The fall of the Wall accelerated globalisation, and globalisation tends to improve cooking. Our food has kept getting more exotic. The number of Indian restaurants in Britain, for instance, has gone from 1,200 in 1970 to about 9,000 today. (Indian food, incidentally, epitomises globalisation: chilli reached India from Portugal, tandoori from west Asia, and curry powder, bizarrely, from England, writes Amartya Sen.) Gradually, more westerners came to regard food as more than just fuel. On April 14 1999, Jamie Oliver presented his first cookery show on BBC television. A new generation of “foodies” was born.
Great masses of people now watch cookery shows on TV. They don’t all then cook the dishes but they must be influenced. Often they consume the foods in simplified or snack forms: in coffee shops, or as ready-made supermarket meals. There’s even a “fresh fast food” phenomenon. Recent TV commercials for Taco Bell in the US, for instance, feature the celebrity chef Lorena Garcia rhapsodising about “beautiful ingredients” while preparing a “burrito bowl” in her kitchen. This sort of thing is easy to mock, but these foods are probably tastier than, say, the Wonder Bread that used to be an American staple.
