IN the beginning, say the 1970s, there was the now notorious nouvelle cuisine with its tiny portions and limited choice created, some say, for the maiden flight of Concorde. Then there was cuisine minceur which took the next step and abandoned the number one ingredient of Michelin cooking: butter. Sacre bleu. And cream. Zut alors.
Then by the 1980s everybody realised that, frankly, why go to a restaurant to lose weight? And be bored? So the tasty stuff, yes that would be the butter, came glugging back in. Hurrah. But while Michelin-starred French super chefs, say Bocuse and Troisgros, did agree that there was a lot to be said for old fatty Escoffier’s orthodox cuisine classique because it tasted bloody good, at the posh end wholesome and pretty and regional was here to stay.
I mention this because over in the land of the free, America, these days a completely parallel revolution is taking place, 40 or so years later. Butter is back, real butter; not in Michelin-starred restaurants, it’s been there for years, but in McDonald’s. McDonald’s I hear you scoff, what’s that got to do with real food? Ray Kroc, the mastermind of McDonald's (“We’re not in the burger business, we’re in show business”) will be turning in his grave. But it’s true. The Golden Arches have officially abandoned margarine for full-fat butter.
So significant is this to the American economy that an extra 500 million pounds of milk a year, the equivalent to total US butter exports, will be needed. Crikey. And that’s before every other fast food chain embraces butter, as they will. If you’re thinking, aha, another stinking American imperialist plan to kill us all, think again. It isn’t. It’s desperation.
In the United States this year for the first time in fast food history McDonald's will close more restaurants than it opens. The business is beset with wide-eyed panic. We all know that salt, sugar and fat have a heroin-like effect on our brains, balloon our waists and clog our arteries. It turns out we don’t care. We’re not eating tasteless cack no matter how healthy it is and that’s official.
The boom in fast and casual – even Michelin-starred restaurants are going casual – is not in healthy anymore; it’s in wholesome. Butter is wholesome. Organic is wholesome. Free-range eggs (anyone noticed McDonald’s current UK telly campaign?) are wholesome. It doesn’t matter if its also full of fat as long as its wholesome fat. Or if it’s loaded with salt, as long as that chicken led a rich and fulfilling life. And it tastes good.
Does it need to be pretty? Uh, no. Or regional? Regionalisation is a bit of a problem if you’re McDonald's; a problem too if you live in Scotland. We don’t do much in the way of fresh locally grown food, turnips aside. But we can do wholesome. In the US the hugely successful Chipotle chain practically patented fast n’wholesome. In Scotland we have trailblazers Martha’s and Pinto. More are following. The nouvelle, nouvelle cuisine is on its way.
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