, before jovially asking for an apology for what he’d said about her on national television. Sitting next to her mother, Critchlow went on to tell Oliver about the recipes that had passed down through her family, and the ones she liked to make for her own kids: stew and dumplings, braising steak, Chinese pork belly; ‘I’ve always cooked,’ she said. Jamie, perched on the edge of her leatherette sofa, admitted that she sounded like ‘a proper foodie’.

After Jamie’s Ministry of Food, Oliver opened a social enterprise kitchen with the same name in Rotherham town centre. With funding from Rotherham council, the initiative employed two staff to run free ten-week courses about how to cook healthy meals from Oliver’s recipes. The project claims that it taught 10,000 people to cook over its lifetime; inarguably, Rotherham’s Ministry of Food did introduce people to new ways of eating. But its nine-year existence was not funded by Oliver, nor were its operations overseen by him. (When funding from the council ended, it was kept going by Leeds-based charity Zest.) When it closed temporarily in 2013, then-manager Lisa Taylor told the Yorkshire Post that Oliver – at this point a multi-millionaire – would not return her calls, nor assist her in trying to keep the project going: ‘We haven’t had one visit from Jamie Oliver since he finished filming and left’, she said. With this context, it feels like Rotherham, once again, has been abandoned as a failed experiment, a place that can be easily dismissed and forgotten.

Two weeks ago, I reached out to Oliver’s team, asking if he would talk to me about the media episode in Rotherham and his follow-up show, and wondering whether, in retrospect, there was anything he would have done differently. In response, I received a brochure about Jamie’s Good School Food Awards (sponsored by edtech company Wonde), which details how Oliver and his team ‘[Call] on the government to make sure that this brilliant expansion of school food is backed by updated and enforced school food standards – so that every meal served is genuinely nutritious, delicious and worthy of our children.’ Today, Oliver’s Ministry of Food Foundation continues to announce new sites for its community cooking program – including Glasgow, Cambridge and Plymouth in 2024 (though it is unclear whether such sites ever came to fruition). These are funded in part by the Jamie Oliver Group, but primarily by local councils and other ‘partner’ organisations.

In Rawmarsh, meanwhile, the built environment around the school has drastically changed since my days as a student – and in a way that feels directly tied to its portrayal in the media. Today, two of the three food outlets that fed students during my time at the school are gone: Monkwood Fisheries, the much-maligned but formerly brilliant chip shop, is permanently closed; the sweet shop – where the female proprietor greeted the after-school rush with a rolling script of Yes love? Ta love, Thanks love – is now a (seemingly closed-down) pet supplies store. Chubby’s, too, is changed; rather than selling tuna breadcakes or bacon sarnies to the school kids for a quid, it now appears to sell pizzas, baked potatoes and kebabs to the evening crowd, only opening after the school day has already finished. It no longer matters whether the school gates are locked or not, because the small businesses at the foot of the drive are gone; the students of RCS have nowhere close by to eat.

In the twenty years since the media panic, during which I have established my life elsewhere, Rawmarsh has encountered further deindustrialisation, community-asset stripping in the name of austerity and waning government investment. In August last year, Britain’s third-largest steelworks went into administration, threatening 1,500 jobs across Rotherham and Sheffield and yet again leaving residents at the mercy of the market and neoliberal governmental neglect. Outside forces are only interested in Rawmarsh insofar as they can extract something from it: a TV show, an incendiary headline, a few years of cheap labour. Being left behind by the state over the course of forty years leaves a population with little choice and few ways to affect real change on a governmental level. While some work hard to build grassroots power, others have found an ‘enemy within’ to blame, demonising immigrants (and Black and brown citizens and residents) rather than looking at the real root causes of their material circumstances.

But still, there are establishments that focus on meeting the real needs of people, like the eighty-year-old family bakery Staniforths, which continues to sell the 65p jam tarts I ate when I was a kid, and the host of comparatively new businesses providing Rotherham residents with both a diverse menu and community: the Italian-run Miele Delicatessan, the popular Yemeni food-delivery service Mama Arab, and the town centre’s wonderful Cafe Noor, where you can sit down to two of the best (and most affordable) samosas you’ll ever eat. It is these places that carry the spirit of Rotherham and its people, serving up good humour, interpersonal care and social inclusion. These are the spaces where people find inspiration to embrace new ways to cook and eat.

When looking at spending per child on primary school dinners, Rotherham now sits thirtieth in the ranking (of 152 local authorities in total), with an apparent average of £1.77 per meal per student – an increase, in two decades, of just over a pound per meal, adjusting for inflation. While this is an undeniable improvement on two decades ago, it’s also worth asking – after twenty years, endless campaigning and the demonisation of an entire town – is this enough progress? Natasha Wilson certainly feels that the school dinners incident ‘massively’ affected her relationship with what she ate; as a ‘picky eater’, she was, at the time of Oliver’s intervention, the right age to be gently guided towards new and exciting food options, but ended up turning against a more diverse palate until well into her adulthood. For many children of Rawmarsh, like Natasha and myself, it has only been the experience of having more choice, more money and different influences that changed our diets for the better – not the diminishing of options, not being branded as one of the ‘fat stupid children’ in a Times journalist’s classist article, and certainly not being locked behind school gates.

In Rotherham, as elsewhere, the things that are impactful and enduring are led by its citizens, rather than those who parachute in to impose their ideas. Positive change happens when people are supported to explore new things, to challenge themselves and to broaden their horizons – not when rules are imposed based on the ideas of famous chefs who knew, and know little about a place, its people and its history.

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Heather Parry is a Glasgow-based writer of fiction and nonfiction, originally from Rotherham. Her most recent book is Carrion Crow, a novel. She also writes the Substack general observations on eggs.

Alia Wilhelm is a Turkish/German collage artist, writer and filmmaker. Inspired by her multicultural heritage and a childhood during which she moved often, Alia is passionate about themes such as cultural inheritance, transience and belonging. Working across moving image, collage and the written word, Alia creates soulful and personal work with a handmade and nostalgic feel, using printed matter from decades-old magazines to create her collages. All of her work is grounded in visual and historical research.

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles Restaurants. Ahead of the publication of the 2026 Michelin Guide to Great Britain and Ireland in Dublin on Monday next week, we thought it would be a good time to share Adam Coghlan’s interview with the inimitable food writer Andy Hayler from Issue 2 of our magazine. You can buy a copy of Issue 2 here.

Subscribe now

Buy Issue 2

Battle of the Michelin Men: Andy Hayler vs Bibendum

For more than a century, Michelin has been a byword for greatness and quality in restaurants. But over the last twenty years, it has faced unprecedented challenges to its hegemonic status, with a plurality of voices in print and across the internet asking questions it cannot always answer: what do Michelin stars really mean? What are they given for? Who are they there to serve? Sure, there’s a semiquantitative rationale behind the decisions its mercurial inspectors make, but restaurants are volatile, chefs are human and taste is deeply individual. There are few things more subjective than a person’s experience of a restaurant meal.

Yet one man’s thoughts on Michelin-starred restaurants carry more weight than most: Andy Hayler, a data analyst and elite global gastrotourist who in 2004 became the first person to have eaten at every three-starred restaurant in the world. Through his blog, Andy Hayler’s Restaurant Guide, Hayler has become the de facto Michelin Man, re-rating Michelin-starred restaurants (and beyond) out of 20 on his personal scale and using his years of experience and cross-referencing to call out ‘bad food’ – everything from overcomplicated cooking to restaurants marking up inferior or farmed produce (including inadequately sized turbots). As an act of pure public-service journalism, there is not much in the fine-dining world that rivals Hayler’s body of work.

Last summer, we sat down with Andy to talk about Michelin’s bizarre status as the ultimate seal of quality, and to ask: ‘Is Michelin ... bad?’

Adam Coghlan: I wanted to start by asking: how can a Michelin-starred restaurant be bad?

Andy Hayler: It’s all about the quality of ingredients, design flaws and technical execution. Bad ingredients, in the context of Michelin, might be a very cheap caviar instead of a very good caviar. It could be using farmed sea bass instead of wild sea bass. And the design of the dish: there are some things that just don’t work together. Unfortunately, that’s a very common issue in cheffing these days, because everyone’s frantically trying to be innovative, but most of the really good combinations were discovered 100 or 500 years ago. I can actually remember a three-star dish at a place in Marseille, a dessert involving blueberries and coriander or something. It was absolutely disgusting, inedible.

The third issue is execution. Can they actually cook the things? You would hope in a Michelin-starred restaurant you’d be looking at capable chefs. But a good example of that not being the case was at a two-starred place called Schlossberg in the Black Forest, very near to a pair of three-star restaurants which are both excellent. There was a whole mass of issues with bad ingredients, technical and design issues, and things were wildly oversalted. One dish of trout, spätzle and an undefined sauce was so grotesquely salty that neither of us could eat it, and I quite like salty food in general. Like, the top of the salt cellar must have fallen off or something and they decided to serve it anyway.

Adam: But are so-called ‘low-quality’ ingredients common in Michelin-starred restaurants?

