Yes to the last three. Plus, that we all were gun nuts, that we couldn’t read, that we secretly wanted to control the world (mostly liberals that one), and worst of all, that we had never heard of cricket! No one made fun of my accent though, mainly because people couldn’t decide if I was from the US, Canada or Germany. Hence I managed to get a lot of “Jurgen the Student” jokes thrown at me, which I always found amusing. I also found it amusing that, after I’d lived there a few years and had picked up an English accent from my (now ex-)wife, sometimes people who didn’t know where I was from would start spouting anti-Americanisms at me. I wouldn’t tell them where I was from right away. I’d tell them about my cricket club and my D.Phil thesis on the early English Bible in East Anglia. Then I’d tell them where I was from.
I was not at all pissed off by anyone’s comments. What I found disturbing were the comments to my (English-born) wife like “How could you possibly marry someone from there?” Well, sometimes the people who would over-patiently describe the British political system to me when we were discussing politics. But then I would just over-patiently describe the 13th-century origins of Parliament back to them.
So certain people in England are insensitive, rude and racist (which, trust me, I know all too well) and this has something to do with Americans commenting on the state of English food? Please. Calling someone a bad cook is not an insult on the level of a racial epithet.
My comment was a “drive-by”? Obviously you missed my earlier post in the thread. Come to think of it, you’ve missed the hundreds of posts I’ve made at my time on the Board which have had great things to say about my time in England, the people I met there and the things I learned there. More to the point: What is so “offensive and ignorant” about saying that a country’s food is not as good as another’s? English food is getting better every year, and I will heartily agree with that. But English food, especially in the North and where I lived in Oxford, still has a long way to go. That is not a stain on the English character.
So, are you actually agreeing with me, after all the noise you’ve made about saying a country’s food is not as good as another’s being such a bad insult? Again, tell me how it is that talking about a country’s food is “making fun” of another person.
You challenged us that “anyone who comes out with that [English food isn’t good] hasn’t been to England,” then, “backed it up” with a link to, of all places, the BBC Food website! I strongly suspect you were the one planning a “drive-by”–by angling for a negative comment, then jumping all over anyone who did, accusing them of racism or something uncomfortably near it. I didn’t say that English food wasn’t as good as food in other European countries because it’s a stereotype. I said it because in my experience it was reality. Those pictures on the BBC website look good, but my experience in England is that far too much food consumed there is tinned, packaged and processed (just like in America, in point of fact. Does that make me biased against Americans too?) There are good restaurants in London, and I went to them as much as I could, but I also went to restaurants and pubs where I was variously served tinned soup advertised as freshly-made, pies that still had ice in the middle, and meals that were frankly inedible. Those criticisms of the bulk of English cooking are shared by my favourite cooking writers, Nigel Slater and Pat Chapman…and they are both English!
Now, I am glad that I did not say anything about the weather too…
