Brexit brings back memories of runny Ski yogurt and thin jam. The European Union changed our food for the better – so will we now go back to the bad old days?
I was eight when I went abroad for the first time: a trip to France in my mother’s black Datsun Cherry. We drove from Sheffield to Calais, crossed the Channel in a hovercraft which made me throw up, and proceeded first to Amiens, where we stayed overnight in a tiny hotel close to the cathedral. The next day, our parents took us to a cafe for breakfast, where we ate croissants and drank thick hot chocolate from moss-green bowls, the first of what would turn out to be a series of head-turning moments. Oh, but it’s so hard to convey now just how exciting and delicious a plain croissant was then (this was the late 70s); I’d never eaten one before. Even as I finished it, licking my finger to gather every last flake, I worried that such an ambrosial delight might never pass my lips again. If this turned out to be so, I wasn’t sure life was going to be worth living.
There followed one revelation after another. Water that was – eh? – fizzy. Yogurts that were white rather than purple, and set rather than runny. Butter that was unsalted. Cheese that was stinky. Apricot jam that was so full of fruit you could barely spread it (the raspberry on which we’d been raised was thin and blandly saccharine). In a restaurant in the Loire, my brother and I tried snails, and even as we giggled and grimaced and generally made a fuss, I had a sense of the world opening up: all these things in it, for me to try and to like or dislike as I pleased (mostly, admittedly, for me to like). It was almost too much. Sitting in long grass by some roadside, eating one of my mum’s scratch picnics (camembert, baguette, greengages), we would fervently denounce Ski yogurts and Chivers jam. The superiority of French food – even the tinned peas; especially the tinned peas – had become, in the space of less than a week, an article of faith for us. We were miniature gastronomic zealots, crazed for Orangina, garlic and the pistachio milk chocolate you could buy in three packs at Carrefour and Intermarche.
We were miniature gastronomic zealots, crazed for Orangina, garlic and pistachio milk chocolate
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