Andy: Obviously restaurants are a relatively tight-margin business. And because the things are very tight, there’s a temptation for chefs to compromise on ingredients and to put things together that use suppliers that are not very good, frankly. They’re hoping that people can’t tell the difference or don’t care, because I’m sure they know.

One Michelin-starred restaurant in London – which I can’t name – I know for a fact was serving a dish they were charging £170 for where the ingredients cost £10, because I’ve seen the receipts from a supplier. Don’t get me started on cheap coffee… Some of the one-stars or even places without stars are actually often using superior products. For example, The Dysart Petersham or The Cocochine in Mayfair use genuinely top-of-the-range ingredients and they’re sitting there on either no stars or one star. There isn’t a three-star restaurant in London that uses ingredients that are the same quality as The Cocochine.

Adam: What about Michelin’s own principles and methodologies? Do you think that within Michelin’s own awarding criteria there are things that are bad or too prescriptive? And what is the effect on restaurants attempting to subscribe to those criteria?

Andy: The criteria are not unreasonable: ingredient quality, the technical skill of the chef and the consistency. Another consideration is the personality of the chef in the food, which I’ve never fully understood, but I presume is to do with originality or inventiveness or something. You can’t really argue with ingredient quality or technical skill. Consistency is interesting, because there have been quite a few exposés to show that Michelin very rarely reinspect the same restaurant in the same year. In Pascal Rémy’s book L’inspecteur se met à table [The Inspector Sits Down at the Table] he revealed there were only at that time [2004] about five inspectors for the whole of France. And so they couldn’t get to restaurants even every three years. So, it’s not at all clear how often Michelin is reinspecting, but I’m sure sometimes they do multiple inspections.

The issue is often the actual execution, from the inspectors, of those criteria. It seems to me quite clear that in many cases the inspectors are either inexperienced or inconsistent. You do see quite surreal decisions made. And there have always been Michelin stars you can argue with, but I think over the last decade it’s become much worse in terms of consistency.

Adam: What else has contributed to this decline?

Read more

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles Restaurants!

How do restaurant critics decide what makes for a good restaurant - or a bad one? How do they account for their accreted experience, personal preferences and inescapable groupthink when making these judgements? To answer these questions and more, we assembled a group of the world’s most influential voices on the subject – Helen Rosner (The New Yorker), Chitra Ramaswamy (The Times, Scottish edition), Pete Wells (the New York Times) and our own Jonathan Nunn. The conversation was moderated by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan. We talked about the process of writing negative reviews, the difference between bad food and bad restaurants, how the role of the critic differs in the UK and the US, and what happens when you eat out at too many restaurants.

This is the second piece that we’re publishing online from Issue 2 of the print magazine, which is organised around the theme of ‘Bad Food’. The magazine contains lots of other deeply researched and fun pieces about contemporary food culture – specifically the messy, unglamorous and chaotic aspects of it. You should buy a copy.

Buy issue 2 now

Subscribe now

You Say Tomato, I Say Tomato

Adam Coghlan: I’m curious about all your individual methodologies. When you’re preparing for a review and a meal, what are the most important things – both before you go, and then once you start assessing the qualities of the experience?

Pete Wells: I would try to walk in as ignorant as I could. I tried to learn nothing, which is impossible, so I would learn maybe just enough to figure out if this place might potentially be of interest to me, to readers, but not so much that I had made up my mind about it before I walked in. At a certain level of restaurant, where they are in control of their marketing and their image, that’s the last thing they want. They want you to walk in having made up your mind that it’s a significant restaurant. When the marketing and PR world does its job correctly, all those questions have been answered for you before you walk in the door, but I tried to just get that out of my head as much as I could. It’s a losing battle, but I tried so that I could experience the place before it was experienced for me.

Jonathan Nunn: I think you do have to come into it with as close to a blank mind as possible. I’ve been guilty before of writing about restaurants with a heavy prejudice for what they’re not. I don’t know if anyone here has been to Tayyabs, a famous Pakistani restaurant in Whitechapel. I always used it as a kind of whipping boy in reviews of other restaurants I liked because I thought, why is this restaurant, which is filled with so many American tourists, always getting written up when you’ve got restaurants down the road doing much better Pakistani food? And then I went fairly recently and tried to forget about those prejudices and remember that there are people who are coming here – to a fifty-year-old Pakistani restaurant – from America and from further afield for their first meal in London, and everyone is leaving happy. And I completely changed my mind. Not that I have any different opinion on the food, but it was just remembering what this restaurant is for and who it’s for. It doesn’t fulfil the same function as these community restaurants out in East Ham.

Chitra Ramaswamy: I think I take quite a lot from both Jonathan and Pete. I really try to review each restaurant on its own terms. By that I mean answering those questions: what is the restaurant for? Who is it for? Why is it on this particular street at this particular moment at this particular time? As soon as you’re walking in with that, it’s like a cultural framework. Those are the parameters that are always surrounding your review, but don’t necessarily make it in. And that matters to me enormously, and positions your bullshit detector, even if it’s not foolproof. Like Pete, I try not to read too much about any restaurant. I might do a cursory google and look at their Instagram account on the tram or the bus there. But, ultimately, I try to walk in as I would as a punter and then do all my research afterwards.

Helen Rosner: I do pretty much the same thing – just enough reading to figure out if it is interesting to me. I don’t know if this sounds like nonsense, but I try on my first visit not to eat like a critic, but just have a meal at the restaurant with a friend. I’ll be paying attention, but I’m not reporting in a critical sense on my first visit – I’m kind of taking in the feelings and the vibes. And not necessarily trying to be strategic or stress test any weak points or anything like that, but to feel like, if I were here, as Chitra says, just as a diner, as a civilian, would I be having a nice time?

Jonathan: I’m writing a review about a very hyped restaurant in London right now and I made the mistake of going there for the first time with restaurant people. Restaurant people are always on. They ripped everything apart and made the meal much less enjoyable than actually I think it would have been if I had just taken my mum.

Adam: It’s usually a bad time with restaurant people.

Helen: I’m very strategic about who I’ll bring on a first visit. I try very hard to have it not be a food person, to have it be someone I know I like spending time with so I can know that any happiness or unhappiness that comes out of the evening can be fairly attributed to the restaurant as opposed to my dining companion or the flow of the conversation or whatever.

Adam: Do you think with experience, and with going to more and more restaurants, that shutting yourself off from the noise actually becomes easier, counterintuitively, rather than harder?

Helen: Yeah, absolutely. We’re probably, all of us, expert restaurant-goers, which is a bizarre skill. There’s a degree of fluency in the modes and the operations of a restaurant and of being a diner that builds up over time. One of the things that a restaurant critic will never really be able to embody is the special-occasion restaurant-goer, someone for whom going out to eat is a rare occurrence and has to be special. And it has much higher stakes, even if it’s not a particularly expensive or celebration-y restaurant.

Because the restaurant is a space that I’m comfortable in – I know how a menu works, I know how the waiter’s bill works, I know I’m going to be able to pay for the meal because I’m expensing it – I can just be dropped into any restaurant and not worry about my time, my money, my aesthetics, my attitudes being insufficient. That makes it a lot easier to not do the pre-research that is often – especially now, in the restaurant-as-a-social-Thunderdome environment – so driven by social status society.

Jonathan: I think it makes the assessment harder, though – that experience. One thing I’m always wary of is how the utter strangeness of being a critic warps my standards of what is normal. I don’t mean in terms of good and bad food, I just mean the actual experience of going to a restaurant and having something cooked for you by someone – this whole system built just to feed you a dish – and to start seeing that as something quite boring and not something which is an immense privilege to have.

Chitra: I also worry about that. And then I think it’s amazing. Occasionally a restaurant will come along and it’s just the most forceful reminder of that. I reviewed one recently on the southside of Glasgow, and I was viscerally reminded as I ate the chef ’s Southwestern Chinese foods that this was the vision of this one woman and these were her dishes and they had been handed down by her mother and her aunt and her grandmother. And she had taken the risk of choosing to feed them to the people of Glasgow. And I think when moments like that happen, the institution of the restaurant itself can be a really powerful reminder of the responsibilities of the job, really. And a reminder of what it means when you do give a bad review – how high the stakes really can be.

Pete: Yeah, I always find myself just forgetting what an incredible miracle it is that you can leave your house and just point to something on a menu and have it brought to you. Then after you’ve eaten it, they not only take the dishes away, but they clean them and you just get to go home. Like on that level, every restaurant is great, right? For a lot of people that is enough, and, now that I’m sort of back in civilian life, on certain nights that’s enough for me, too. But when you’re a critic, you’re paying a completely different kind of attention and you would never write a review that said ‘Wow, this place has hot food and they do the dishes.’

Chitra: Maybe we should once in a while do one of those.

