The Final Countdown: Food and Brexit

It's been around a year since we voted to leave the EU, and yet there hasn't really been time for sober reflection. It's been more of a horrified extended hangover; running around trying to undo bad decisions, rushing headlong into a world of pain while trying not to vomit on ourselves. But as with any hangover, the nausea eventually passes and it comes time to eat something. Unfortunately, many of those somethings come from that there Europe, which poses its own problems.

The modern British individual has pretty diverse tastes, and a palate that calls for a whole host of exotic and esoteric foods. Thanks to such revolutionary ideas as ‘cooperation’ and ‘trade’ we can currently sate those tastes fairly easily, regardless of the underlying logic of the situation. Think about this – you can step outside right now, head to your nearest medium-sized shop, and buy a mango. A fresh mango, in Scotland, in late spring, like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

That you can go full mango at the drop of a hat is down to the network of trading connections built up between the UK, the EU and beyond. More than half of the UK’s food supply comes from overseas, with a hefty chunk of that food mountain emanating from the EU, and it’s the growing role of pan-European grocers and food suppliers that helps make varied food affordable in a country where wages have largely stagnated in the last decade. 

Before we get going, it's important to point out the bad sides to this arrangement. If we can go into a shop in Edinburgh and buy a mango for £1, it stands to reason that someone, somewhere is getting ripped off in order to make this all possible. As usual, we don’t exactly have clean hands here – our need for avocado directly contributes to deforestation in Mexico, and our love affair with the frankly-overrated quinoa has led to the grain’s price yo-yoing as farmers rush to shift the stuff while we still care about it. Who are the ones who lose out? You guessed it, the original Andean farmers who’ve been growing the stuff for decades. 

With Brexit, we could decide to change all that, and go fully self-sufficient in food and drink. It’s not completely outside the realms of possibility, especially if we can get some sweet farming robots on the case, and a dramatic shift localward certainly cuts down on the carbon footprint of our diet.

That’s the good news; the bad news, according to the National Farmers’ Union, is that such a move would involve “drastic shifts in consumption patterns... which may not be feasible or acceptable.” In short, you better learn how to make lassi out of turnips, ’cause your tropical fruit-having days are numbered.

Then there's the international implications of deciding to go All Local Everything. Everyone who works in the food industry seems to agree that Britain needs some kind of deal with our erstwhile pals in Europe to make sure we can still buy cheese off them, while we can continue to send them the kind of British produce that is objectively too nice and too valuable to waste over here. Now, admittedly, we just had a deal. We decided to fuck it out the window because we’re all idiots, and also because of something to do with Brussels (the city, not the sprout). Also, everyone keeps just using the word 'deal' like they're in some kind of improv skit – 'we need a good deal', 'no deal is better than a bad deal', etc – with all the confidence of a parrot that's just learned a new sound but isn't sure if it's endearing or a bit racist. 

Things just get worse from there. We'll stop EU workers from coming to the UK, thus pushing up the cost of food produced here; we’ll also likely get lumbered with a set-up which will make stuff produced elsewhere more expensive. On the high seas, the UK’s fisheries plan has been compared to “blackmailing [Europe] on the way out”, which, for one thing, isn’t how you blackmail people – they tend to just let you leave and lock the door behind them. It’s almost as if none of this shit was thought through at all, which is why nobody seems to have any idea what the bloody hell's going on. Will everything be fine? Will we all starve to death? Will we all be forced to survive on Michelin star-level langoustines? This lack of specifics, by the way, is why you're reading this article now. Try to write something like this a year ago, and you'd end up with a three-hundred word scream and a load of terrified expletives; now we're up to a full page.

When routine gets upended, all bets are off, and when your food supply gets interrupted, weird things start happening. Norway is a lovely country, all austere architecture and bleak-but-friendly people, but it has a complex system of tariffs and duties on food coming into the country. This is to protect the local farmers and ensure that the country doesn’t go wild with all its oil money, importing huge piles of ham and ending up with nowhere to put it. It rained a lot in Norway in 2011, which hit butter production, and Norwegians love their butter. When prices hit £120 per kilo for the yellow stuff, people were being stopped at the Swedish border for trying to sneak illegal butter into the country. Now imagine scenarios like that, for everything, all the time.

And then there's all the other stuff – the simple trips to Italy or Spain to spark culinary ideas and broaden horizons, the European PDO scheme that lets you know that what you're eating is definitely real actual Parmiggiano Reggiano. Yes, we sound like the worst kind of urban liberal elite faux-sophisticates, now give us back that cheese before you get a screwdriver in the eye. We're very miffed right now.

Food brings people together; it helps transcend our national and cultural boundaries, and gives us a shared experience to talk about and/or chow down on. As the New Yorker’s Bee Wilson puts it: “To contemplate Brexit is to see the extent to which Britain is not a food island.” We've seen what Britain has to offer food-wise – some of it good, some of it bad, a lot of it beige – and now we want to explore some new eats, and so do you. You love pizza, and the more authentic the better; you want to try intriguing dishes from other cultures; you like to eat and drink new things, and experience new tastes. Let's hope we don't have to resort to sneaking our favourite recipes and ingredients over the border in the near-future; if we do, hopefully those farming robots can come up with a convincing alibi.