Fodder

What has the George V done to you?

Do the waiters now tip the tourists to dine there?

Where did you go? Paris? (Why can't a post be less than 10 words)

This is the dreadful food to which you refer?

I thought you might be complaining about the French version of roast beef and yorkshire pudding or battered fish and chips.

You should have been more adventurous and tried frogs legs, squid and octopus as an appetizer. 

I'd have welcomed frogs legs.
What we had was fish, which I can't eat, very badly cooked, with no vegetables, ever. To start we always had some form of crème brulée, which tasted nasty, and always finished with some sort of very nasty chocolate with very nasty cream, because they were cheap there.

This is a habit picked up from the USA's UK origins. We have a very long history of being a trading island, and adopting tastes and ingredients from all over the world, either picked up through trading or brought here by immigrants (and we have a long and proud history of immigration, too). That is what many seem to fail to understand about 'the British' (including some of the 'British', of course!) - the various peoples here (those that could afford it) have always been outward-looking in their eating habits. Nowadays almost every village has at least a Chinese and an Indian food outlet in addition to the 'chippy' (and many large villages, and every town, has much more, including Italian, some form of 'Kebab' place, Sushi, etc.).

I have to say that French food on the other hand is, in my experience, almost universally poor. Their cuisine seems to have a limited understanding of how to use ingredients in order to get the best out of the ingredients themselves, and fairly a limited palette of flavours (not to mention a regular habit of not putting enough on the plate, and prioritising style and look over flavour and satisfaction!). It generally doesn't compare favourably at all with Indian sub-Continental cuisine, for example, or Italian, or South East Asian food, in my opinion. I have no idea why it seems so highly regarded - there are so many other cuisines that are so much better.

People from outside the UK often seem to misunderstand what 'traditional British' food is all about, too - using the flavours of the ingredients themselves to good effect, rather than covering them with lots of additional herbs and spices. If you are used to highly-spiced food, obviously things that aren't highly spiced will taste 'bland' at first, until you gain an appreciated for the more subtle flavours.

Of course, there have been historic misunderstandings of British food - much of the US impression of it, for example, comes from the WWII period when US citizens were over here in large numbers. Yes, UK food then was pretty bad - we'd been suffering from years of shortages and rationing as a result of the war, and were particularly short of things like fat and sugar - major players in the flavour stakes. It seems to have been assumed by many that that was 'normal' British food, and the misunderstanding still persists all too widely.

Of course, many foods considered by Americans to be 'American' are actually entirely British and entirely traditional to the UK - the standard roast dinner, for example. And what could be more 'American' than apple pie? That's traditional British food, too, and not American at all. It can be a little irritating to hear Americans dismiss UK food as being 'bad' when what they are saying is 'good' and 'traditional American' is often exactly the same as that UK food.

One of the most popular dishes in the UK is Chicken Tikka Masala - a dish using traditional Indian elements, but probably actually invented in the UK (probably in Glasgow, specifically, although the origins are disputed). British food is among the most varied in the world because of so many influences over so long a period (and so many flavours and spices from all over the world), and that is a tradition that is many centuries old, which is why the original 'traditional British cuisine' is something so hard to define. Definitions often seem to fall back essentially on 'peasant food', which can be good and hearty and tasty enough, of course, but was ultimately eaten by poor people because they couldn't afford better (and is pretty similar to peasant food across Europe and elsewhere - lots of stews and things).

There's nothing wrong at all with food in the UK. There only ever has been at times of shortage, and that is going to be the same the world over. There's plenty of bad food in the UK, of course, and bad restaurants, and bad takeaways, and bad processed foods in supermarkets - that is also the same the world over, and not a yardstick for judging how good food is generally.