Pete: I wonder about that, too. Another form of that I found myself falling into all the time was to think my job as the critic was to go in and eat as much of the menu as I could, to really kick the tyres. An average diner walks in and if they eat something that’s bad, they’ll never come back. They’re not gonna go and explore the eighteen other things on the menu, which is the totally natural way of behaving. What we do is completely an unnatural approach to restaurants. We’re behaving stupidly, you know – if we’re rewarded with a good dish, we go looking for the bad dish.

Helen: I’m trying to figure out how to say this without sounding like the most pompous asshole in the world …

Read more

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today’s essay is a long read by Joe Zadeh about the persistent fears in the West surrounding the reheating of rice. It’s the first piece that we’re publishing online from our second print issue, on the theme of ‘Bad Food’. The magazine contains lots of other deeply researched and engaging pieces about contemporary food culture – specifically the messy, unglamorous and chaotic aspects of it. You should buy a copy.

Speaking of things to buy, we have added five extra tickets for our sold-out event this Wednesday at Oxford House with Ixta Belfrage, Melek Erdal and Rukmini Iyer. These are sure to sell out so act quickly!

Buy Issue 2

Subscribe now

‘What are you talking about?’ Dad asked me, a look of incredulity on his face. ‘I’ve been reheating rice all my life.’ It was a warm Saturday evening. We were sitting at the dining table in his home in Gateshead, drinking beer and eating from a plastic tub of M&S bell peppers stuffed with ricotta. I had just told him that I was researching a story about the dangers of reheated rice – more specifically, the illness that has come to be dubbed ‘fried rice syndrome’ or ‘reheated rice syndrome’ across the Western world. Search those terms on most platforms, and you’ll find hugely popular posts issuing dire warnings about the condition. ‘Hospital workers say it’s some of the worst cases of food poisoning they’ve ever seen. And it can lead to death,’ reported food52, in a TikTok post with more than 431,000 likes at the time of writing.

Dad didn’t take this news well. He got up from the table, marched to the fridge, took out a glass container and started pointing at it animatedly. ‘What is this?’ he asked, before taking a second identical container from the fridge and waving it around. ‘And this, what is this?’

‘Rice,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ he said defiantly. ‘And I will reheat some tomorrow, and the next day and the next day.’

Like many Iranians, my dad takes rice very seriously. When we cook polow together, he says things like ‘Careful!’, ‘Be gentle!’ and ‘You need to keep an eye on your rice, Mister!’ as if we were bathing a newborn baby. Despite having been divorced for twenty-nine years, his ex-wife – who is British and, incidentally, my mother – still cooks perfect Iranian-style rice due to how ardently she was drilled on his methods. When asked if he owns a rice cooker, he takes great pleasure in saying: ‘You’re looking at it.’

According to the food52 video, you should eat rice within a day of cooking it. After that window has passed, they advised viewers to ‘just throw it away. Just throw away your leftover rice, friends, it’s really not worth it.’ They’re not the only ones making this claim. On LADBible, a headline read: ‘“Fried rice syndrome” is real and can kill you, doctor says’. A post on the ‘r/TrueOffMyChest’ subreddit titled ‘I almost died from fried rice syndrome’ tallied over 500 replies. If you look at the comments on these posts, you’ll find lots of astonished people – frequently of Middle Eastern, Asian, African or South American descent – saying something to the same effect as Dad: I’ve reheated rice all my life, and I’ve never got ill. How can this be true?

This stark division in rice-reheating attitudes is almost comically widespread. While appearing on The Graham Norton Show in 2023, the British and Malaysian-Chinese stand-up Phil Wang joked that the main difference between white people and Chinese people is that the former are ‘absolutely terrified of reheating rice. For white people, rice has one chance to be food. And if there’s any left over after the meal, it just becomes poisonous straight away.’ Out of curiosity, I texted seven white friends to ask if they were brought up to believe that reheating rice was dangerous. All seven said yes.

Like my dear father, and Phil Wang, I have also been reheating rice all my life. As I write this, there is one container of rice in my fridge, and three in my freezer. Cooked white grains linger in my kitchen like coins in trouser pockets: forgotten for long periods, then rediscovered with joy. And I have never, to my knowledge, got sick from them.

As I plied Dad with more and more internet evidence of rice-related anxiety, he fell silent. We looked out the window into the back garden. The closing notes of the day’s sun played out on the grass. ‘China, India, Pakistan, Iran,’ he said, quietly. ‘Russia, Greece, Turkey, Japan,’ he continued, becoming louder and bolder. ‘Malaysia!’ I realised he was listing countries that ate rice. ‘There would be a lot less people in Iran if reheated rice was deadly. There are communities in Iran that are so poor, they eat rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner. They don’t have a fridge or a chiller. How can you explain that, Joseph? How?’

Of course, this wasn’t the first conversation I’d had about the dreaded syndrome. But I’d always thought that it was only a risk if you didn’t cook your rice properly in the first place, and so I’d dismissed it, with an air of superiority, as something not worth worrying about. But as the odd cultural divide became more apparent, my curiosity was piqued. How can so many people be terrified of reheated rice, while others live their lives in fluffy ignorance? Are the warnings overblown or have I – and most of the non-Western world – been dancing with death all these years? Is there something in the way that different cultures cook or store rice that protects against these toxic side-effects? And where did the very specific – and rather problematic – name fried rice syndrome come from? I felt compelled to find some answers.

Reheated rice fears have circulated for decades, but many of the recent posts on TikTok and other platforms seemed to have been triggered by the recirculation of a story about a young man in Belgium supposedly dying from fried rice syndrome. Despite regularly inspiring breaking-news-style posts – ‘Man, 20, found dead in his bed by devastated parents after he reheated common pasta dish’ reads a headline in the Sun from 2023 – the incident actually took place in 2008. As that headline reveals, the man hadn’t actually eaten rice, but leftover spaghetti (resulting in some online publications running confusing headlines like ‘20 Year Old Dies of “Fried Rice Syndrome” After Eating Leftover Pasta’). I texted the same seven friends from earlier to ask if they’d ever received warnings about reheating pasta as they had for rice. All seven said no.

According to a 2011 report about the case in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, the man became sick after eating spaghetti leftovers that had been cooked five days earlier and then left in the kitchen at room temperature. Within 30 minutes of eating, he experienced a headache, abdominal pains and vomiting. He was found dead the following morning. The autopsy revealed the presence of the bacterium Bacillus cereus (B cereus), which was also detected in samples of the pasta dish that were analysed. The paper also references four other fatal cases attributed to B cereus food poisoning: two more associated with pasta, one with fried rice and one with noodles.

‘B cereus is the microorganism culprit behind the so-called fried rice syndrome,’ confirmed Enzo Palombo, a microbiologist at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, whom I spoke to over Zoom. The name comes from Latin: ‘Bacillus’ means ‘little staff’ or ‘little wand’, while ‘cereus’ means ‘wax-like’. In your mind, picture a microscopic sausage that glistens and wiggles and can multiply into endless sausage links, and you’re not far off. B cereus is a close relative of the notorious Bacillus anthracis, responsible for anthrax. ‘Most of the time, it’s a benign presence,’ said Palombo. ‘But when the conditions are right, it has a few tricks up its sleeve that allow it to act as a food pathogen.’

Most food-borne bacteria are destroyed by heat during cooking, Palombo informed me. But B cereus is one of a few species capable of forming spores. ‘These spores are incredibly resilient: they can last for hundreds of years, and can resist acid, heat and other environmental conditions. They think they might even be able to survive in outer space.’ No matter how hot your stove, the spores of B cereus can survive in your food in a dormant state, waiting for an opportune moment to return, like a cryogenically frozen billionaire.

How do dormant spores turn into a nasty bout of food poisoning? According to Palombo, the ‘danger zone’ in microbiology is between 5°C (the temperature of the fridge) and 65°C (the temperature that food should rise above when cooked). ‘So, imagine you’ve cooked your rice or pasta and there is B cereus in there. You’ve killed the bacteria through cooking but the spores have survived. If you chill it right away, then you’re fine, if you reheat it properly then you’re fine,’ he told me. But if you leave it at room temperature for too long and there’s sufficient moisture, then the spores spring back to life and begin feeding on the starch while secreting toxins. ‘Bingo,’ Palombo continued, ‘these toxins are what will muck up your guts and cause you to have diarrhoea, vomiting or even more severe consequences.’

It’s worth emphasising that the Belgian case was rare and extreme – B cereus infection is usually mild, and hospitalisations are infrequent. The global mortality rate for cases associated with food poisoning is just 0.05%, and deaths generally occur in those predisposed to developing more severe illness (young people, old people, pregnant people and people with compromised immune systems).

Much of what Palombo and I talked about – danger zones and safe storage – felt intuitive. I don’t leave food out for hours. I divide big batches of cooked rice into smaller boxes so that it cools quicker. I always keep everything in either the fridge or freezer, and always thoroughly reheat. But I still felt deeply puzzled about some things. If B cereus is a risk with any starchy food, then why aren’t we as fearful of reheated pasta as rice? And if reheating rice does carry this potential to cause illness, why is the perception of risk so inconsistent across cultures?

