Welcome to gastronomic hell. Or, to be more exact, seat 24, carriage C, on the 11am to Bristol Temple Meads. For it is autumn and I am travelling again, from one end of the United Kingdom to the other. There will be planes, trains and automobiles and while punctuality can’t be guaranteed, one thing is certain: the eating options will be truly awful. We like to think we have gone through a food revolution in this country over the past few decades and in terms of restaurants, and availability of ingredients, we have. But start travelling by public transport or, God help you, pull into a motorway services, and it becomes clear that revolution is still at the Molotov-cocktail-throwing stage.
In Bristol or Peckham or Ancoats right now it’s all ’nduja and seared hispi cabbage and roasted golden beetroot with whipped feta. Meanwhile, on the 11am to Temple Meads it’s “Would you like to avail yourself of our coffee and Twix deal for £3?” and “Just how bad would you like to feel about yourself today?” The fact is you can have anything you like when you’re on the move in the UK as long as it’s a bolus of oil-drenched carbs. There are sugar-spiked muffins, and dismal croissants so flaccid no form of culinary Viagra would ever get them up again. The buffet car sandwiches taste of profit margin and old age. The “healthy option” on board is a bag of salted peanuts. Get on a domestic flight and a mini-tube of paprika flavour Pringles is about as close as you’ll get to an act of self-care. And in a well-equipped motorway services you’ll have the full choice from Burger King to KFC to Costa.
Try to deal with the problem and people will point and laugh. An example: The Kitchen Cabinet, the food panel show I present for Radio 4, generally gets to and from the locations of our early evening live recordings by train. At the end, those of us heading back to London get on board, fully aware that the choice in the buffet car was appalling in the morning and now, gone 8pm, will be a meagre choice of awful. So we have a train picnic purchased in advance: olives and charcuterie, hummus and good cheeses and fresh fruit. One evening I posted a picture of this to Twitter, as we hurtled back from Birmingham or Stoke or Stafford.
It was such an extraordinary sight, this train table of nice things to eat, that hundreds of people piled in with their comments. Which in turn resulted in dailymail.co.uk running a story about how I had divided Twitter with my “VERY middle-class train picnic”. There were reasonable complaints about the amount of plastic. Some questioned the etiquette around eating possibly stinky foods in an open carriage. Taramasalata and sourdough crackers, anyone?
Honestly, the Kitchen Cabinet team would happily avoid both of these issues if there was the kind of modestly ambitious dining car of the sort other countries’ rail operators seem to manage. But almost all of them have been phased out in the UK.
Instead we have little choice but to raid the nearest Waitrose for the cream of its Essentials range. From time to time, just as with hospital food, there is an initiative. A well-known, well-meaning chef is hired to put his name to a range of products. The branding is always gorgeous. But the contents always amount to the same thing: carb on carb on carb. Perhaps you disagree. If so, you are welcome to come and argue the point. You’ll find me in a sugar-induced coma in coach C.
