Influence of travel

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 550.

The experience of British travellers over the centuries has helped the inclusion of so many other national dishes in our food culture. It has been further influenced by migration into the UK, particularly in the last century. To use curry as an example, British recipes for curry date back to the 18th century and the UK's first ever curry house was opened in London in 1809 – the Hindostanee Curry House in Portman Square. In the 20th century, the first curry houses in the North West of England started in the 1950s to feed the men who had come from the Asian sub-continent to work in the region's textile mills. Manchester's Curry Mile – the UK's biggest concentration of curry restaurants – started to spring up in the 1960s and is more popular than ever today.

Convenience culture includes food from around the world.
The influence of other countries' foods and dishes is particularly obvious in where we choose to go out to eat and what takeaway and convenience food we buy.

The UK, as with many other countries, has a convenience food culture - our lives are getting more busy and hectic, meaning that we often have to eat quickly. This is matched by the availability of ready packed and takeaway meals, most of which have their origins in cuisines from around the world – Italian pasta and pizzas, Indian and Pakistani curries, and Chinese dishes are perhaps the most popular, followed by Mexican, Thai and Japanese.

Where do we buy our food?

Supermarkets

We also like convenience when we are buying our food – the so-called ‘big five' supermarket chains in the UK now account for about 70% of the food retail market here. This isn't surprising given that on average a store such as Sainsbury's offers tens of thousands of different items on its shelves. Sales of convenience food were worth £11bn in 2001 in the UK and are estimated to grow by 33% in the next ten years. Customers are also offered incentives such as reward schemes, easy parking and long opening hours (in large cities 24 hour opening is common) to fit in with busy lifestyles.