‘It’s something I’ve always known about, but that just comes from a catering background,’ said Farokh Talati – Head Chef at St John Bread and Wine in London and author of the cookbook Parsi: From Persia to Bombay – when I asked him about rice anxiety. ‘Rice is the cornerstone of my cooking,’ he told me. ‘In my own home life, I’m loose. I’ll cook my rice, and put the leftovers in the fridge once it’s cooled down. When I heat it back up, I’m not there probing it, I just put a bit of coconut oil in a pan, fry the living crap out of it, and then eat it.’ But when it comes to his professional life, Talati has to be much more cautious, because of strict health and safety regulations. ‘But it’s not so much around just rice itself – it’s around everything we touch from raw foods to raw vegetables.’

I asked Talati if he had any theories about why rice might have acquired such a unique fear factor? He responded, ‘I can’t help but think: Is there something deeper going on? Is it something about how the West perceives the East? Is there something really ingrained in us here that sees rice as a scary thing, an unknown thing? What is this food that’s coming over? It’s not part of our cuisine – is it making us sick?’

Throughout history, rice has certainly been known to trigger animosity among Europeans. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that eating rice caused one to become addicted to opium. The notable French gastronomist Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin – famous for his aphorism, ‘Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are’ – thought eating rice made you soft and cowardly. Meanwhile, in his 1883 pamphlet, How, When and What to Eat: A Guide to Colonial Diet, the Australian doctor and novelist Stephen Mannington Caffyn cautioned that ‘We might expect to find rice-eaters everywhere a wretched, impotent, and effeminate race, and such is the case.’

It is certainly odd that food poisoning caused by B cereus has become so widely known as fried rice syndrome – a term used not just on social media and in news coverage, but even in peer-reviewed academic publications. I found it difficult to trace the exact historical origin of the name. The first complete scientific proof of B cereus as a microorganism capable of causing food-borne disease came in 1955, in Norway, and had nothing to do with rice – it was traced to a vanilla sauce prepared from corn starch that had been linked to a wave of illnesses in care homes and hospitals in Oslo.

One of the earliest associations between B cereus and fried rice that I could track down was a 1973 article in the British Medical Journal that reported on eighteen outbreaks of food poisoning in the UK dating back to 1971, many of which had been traced to Chinese restaurants and takeaways where boiled rice was being stored at room temperature for long periods of time before being fried. But the phrase ‘fried rice syndrome’ was nowhere to be seen.

Around the time that this article was published, a completely separate food scandal associated with Chinese food had erupted, with misplaced fears about MSG stoked in the US by anti-Chinese racism and dodgy science. In a 1968 letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr Ho Man Kwok wrote: ‘For several years since I have been in this country, I have experienced a strange syndrome whenever I have eaten out in a Chinese restaurant,’ before going on to describe symptoms that included numbness at the back of the neck, general weakness and palpitations. While Kwok posited MSG as only one possible cause among many, it was latched onto by scientists and the media. In 1969, experiments – now found to have been crucially flawed – appeared to confirm ‘Chinese Restaurant syndrome’ as a legitimate medical condition caused by MSG, one that could make you sterile and cause brain damage in babies. The subsequent public health scare lasted for decades.

It doesn’t feel like a stretch to posit that fried rice syndrome may have been coined during this racially charged moment in culinary history, in which food safety fears were being rampantly fuelled by a dislike and distrust of immigrant culture. ‘I think there is a bit of a stigma in how it has come to be named fried rice syndrome,’ said Palombo. ‘It seems to suggest that Asian food is the problem, but it’s not. Any starchy food should be considered a contamination risk.’

I was starting to understand how reheated rice, specifically, had become such a uniquely panic-inducing food for white people. But if beneath the noise there was still a very legitimate danger of food poisoning, why was this risk being so little discussed, underplayed or even ignored in other cultures? In essence: Why was my dad angry about this?

‘I had no idea this was a massive thing until I read your email,’ said Mandy Yin, founder of the Malaysian restaurant Sambal Shiok in North London, after I sent her links to the TikTok rice panic. At the same time, it didn’t surprise her. ‘Years ago, I was with my husband’s family – half Scottish, half Welsh – and we ordered a massive Chinese takeaway. Immediately after finishing, everyone refused to keep the rice. I was like: There’s so much food being wasted!’

Yin told me that at Malaysian street food stalls and markets, the rice for nasi lemak is often cooked in the morning, wrapped in banana leaf parcels along with sambal, peanuts, anchovies, and egg, and then sold throughout the day. In fact, in many cuisines, there is an abundance of recipes in which leftover rice is actively preferred over freshly cooked.

A beloved dish in Tamil cuisine called pazhaya sadam literally translates as ‘old rice’. Food writer and novelist Chitrita Banerji told me of a similar recipe in rural Bengal called panta bhat: ‘During the summer, people will pour water over leftover rice and just leave it – not in the fridge, but outside. The hot temperature outdoors will ferment it to create this kind of milky liquid. You eat it with raw onions and maybe some raw green chillies. It has a sharp, slightly funky taste. And that is considered very healthy and cooling for your body.’ I find it hard to believe that these recipes, widely circulated and often passed down through generations, would have survived if they were inherently poisonous.

Comparing the rates of B cereus poisoning between different countries didn’t help to clear things up much. At first glance, when you compare a Western nation like the US with China, the world’s leading consumer of rice, the data are striking. According to a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate from nearly twenty years ago, around 63,400 B cereus episodes occur annually in the US, whereas a ten-year survey of infections in China (from 2010 to 2020) logged only 7,892 cases in total. That suggests that far more people are getting sick from fried rice syndrome in the US than in China (particularly when the population discrepancy between the two is factored in). However, the methods used in these studies are so different as to basically preclude comparison – whereas the US figure is an estimate to account for likely under-reporting of mild cases, the Chinese survey focused explicitly on confirmed cases. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder: Might there be something in how different cultures are preparing and cooking rice that may somehow be preventing B cereus infections?

Searching for answers, I came across the work of Paul W Sherman, a biologist at Cornell University who spent a large chunk of his academic life studying the social life of naked mole rats. In the late 1990s, he collaborated with a graduate student called Jennifer Billing to investigate a uniquely culinary question: Why did humans start using spices in food? And why, despite a now-established global spice trade, is their use far more important in some cuisines rather than in others? Could it be, they posited, that people in hotter countries use more spices because spices kill bacteria that grow faster in warmer climates, keeping their food safer to eat?

Sherman and Billings surveyed 107 ‘traditional’ cookbooks from thirty-six countries globally, creating a database of nearly 7,000 recipes, across which forty-two spices were used. Their analysis found that countries with higher average temperatures appeared to add more spices to their recipes relative to countries with lower average temperatures. They also discovered that higher average temperatures (where food-borne pathogens would be more prolific) were associated with the use of spices with stronger antimicrobial effects. They concluded that beneath the veneer of cultural differences in taste preference, culinary spice use might also have an evolutionary premise.

It’s certainly rare that I cook plain rice without any spices added at all. I’m usually riffing on one Iranian recipe or another, which almost always involve turmeric, sometimes saffron and occasionally clove, cinnamon, ginger or cumin. Likewise, when Talati told me how he cooked what he described as ‘plain rice’, it still involved ‘boiling it with spices like star anise, cinnamon, clove and cardamom’. Similarly, Yin said that, when cooking rice, ‘I do generally always use garlic and white pepper, oyster sauce and soy sauce, and some sort of chilli sauce or sambal feature regularly too.’

Star anise, clove, cinnamon, turmeric, ginger and garlic have all, in peer-reviewed scientific papers, shown antimicrobial effects that inhibit B cereus in some shape or form. And they aren’t the only ones: similar studies are out there for the antimicrobial effects of ingredients including rosemary, black pepper, coriander, oregano, thyme, galangal, onion, capsicum and pomegranate (a popular ingredient in Iranian cooking). Even the banana leaf, mentioned by Yin as packaging for parcels of rice, displays antimicrobial properties, although I couldn’t find any studies of its effect on B cereus specifically.

Could the use of certain spices in various cultural methods of rice preparation be preventing the proliferation of fried rice syndrome? I put my spice thesis to Palombo. He agreed that traditional medicinal plants have a lot of antibacterial compounds. ‘Before modern methods of food preservation, people would rely on stuff like this,’ he said. ‘Salt is also an inhibitor of microbial growth, so if you’re adding salt to your rice when you cook it, that might have an effect too.’ I started to think of all the Iranian recipes I cook at home, which my dad taught me and his mother taught him, as not just guides for good meals, but as repositories of traditional knowledge, from a time before fridges and microwaves, in which many of the ingredients had been combined in particular ways for a myriad of now-forgotten-yet-essential reasons. And like a child reciting a prayer, I was now repeating these actions, without ever truly understanding why.

The spice theory is interesting, but it is just a theory. Since Billing and Sherman published their work in the nineties, some of their findings have been challenged. A 2021 study in the journal Nature Human Behaviour painted a more complicated picture, which suggested that spice use is better predicted by socioeconomic factors like poverty and poor health outcomes than by temperature or infection risk. And when I asked Banerji about the use of spices to cook rice in Bengal, she was quick to burst my bubble: ‘In Bengal, the day-to-day rice is cooked plain, without any added spices or even salt. The use of cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, bay leaves, or even saffron is seen for more “fancy” recipes, like pilafs and biryanis. It is not daily food.’

