The government would like you to prepare for the apocalypse. I have done the catering.
Its new Be Ready campaign recommends keeping three days’ worth of food and water at home for emergencies, prompting a rush on tins, bottled water and, apparently, an extraordinary amount of soup. So I spent a week eating exactly the sort of food we’re being told to stockpile – without cooking or refrigeration – to find out whether surviving the collapse of civilisation also has to mean miserable dinners.
Surprisingly, no. I made apocalypse “avo” on toast from tinned peas, a convincing Niçoise, coronation chicken from the deeply unpromising contents of a tin and something I am legally obliged not to call paella involving smoked mussels and Peperami. The real lesson was that olive oil, vinegar, mustard, chilli and spices are considerably more useful to morale than another 14 cans of beans. We’ve also put together a practical guide to what is actually worth keeping in your emergency cupboard – including the humble sieve, which nobody puts on the survival lists and which I used constantly.
If civilisation survives, the supermarket of the future could contain bananas that refuse to go brown, tomatoes with extra vitamin D and Maris Pipers engineered to resist blight. England’s new precision-breeding rules have brought the first gene-edited crops closer to our shelves, although none has yet been approved as food. The technology could reduce waste, improve nutrition and protect crops from disease. After a summer of drought and disappointing harvests, the bigger question is whether we’re using this extraordinarily clever tool for the problems farmers most urgently need it to solve.
Westminster has its own solution to expensive food: cheaper gherkins. More than 100 imported products are having tariffs suspended, including marmalade, garlic, boiled sweets and chocolate wafers. The Treasury says the combined changes could save households up to £12 a year. Food and drink prices, for context, have risen 38.6 per cent since 2020. A useful reminder that Britain’s supposedly national diet is built on an enormous amount of imported food – and that knocking a few pence off a pickle is not quite the same thing as fixing the food system.
Sardinia, at least, is trying to solve a problem closer to the dinner table. Fifteen restaurants are asking families to put their phones away and giving them games and conversation prompts instead. It sounds faintly ridiculous until you consider that a quarter of British families reportedly no longer talk over dinner and more than half of children aged eight to 16 have a device beside the cutlery. Perhaps the Italians are on to something.
For some considerably more wholesome national competition, Britain briefly held the world record for the heaviest pumpkin. Hampshire grower Ian Paton produced a 1,295.8kg monster called Bagheera, only for an American to beat him seven days later – using genetics from a pumpkin the British growers had produced themselves. Giant pumpkin growing, I discovered, involves pedigrees, international seed auctions, forklifts and the ever-present danger that several months of work will simply go “pop”. Magnificent stuff.
Finally, dinner. We have nine proper Sunday roasts from Rick Stein, Raymond Blanc, Jessie Ware, Imad Alarnab and more, spanning Marmite gravy, pistachio-crusted lamb and chermoula cauliflower. And for anyone exhausted by the protein arms race, Bettina Campolucci Bordi has three recipes that give fibre some overdue attention, including red lentil dhal with tandoori chickpeas, a Mexican nacho plate and five-minute pea soup with spiced pancakes.
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