How then to think about fried rice syndrome after everything I’d learned? It was certainly more complicated than a simple public health warning. The name itself is useless and misleading, and probably originates from a particularly racist moment in culinary history. Yes, improper storage and reheating of your rice can make you sick, but so can the same treatment of any starchy food. I’d become less wary of rice in particular, and more wary of room temperature itself. Will I now think twice about the tempting arancini and frittatina di pasta that sit out on cafe counters in Italy next time I’m on holiday? Yes. Will I try at least one anyway because risk excites me? Yes.

I walked away from this intensive phase of research with a very odd picture of the world, one divided into two tribes: the reheaters and the dumpers. Box by box, the faithful reheaters filled their fridges and freezers with cooked rice, building for the future, like beavers constructing a mighty dam. Meanwhile the other tribe, the fearful dumpers, poured their leftovers into a never-ending waterfall of perfectly edible white grains that showered down into a black abyss, deep into the underworld.

That evening, once Dad had calmed down, we did what we do best: we cooked rice. He’d been to the Kurdish shop on Sunderland Road to get fresh dill and fava beans so that we could make baghali polow, an Iranian rice dish that people have been cooking since at least since the Safavid Dynasty. We washed basmati ritualistically five times and then parboiled it. Steam bellowed from a big pot, dill leaves were separated from stalks, fava beans were rinsed. We drained and washed the parboiled rice again, then mixed it with the dill and beans. We added oil, butter and turmeric into the pot, carefully placed and sizzled some thinly sliced potato and delicately spooned the rice back in. Dad said, ‘Careful!’ a lot. Melted saffron was drizzled over, and then the lid went back on for an hour.

We ate the baghali polow together and watched the football, and Dad told me all his rice memories: about being taught to cook by his mum; about living in a Caspian seaside town in Mazandaran and smelling the rice fields in the summer (‘a lovely sweet smell’); about how in Iran, your Sunday best clothes that you’d wear for special occasions are called ‘lebas polo khori’ – ‘rice-eating clothes’. When the game finished and I got up to leave, he presented me with three glass containers of leftover baghali polow, which I took home, and which I would ultimately reheat, the next day, and the next day and the next.

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Joe Zadeh is a British-Iranian writer based in the north east of England. He writes fast-paced and wide-ranging nonfiction about the things that underpin our everyday lives, but often escape scrutiny. His longform essays have questioned the way we think about time, examined the cultural history of charisma, and shone a light on the consequences of the modern world's addiction to concrete. Previous bylines include the Guardian, VICE, and Rolling Stone. He currently works as a contributing writer for the US publication Noema.

Ibrahim Rayintakath is an illustrator and art director based in his coastal hometown of Ponnani, India. His editorial work, which explores themes of culture, politics and mental health, has appeared in various outlets like the New Yorker, the New York Times and NBC.

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today’s essay, our last of the year, by Vittles mentee Vitória Croda, is a tongue-in-cheek look at one of the hardest parts of integration for any immigrant to the UK: the country’s reliance on the meal-deal lunch. It is the third online-only dispatch from the Bad Food Extended Universe.

Our second print issue – the ‘Bad Food’ issue – is available on our website, along with prints from our favourite illustrators and photographers. Please note that any orders this week are unlikely to arrive before Christmas, but if you’re looking for a last minute present, we do have one option left…

Give a gift subscription

Otherwise, we hope you have a wonderful Christmas and New Year break — see you in 2026!

Buy Issue 2

Subscribe now

The Real ‘Life in the UK’ Test

How do you measure integration into a new country? If you ask the ‘Life in the UK’ test – which is also a great icebreaker in immigrant circles – full integration means memorising the names of all of Henry VIII’s wives, or being able to confirm that autocracy isn’t a fundamental principle of British life. As someone who moved here from Brazil five years ago and has passed the test, I feel almost fully integrated. I have got used to the gloomy weather, I have learned to love the noisy London Underground, and I now walk so fast that I have taken up running as a hobby. However, there is one metric I have yet to meet, one which the ‘Life in the UK’ test misses: the ability to happily eat a chilled sandwich.

It didn’t take me long to get acquainted with the ‘meal deal’ – the lunchtime food combo of main (usually a cold sandwich) + snack + drink offered by major supermarkets. In my first corporate job in central London, the meal deal was the closest I got to culture shock. Unlike Brazil, where workers are given a stipend for restaurants and groceries, here employees have to pay for their own lunch; a meal deal is often the only thing that will work with budgets and a half-hour break. Every time I ate a tepid chicken salad sandwich at my desk, I felt like I was eating only to keep my body alive, rather than for pleasure. Maybe that’s why my mother refuses to call these pre-packed lunches ‘real food’. ‘Call it what you want, but this isn’t a proper lunch,’ she argues when I send her a picture, before asking me to eat a warm meal of rice and beans.

With my outsider perspective, I soon realised that what truly unites people in the UK is accepting these meal deals as food. I’ve also noticed that Brits have a very personal relationship with their meal deal combination, which means you can use the most popular choices to judge the current psyche of the nation. In the last few years, I’ve seen more stickers announcing ‘High in Protein’, ‘Source of Fibre’ or ‘Low Fat’, along with complete meal drinks such as Huel and yfood, making the meal deal even more joyless. This year’s ‘Clubcard Unpacked’ showed that the UK’s favourite combo has shifted from the sausage, bacon and egg triple sandwich and McCoy’s steak-flavoured crisps to a chicken club sandwich and a high-protein pot of hard-boiled eggs.

As I see people around me unbothered about their daily meal deal, I start to wonder if I will ever feel like a ‘fully integrated’ immigrant. My partner, on the other hand, has completely accepted the meal-deal mindset. ‘I’d rather eat something cheaper now and spend more on a date with you later in the week,’ he tells me dubiously, although I feel flattered by his selfless sacrifice.

So, he has passed the real ‘Life in the UK’ test, but not me. Not yet. To try and pass it, I decided to eat meal deals for five days in a row to see if I’m able to fully belong in this place I now call home.

Day 1: Tesco, St Paul’s

I decided that each day I would choose a different supermarket – or pharmacy, if you include Boots – at which to buy my meal deal. For my inaugural lunch, I entered the first Tesco I saw around St Paul’s station (I’ve noticed Tesco tends to dominate conversations about supermarkets’ meal-deal lunches). It was half past noon, which meant I needed to be quick – gilet-wearing dudes were already packing the aisle, breathing heavily to hint that I was in their way. I was rushed into choosing the tuna sweetcorn sandwich. It wasn’t bad, but at the same time, it wasn’t exactly good – which is a summation of the meal deal. I got my sandwich with a side of sliced carrot and hummus dip for my fibre intake, plus a small carton of coconut water, which I must admit was surprisingly tasty (don’t tell my coconut water-purist Brazilian friends). In less than thirty minutes, I was all fed for exactly £3.85, but the real cost of this convenience is flavour.

Day 2: Sainsbury’s, London Bridge

The meal-deal aisle at the London Bridge Sainsbury’s was almost identical to that of Tesco’s, but here the meal deal cost £3.95. I got the only thing I couldn’t recall seeing the day before: a chicken and sweetcorn sandwich, which unnervingly didn’t taste much different to the tuna one. I decided to get a high-protein blueberry yoghurt as a snack – it seemed like everyone around me was getting this as well. Although popular, the yoghurt tasted so artificial that I doubt it contained a single blueberry; I felt sorry for the cow that was milked to make it.

Maybe my standards were too low at that point, but my canned apple and elderflower kombucha was a pleasantly tart, refreshing surprise. This was probably my most ‘fit’ lunch of the diary. In numbers, it had fewer than 500 calories, over forty grams of protein and no more than seven grams of fat. I felt like this entire lunch was built by the algorithm – probably the same one that made me sign up to run a half-marathon on the hottest weekend of September.

Because I was raised Catholic and unconsciously seek penitence, I ended up sentencing myself to eat my Sainsbury’s meal deal right next to Borough Market, where tourists were having their fill of truffled sandwiches, empanadas and oysters. Even the strawberries with chocolate topping seemed worth £8 in that moment. But I needed to pass the test, so I kept chewing the cold and slightly stale bread. As soon as I finished my combo, I headed into the market and got a mango sticky rice from Khanom Krok.

Day 3: Marks & Spencer, Brixton

From my observations, the supermarket you shop at says a lot about your social class in the UK. People back home don’t fully seem to grasp this, even though inequality is rife in Brazil. Although different supermarkets in Brazil have their own target audience, for Brits, your preferred supermarket becomes as much a part of your identity as being from Manchester or supporting West Ham. To understand what kind of chilled pre-packed sandwich was being offered to the more affluent classes in the UK, I decided to go to the Marks & Spencer near my home in Brixton.

Unlike everywhere else, M&S doesn’t offer a typical meal-deal combo. The sandwich alone costs £4.60, which is more expensive than most of the meal deals I tried throughout the week. To be fair, it was the only supermarket lunch with a significant difference in taste. The beef and horseradish mayonnaise sandwich had fresher bread, and the spicy horseradish stood out against the dull mayo from Sainsbury’s and Tesco’s. I still ended up feeling hungry a few hours later; luckily, I had some leftovers from the previous night’s dinner. Although I hate to agree with my mother, as I was eating, I realised she was right: the meal deal isn’t a complete lunch.

Day 4: Boots

The most interesting thing about immigrating is how much you learn about your home country. For example, learning that there is a pharmacy chain in the UK that sells lunch alongside sex toys has shown me how prudish we can be in Brazil, despite stereotypes. Back home, vibrators are usually tucked away in specialised adult shops only, not sold alongside chilled pasta salads and protein bars.

Boots is indeed quite convenient, but buying a bullet vibrator at Boots Cheapside feels more dignified than getting its meal-deal lunch. Imagine telling your friends back home that you just spent £4.50 – or £4.99 if you don’t have an Advantage Card – on a combo of a dry and crumbly chilled ham and egg club sandwich, an insipid chocolate mousse, and the one carton of coconut water you drink to gaslight yourself into believing it’s not all that bad. At the end of the day, I bet the sex toys were gone but the sandwiches were still there.

Day 5: Pret a Manger

I started to realise that I might never actually enjoy – or even tolerate – a cold sandwich for lunch. Suddenly, the voices of Nigel Farage’s supporters echoed in my head: ‘Go back to your country.’ So I packed my bags and went straight to Gatwick, where I ate at Pret a Manger.

Pret is a phenomenon I’ve never understood. It’s expensive and doesn’t particularly taste better than any chain supermarket. Yet there are always British people lining up at every central London branch, waiting for their watery coffee and average food. I thought I could escape this, but there’s no way to complete the ‘Life in the UK’ test without having a Pret lunch. This one was particularly pricey – £11 for a dry ham and cheese sandwich that almost crumbled into powder, a mango and lime snack pot and a bottle of still water. We all know airport food exists in its own logic, but this felt exploitative.

As I was leaving the country, I looked over to the plane window with a sense of sorrow, feeling like I had failed my personal exam. I still couldn’t feel a modicum of pleasure or happiness when eating a meal deal. But, soaring high in the sky, I listened to Pink Floyd, and as Richard Wright sang, ‘Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way’, I finally understood what it meant. Maybe this was enough.

The time is gone, and twelve hours later I’m at my mother’s home in Brazil. She feels sorry for me and cooks me lunch. Rice, beans, sun-dried meat, okra and pumpkin salad. On a plate, not in cardboard. ‘Finally, a real lunch,’ and I sighed in relief.

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Vitória Croda is a journalist and immigrant from Brazil. She’s been in London for five years, and is currently doing her PhD at Loughborough University.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Related Reading

• Aaron Timms on the Erin Patterson trial

• Mariam Abdel-Razek on the decidedly unromantic reality of cooking in a professional kitchen

• Thom Eagle on how the customer is not always right

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! There’s now only a couple more weeks until Issue 2 of our print magazine – the Bad Food issue – comes out. If you pre-order a copy before 1 December, you will receive it for a discounted price, with an extra discount for paid subscribers (see the original email for details).

Today’s essay, by Mariam Abdel-Razek, is the second online-only dispatch from the Bad Food extended universe. At a time when being a chef is often romanticised, Mariam discusses the decidedly unglamorous aspects of life in professional kitchens, where passion for cooking is often in short supply.

Subscribe now

Pre-order Issue 2

A year and a half ago I made the ill-advised decision to quit my cushy business consultancy job and retrain as a chef. The response from my friends and acquaintances was almost excessively enthusiastic. Most of them were people who, like me, had sat through many a miserable office day or pointless Teams meeting, and who spent their time dreaming of sacking it all off to do something more romantic. ‘God that’s so cool,’ they’d say enviously. ‘Do you love it? You must love it.’

Let me be clear, before I go any further: I do love cooking. I love when I’m preparing dinner at home and my housemates wander in and say, ‘Jeez, something smells good!’ I love arriving at the restaurant and tying my apron around my waist once, twice, three times, putting it on like armour. I even love the whirr of the ticket machine as it spits out another order from a table of three who expect a whole Cornish sole in front of them in under seven minutes.

Now that that’s out of the way, I can tell you something else: in my line of work, not many people do like cooking – which isn’t really ideal when cooking is the job.

*

The first time I worked in a professional kitchen was on a two-hour trial shift as a kitchen porter. I wasn’t paid, but I was allowed to order whatever I liked off the menu, which I thought was a good deal. I got the cheeseburger and ate it on the patio outside. My nerves had made me ravenous;

I’d spent the whole time thinking, They’re going to find me out, all these people who are amazing at cooking and love food and can probably make a beef Wellington with their eyes closed. I am an imposter.

I couldn’t tell you when exactly this assumption changed, but it was probably some time between watching a head chef throw a pair of tongs at someone’s head and hearing a commis chef ask if he could microwave chocolate mousse. Many chefs – particularly those not in Michelin-starred kitchens – cook professionally not because they particularly love food, or even because they’re good at cooking, but to survive. They have no more interest in cooking than they would have in, say, cleaning, or being delivery drivers. For them, cooking is a means to earn a pay cheque; that it involves one of the most fascinating, complex and useful skills a person can have is neither here nor there.

This comes as a surprise to people outside the hospitality industry, who tend to assume that cooking must be some sort of calling or vocation (funnily enough, no one ever assumed that I was in business consultancy for the love of the job). Inside professional kitchens, the reverse is true: it is so clear that cooking is a thankless job that the thought of pivoting into it is bizarre. Once, a fellow chef, having asked if I had a British passport and if I’d finished school (yes and yes), looked at me and asked, ‘So, why are you here?’

‘I like cooking,’ I said. That got me a laugh. It’s gotten me a lot of laughs, actually.

Read more

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! We’re very excited that Issue 2 has now gone to print, and we’re selling through the magazine like warm baked goods of some kind. If you wish to guarantee a copy, pre-order the magazine now. If you order before 1 December, you will receive it for a discounted price, with an extra discount for paid subscribers (see the original email for details).

From now until publication day, we will be posting some online-only content related to the subject of Bad Food by various Vittles writers and contributors. See this as the magazine’s extended universe. The first article by Aaron Timms, who wrote about British food influencers for Issue 1, is an investigation of the infamous Erin Patterson trial, and the unlikely influence that modern food culture – from Gordon Ramsay to MasterChef – had on the most bizarre murder of the decade.

Subscribe now

Pre-order Issue 2

How responsible are we for the dishes we make, or even kill with? If authorship of food is shared, could it be that everyone who’s helped nourish the modern cult of the beef Wellington is in some way responsible for the 2023 murder of three elderly Australians in the Victorian town of Leongatha? That’s taking things too far, of course: Erin Patterson was the sole author of her crime, whereby she fed a small party of relatives a lethal meal of toxic-mushroom-spiked beef Wellington, and for which she was recently sentenced to life in prison. International media coverage throughout the trial was relentless; since then, a torrent of books, TV series and spin-offs has been announced, each of them promising to wade deeper into the mystery of this most unusual triple murder, whose contours are so macabre they seem to have been plucked straight from a short story.

Part of what has made this case so intriguing to so many people across the globe, I believe, is its connection to food. This was a story of culinary disguise, of meat concealed in dough and murder masquerading as lunch. A whole world – of smartphones, competition shows, hottest-ticket-in-town pop-ups, must-have cookbooks, signature dinner party dishes, celebrity chefs forging through the bush and tenderly photographed, pastry-cradled lobes of rested red beef – had to come into being for Patterson’s scheme to assume the precise form that it did. Without such influences, this might have been a murder like any other; instead, it was the first killing in which modern food culture played a decisive architectural role.

For the true-crime fiends, the vital question the case raises is why: why did a seemingly undramatic forty-eight-year-old woman, living in a small, laconic town in the pastures of south-eastern Victoria, invite her in-laws, her mother-in-law’s sister, and the sister’s husband over for lunch, then kill them with the main course? But for the food-fascinated, the more interesting question is how: how did a middle-aged Australian, in the year 2023, come to forage death cap mushrooms and use them as the basis for a poisonous lunch – and what made beef Wellington a suitable vehicle for the accomplishment of her plan? I don’t mean ‘how’ in a narrow instrumental sense, but in a wider cultural sense: what were the specific historical conjunctures that led Patterson to choose, for her victims, death by duxelles?

Exhibit A: The Mushrooms

Over the past two or so decades, Australia – where I was born and grew up – has embraced, with uncommon zeal, food as a source not only of sustenance but also of culture and collective identity. Perhaps this is because the country’s own post-colonisation culinary heritage is fairly thin, or because food is synonymous with the migration that has remade the nation in the decades since World War Two, or because the ancient foodways of the island continent’s indigenous inhabitants were, until recently, poorly understood by the general population. Probably, it’s all three reasons at once. The flat white (and the intense coffee culture that surrounds it), the ‘all-day cafe that serves restaurant-quality food’, the avocado toast: Australia’s obsession with ‘food and bev’ is so powerful that its most recognisable signifiers are now global clichés.

In the past decade, a passion among local chefs for foraging – supercharged by Noma’s relocation to Sydney for a ten-week pop-up in 2016 – has bolstered the restaurant industry’s ‘discovery’ of the continent’s unique and extraordinarily rich plant life, creating a form of hyperlocal, super-tidal cooking that has become a powerful cultural spectacle in its own right. At nearly any moment in Australia today, whether on TV or social media, you’ll find some enterprising young chef performing their appreciation of the continent’s endemic vegetal bounty with the fly-eyed fervour of the recently converted. This spectacle could involve savouring the acidity of a quandong, brandishing a salty necklace of sea grapes or worming through mudflats in search of pigface, sea rush, marine couch or swamp weed.

Patterson’s escapades took place against the backdrop of a nation suddenly mad for foraging – or at least dead keen on the idea of a trained professional doing it for them. Death caps are not, I probably don’t need to point out, the type of thing Australians usually like to harvest for their own consumption. But thanks to the species identification tool on iNaturalist – a photo-based, user-sourced biodiversity platform that includes more than 300 million observations of plants and other organisms worldwide – they’re relatively easy to identify. Indeed, Patterson relied on iNaturalist to scout her noxious haul, diverting users’ cautionary tagging of death caps on the platform towards a far darker end.

The story of how death caps came to exist in Australia to begin with has much deeper roots. Amanita phalloides is not native to Australia; the species was introduced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the result of an effort to Europeanise – or more precisely, Anglicise – the evergreen continent’s southern cities. The early colonists of Australia felt that British trees were superior to all others, and that all public parks should be planted in the British style (as directed by a resolution from the Victorian Gardeners’ Mutual Improvement Society in 1862). Evergreens like the native eucalyptus tree, as a host of nineteenth-century observers recorded, were felt to be ‘too gloomy, dirty, and dense’, ‘too towering and ragged’, too ‘monotonous’ for the new cities of southern Australia. ‘Other things being equal,’ one such observer wrote in the bulletin of the Victorian Department of Agriculture in 1889, ‘deciduous trees are to be preferred.’ The legacy of that preference can be seen in cities like Melbourne and Canberra today, which have a density of oaks, elms, poplars and plane trees in their centres and wealthy suburbs utterly at odds with the native Australian landscape’s unvarying palette of blue, brown and beige.

This provincially Eurocentric desire to ‘improve the face of the country’ (as colonial Victoria’s chief secretary put it in 1870) by planting deciduous trees throughout its temperate southern towns and cities also had the effect of creating a biotope uniquely hospitable to the death cap mushroom, which flourishes in the rhizosphere of the oak tree in particular. According to mycologists, death caps travel to foreign environments as fungal bodies known as mycelia on the roots of introduced trees, then propagate once planted in native soil via mushrooms and spores; their introduction, in other words, is the accidental by-product of arboricultural policy. The iNaturalist distribution map shows quite clearly the clustering of death caps in cities like Canberra and Melbourne, and around the towns south-east of Melbourne, where Patterson went foraging. This map not only offers a remarkable visualisation of the fungal legacy of colonialism, it also shows how history and technology came together to make Patterson’s murder plan possible, affording her both access to a nearby mushroom supply and the convenience of a user-friendly app with which to score its deadliest treasures.

Exhibit B: The Wellington

Beef Wellington is a dish that, like the trees that gave Australia death caps, traces its origins to England. While its connection to Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington, is inconclusive, the scholarly consensus is that the dish earned its name, and took distinct and recognisable shape, in the grand hotel and palace kitchens of England and Europe at some point over the course of the nineteenth century. In recent decades the dish has been repopularised thanks to social media and the work of celebrity chefs like Gordon Ramsay, who’ve turned it into a global symbol of luxury and excess, standardising the dish as a chateaubriand log of consistent thickness which is sliced open to reveal its blushing meat.

Ramsay is a judge on MasterChef Australia, the most-watched food competition show on Australian TV. The programme has featured beef Wellington prominently over its seventeen seasons – partly because it’s a good measure of a cook’s skill in handling multiple components and cooking styles at once, but mostly, I suspect, because the food internet has made the dish perennially vibey. Though Ramsay has not, as far as I know, directly presided over a beef-Wellington-themed challenge, his ideas about what constitutes good cooking permeate the show, as does his signature dish: in recent seasons, beef Wellington has inspired a portrait challenge, a reinvention test and various manipulations, where the Wellington’s beef has been substituted for pork and beets.

We don’t know whether Patterson is a fan of MasterChef, but all murders reflect culture back to itself. Australia’s food fanaticism, of which MasterChef is a central pillar, would unquestionably have lent credibility to the killer’s baked steak theatrics: the preparation of such an elaborate dish legitimised her in the role of both cook and peacemaker. Patterson extended the lunch invitation to her in-laws out of the blue, after several years throughout which their relationship had grown icy; the husband of her mother-in-law’s sister, the meal’s sole surviving victim, said during the trial that the invitees all happily accepted in the hope that the gathering might prompt a thaw. Beef Wellington is a dish designed to dazzle and comfort at once. It offered the perfect cover for Patterson’s plan, dressing intent to kill in the flaky drapery of a culinary showstopper.

The folklore at the heart of MasterChef in Australia is that great cooks can come from anywhere. As in the UK (and in contrast to the US, where the pros-only Top Chef reigns supreme), Australia’s pre-eminent competitive cooking show opens its doors to both amateur and professional chefs. The recurrent spectacle of the ‘humble home cook’ wowing the betoqued and terrifying MasterChef judges with feats of unexpected kitchen wizardry has imprinted itself on the national cultural consciousness as evidence of Australia’s unique gift for gastronomic invention. Beef Wellington is a tricky dish to pull off: there’s a real art to cooking the pastry (which should be buttery, golden and light) and the pill of beef hidden inside (whose cuisson cannot be tested by touch) at the same time. Patterson’s attempt of a dish like this showed a spontaneity, a confidence, an ambition entirely consistent with the surrounding culture’s mythos of the virtuoso home cook; walking into her house that fatal day, her guests likely greeted the sight of beef Wellington on the plate with delight rather than horror. Food culture made Patterson’s meat-and-mushroom murder weapon believable as a symbol of skill, care, respect and reconciliation.

Exhibit C: The Recipe

There’s another dimension to responsibility in this case that food, normally a stranger to criminal procedure, invites us to anatomise: the question of attribution. Patterson followed a recipe for beef Wellington from RecipeTin Eats: Dinner, a tome by chef-blogger-influencer Nagi Maehashi that is said to be the fastest-selling cookbook in Australian publishing history. The recipe from the book nods explicitly to Ramsay in its sub-heading (‘Gordon Ramsay, eat your heart out’). Interestingly, Patterson departed from the recipe’s instruction to construct the dish as the single, sliceable cylinder canonised by Ramsay and his ilk. Instead, she assembled a series of individual Wellingtons, which allowed her to control the allotment of poison to each of her guests while serving herself a plate that was toxin-free. We live in an era of hacks and mods, of cooks in the comments endlessly sure of their ability to improve upon the printed instructions with shortcuts and switch-outs. Patterson was not the first home cook to deviate from the recipe, but she was surely the first to make the deviation deadly.

Earlier this year, Maehashi accused the Brisbane-based influencer Brooke Bellamy, better known on Instagram and TikTok as @brookibakehouse, of plagiarising her recipes for caramel slice and baklava. Caramel slice is a classic and beloved Australian dessert, the type of sugary treat that can be found in bakeries all over the country; baklava is, well, baklava. The similarities between Bellamy’s recipes and Maehashi’s ‘originals’ may be striking – the ingredients, proportions and directions are all essentially the same – but attribution in these cases surely attaches to no one; though countries may claim ownership of baklava, no individual can. If caramel slice ‘belongs’ to Maehashi, does beef Wellington belong to Ramsay, to the army of unheralded nineteenth-century cooks who collectively wrestled the dish into something like its modern form – to the Duke of Wellington himself? The debate over authorship that Maehashi’s allegations triggered took place, curiously, right as Patterson’s trial was starting, a coincidence that practically wills us to consider one theft (of two recipes) in light of the other (of three lives).

Recipes are not subject to copyright or ownership in any meaningful sense, legal or otherwise; they are only ever a rough translation of a physical act that every reader completes with their own cooking. They bring both author and reader into a community – of shared experience, knowledge and feeling. Some languages even grammaticise the collective nature of recipe-writing (and recipe-following) by framing directions not in the imperative, as is conventional for recipes in English, but in the present tense of the first person plural (‘We season the beef …’). The death cap mushroom and its arboreal host thrive through a symbiotic association known as a mycorrhiza, sustaining and even communicating with each other via the exchange of nutrients and other matter. At its best, the act of cooking functions in much the same way, as an expression of reciprocity and fellow feeling that creates bonds of mutual nourishment.

But very occasionally, the marriage curdles, the glue of community turns toxic, and we get something like the Patterson case. Life cedes to death, symbiosis to synnecrosis; food becomes foe. Though the court’s guilty verdict was unambiguous, the mushroom murders sprouted from a rich historical sediment of taste formation and communal enthusiasm. The killer alone was responsible for these deaths, but culture made them possible.

Share

Leave a comment

Credits

Aaron Timms is a writer living in New York.

Sing Yun Lee is an artist and illustrator based in Essex who specialises in painting, drawing and collage. You can find more of her work on her website and on her Instagram.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Published in Vittles

Stone and Seed

Mira Mattar on starvation as a tool of genocide in Gaza

Starving Palestine

Israeli colonialism and the struggle for food sovereignty in Masafer Yatta, by Manal Shqair

When Food Doesn’t Taste Like Home

How occupation and war have severed the people of Gaza from their culinary history, by Doha Kahlout (translated by Katharine Halls).

Read a version of this essay in Arabic here.

Sowing Solidarity: How Lebanon’s Wineries Remain Rooted

Farrah Berrou writes about the delicate balance between loss and hope in southern Lebanon’s wine country.

Redefining the food film: A Glass of Juice in Palestine

NA Mansour on the representation of food in Palestinian cinema.

Writing in Other Publications

• Jerusalem Quarterly special issues on food (2024)

• Hunger Makes Life Hell for Gaza’s Journalists – Eman Hillis, Electronic Intifada (2025)

• My Family’s Daily Struggle to Find Food in Gaza – Mosab Abu Toha, New Yorker (2025)

• Cooking Palestinian Food: On Indigenous Herbs, Craft, and Community – Fadi Kattan and Karim Kattan, The Funambulist (2020)

• I Come From There – a newsletter by Lama Obeid

• Back Home – a newsletter by Amanny Ahmad

• Freekeh and Fellahin: A Symbiotic Relationship of Sumud - Amanny Ahmad, Institute for Palestine Studies (2024)

• Bread and Salt - Amanny Ahmad, Mold (2024)

Subscribe now

Vittles: Issue 2 will be published in December 2025. Pre-order here.

This magazine began as a modest project about awful food and quickly spiralled out of control.

About a year ago, my colleague Sharanya Deepak mentioned that she was tired of South Asian food writing that was only about grandmas, who all seemed to be amazing cooks. This well-meaning food writing trope – in which a whole culture must be introduced to a readership through its tradition or sense of hospitality – had to die. Sharanya’s idea was an online supplement that ignored the virtuous aspects of cuisine and instead focused on the havoc that is regularly wreaked across South Asia in the name of food: pink sauce pasta, Szechwan sauce, the alliance of capital and stupidity that leads to a Jamie’s Italian in Delhi, or Chicken Cottages across Pakistan-administered Kashmir. In short: the exact opposite of nourishing grandma food. Eventually we got so invested in the idea of ‘bad food’ that we lost the South Asia focus and it became this magazine: 150+ pages of slop dedicated to terrible food in all its guises.

We’ve loved working on this issue. In a strange way, concentrating specifically on badness has been freeing. So much of food media – us very much included – is dedicated to finding goodness in food, whether it’s a recipe that works, a particularly well-made supermarket item or a great restaurant. Yet most foods sold commercially across the world don’t fit neatly into these categories. They might be indifferently cooked, or don’t fit with elitist notions of ‘good taste’. Or they might be just plain bad for you. These are the foods we wanted to re-evaluate and celebrate, and they have informed the sections we have divided this magazine into: Bad Cooking, Bad Taste and Bad Foods – a trifecta of badness.

Bad Foods is all about the things that are, or that are believed to be, bad for us. In an investigation we’ve long wanted to read, Joe Zadeh looks at the phenomenon of ‘fried rice syndrome’ and why so many white people fervently believe that you cannot reheat rice. Tania Sanchez, co-author of the legendary Perfumes: The A–Z Guide, turns her hand to writing about soft drinks, and the various sweeteners they contain. Morgan M Page writes movingly about the links between rotting food and transition. Chefs Joyeta Ng and Andy Ho have a frank discussion about the contemporary reappraisal of MSG and the difference in attitudes between people in Hong Kong and the diaspora in the West, while Ozoz Sokoh and Joké Bakare discuss the MSG-laden Maggi, and whether it has improved or ruined Nigerian cuisine. Additionally ten of our favourite writers choose their most compellingly evil supermarket items, from Charlie Bigham’s Lasagne and Yazoo milkshakes to ready-to-eat poached eggs.

Bad Taste was the genesis of this magazine, and begins with two long dispatches on ridiculous food in South Asia. The first is Sharanya Deepak’s epic on Italian food in India and Pakistan, which takes in alfredo fettuccine, keema noodles, pink sauce pasta and Balochi tikka lasagne – dishes that thrive despite puritanical Italian rage. The second, by Lily Kelting, is on the supremacy of Szechwan sauce, the beloved red condiment that fuels much of India’s street food but literally no one wants to take credit for. On the subject of bad manners, Amel Mukhtar and Melek Erdal navigate the classist and colonial connotations of table etiquette and eating with hands. Elsewhere, two contributions explore over- and under-restraint: legendary queer polymath Johanna Hedva writes about Simone Weil and her relationship with anorexia, while in an anonymous essay Ms Pistachio Paradise reveals what it’s like to combine sex work with food in the form of sploshing.

Finally, Bad Cooking is all about the restaurants, cafes and cooks that have given us the gift of bad food. Chris Jones of the essential 56a Infoshop in Elephant and Castle has written the history of the squat cafes that kept a swathe of London fed on skipped vegetables and international squat slop at the tail end of the millennium. Alim Kheraj discusses the tragic food in gay bars across the UK, from dry pork baps at Dempseys in Sheffield to buffets at gay saunas in the Docklands. In our roundtable, restaurant critics from both sides of the pond – Pete Wells, Helen Rosner, Chitra Ramaswamy and me – talk about how we evaluate bad food and restaurants, and the process of writing bad reviews. As an extra treat, we also chat with the Michelin Man himself, Andy Hayler, about whether Michelin is responsible for making food worse. On the cooking side of things, Rukmini Iyer answers all your burning questions about the British TV show MasterChef, its cooking legacy and her run-ins with its notorious judges, while we asked chefs Feroz Gajia, Ixta Belfrage and Rahel Stephanie to come up with a trio of disrespectful recipes that could potentially get them in trouble with their elders.

We’re delighted to include three stellar pieces of fiction, with short stories from Munir Hachemi (translated by Julia Sanches), Sheena Patel and Lauren J Joseph that veer between hunger, horror and horniness. Also, from now until publication day, we will be posting some online-only content related to the subject of Bad Food by various writers and contributors, including Aaron Timms, Vitória Croda, Mariam Abdel-Razek and more. See this as the magazine’s extended universe.

As with Issue 1, Bad Food has been a huge collective effort. It was put together by our editorial team, comprising Adam and Sharanya along with Rebecca May Johnson and Odhran O’Donoghue. We’ve been lucky to work with a wealth of illustrators and photographers, including some dream collaborations with Lauren Martin, Joy Yamusangie, Kenneth Lam and Ibrahim Rayintakath, which has made this magazine the most visually fun project we’ve ever worked on. Dan Biddulph designed a completely new magazine from scratch, along with our cereal box cover (an unintentional rip-off of hat-tip to Heston Blumenthal and Lucky Peach) with Sing Yun Lee. Sophie Whitehead sub-edited the whole thing and we even have a Bad Foods crossword by Beatrice Barr!

In many ways, Bad Food feels like our first issue. It is the first magazine we have commissioned entirely as a whole item and feels very much like us: a reflection of our love for the more absurd, stupid and evil parts of food culture. If you’re interested in mould, Maggi, monosodium glutamate, aspartame, Ace K, Irn Bru, dupe sodas, Richmond Sausages, Rustlers Burgers, Charlie Bigham, Red 40, E numbers, E coli, the oeuvres of Pierre Bourdieu, Simone Weil and Gregg Wallace, Sosmix, post-orgy roast dinner buffets, sploshing, squat slop, creamy cheese szechwan dosas, Massimo Bottura, Massimo Dutti and the worst three-star restaurants in the world, then this issue is for you.

Pre-order!!!! Now!

Like with Issue 1 (now sold out), this magazine is entirely self-published and funded only through user subscriptions. We have taken on no additional investment, and it contains no adverts. Pre-orders are vital for us. If you pre-order the magazine by 1 December the magazine will cost £18, down from the RRP of £20. Paid subscribers will get a further reduction to £16 – there’s a discount code after the paywall.

If you are a retailer and wish to stock Issue 2, then please email our distributor Antenne Books at maxine@antennebooks.com or mia@antennebooks.com.

Order Issue 2

Read more