As we enter 2026, I reflect on what has changed foodwise in Britain over the last year. The Food Scene is of course constantly evolving, and I have written about many of the trends before, but now seems a good time to take and record the temperature.
A return to meat
Let’s start with a good thing – we seem finally to have seen off fake meat and instead have a greater concern over what meat we buy.
January, in addition to being a month in which we are urged to lay off alcohol, has since 2014 been christened Veganuary, in a campaign by a non-profit company aimed at persuading people to switch to a vegan diet for the month. Toni Vernelli, who had been head of communications for Veganuary for the last six years, has now urged people to “forget” the campaign and go back to eating meat. She says that the “vegan dogma” is “not only unhelpful but actually damaging to the fundamental goal of reducing animal suffering”.
Thom Norman, another former vegan activist. He said his history campaigning on the streets of London never made “much difference” given that 83 % of people who try veganism give up in the first three months.
When Henry Dimbleby published the first part of his National Food Strategy in 2020, he declared that we needed to consume a third less meat by 2030. Daily meat consumption had been falling for a decade, down some 17pc, with consumers not only eating less, but also switching from red to white meat. Now it seems that a growing awareness of health, and the role of quality protein within this, has turned the tide. Some identify the role of so called “fat jabs” in this as when weight has successfully been lost, users find they desire a smaller quantity of food but recognise that what they do eat should deliver optimum protein.
Of course, under the barrage of messages against meat, many farmers had either gave up meat production or gone under. For those that remain the price of meat has gone up, but increasing or restarting production is not quick process. Beef prices rose 27.4pc this autumn, the biggest rise since the 1980s, giving a rise in sales of £418m. The end of an era for cheap meat we hope, and a growing realisation about the true price of its production. Whilst volume has fallen the price has risen. Less but better is the mantra.
Meanwhile UK sales of plant-based proteins fell from £520m in 2023, to £460m in 2025 as people became aware of the downsides of mass-produced, ultra-processed versions of meat. Just one plant-based food has bucked the trend: Sales of tofu and tempeh, the curdled soybeans which humans have been eating for 2,000 years, have risen. Authenticity has seen off the faux.
Shortcut foods
Now the bad news. Britain now leads the UK table for consumption of ultra-processed food having, according to a survey published by the Journal of Public Health and Nutrition, just broken the 50% threshold. Germany and Ireland are not far behind at 46.27% and 45.9% respectively, but the really striking picture is the wide difference between countries that have a strong food culture and those that do not. Italy and France consume just 13.4% and 14.2% respectively, figures that indicate that processed foods are just an occasional “treat” and not the normal way of life they have become in Britain.
I don’t intend here to go into an in-depth analysis of what constitutes “ultra-processed”, nor enter into the argument about whether all are necessarily harmful to health. What I want to draw attention to is our use of “shortcuts” in cooking.
I haven’t set foot inside a supermarket for years, but from what I read the shelves are filled with shortcut foods. I learn that next to the bags of rice there are 39 varieties of pre-cooked rice, costing between 75p and £2 for 250g depending on whether it has been flavoured with something like mango or coconut. There are all manner of marinated proteins, including chickens on which someone has already sprinkled the salt for you. You don’t have to handle the bird; you can cook it in the bag.
Most published recipes nowadays make use of shortcut products in order to keep the list of ingredients down to what is widely reckoned to be the absolute maximum of 10, but in most cases only 5. I watched a Mary Berry programme before Christmas in which she proudly asserted that she would never make pastry nowadays as what you can buy “is perfectly good”. As a cake maker she actively promotes the use of “Baking Spread” (a processed plant-based spread/margarine) in place of butter. Commissions for food programmes have dropped by 44% in a year and people who want to learn how to cook something will find it on YouTube rather than the BBC. YouTube tutorials are the way that most young people learn nowadays, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Learning from books as I did is no longer an option. In 2022 Sunday Times research found that while more than 5000 cookbooks were released in the UK only 556 sold more than 100 copies and these tended to be miles from the fabled Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course of yore.
Back in 1978 Delia Smith taught the nation to cook via a cookery course on BBC2 and accompanying books – originally three, later published in one manual. Delia Smith herself often promoted shortcuts, but these were usually in technique rather than shop-bought alternatives. Her basic pastry lessons included shortcrust (with a discussion of the various fat options and matching them to the filling); quick flaky pastry (a really good technique using grated fat that I still use to this day for sausage rolls, Eccles cakes and even Beef Wellington); and Suet Crust pastry for puddings both sweet and savoury. Her Advanced Pastry chapter gave us Choux Pastry (for profiteroles, eclairs and gougères), John Tovey’s Rough Puff Pastry (incorporating the fat in pieces rather than a lump and another shortcut technique I have followed for life) and Rich (sweet) flan pastry for desserts. This gave me pretty much every pastry I have ever needed, although I tend to make my shortcrust pastry, both savoury and sweet versions, in a food processor rather than by hand nowadays. Plus, filo (which I confess I do buy) and for some reason, hot water crust pastry was not covered, the latter I make for raised pies such as pork or game. I think you will struggle to buy all of these, although I note that there are others like gluten-free now available. Someone has decided that we no longer want to make suet puddings or even adapt our shortcrust pastries to suit the final dish. That’s a sizeable impoverishment to our baking heritage, but I’m sure that if we really want to make a pork pie someone will show us how on YouTube.
However, there are worse implications for our cooking skills from the raft of shortcut products now available than just our diminished pastry skills. In fact, many are so widely used and firmly embedded that I am beginning to doubt that people even know they are shortcuts. Take the use of gravy granules or custard powder for example. How many people know how to make these from scratch, using homemade stock for gravy and fresh eggs for custard? Of the two, gravy granules contain the most additives and are certainly ultra processed yet few people think twice about using them. If you are lucky, you may be able to find a custard powder that contains nothing scarier than dried eggs and cornflower but even then, what do you know about how the hens that laid those eggs were reared? It is thanks to these shortcut products that foods from the lowest rearing standards, including from abroad, find their way into the food chain. At Christmas, when there was a shortage of home-reared turkeys for sale, the press reported a widely used subterfuge where if meat is processed, even just butchered to provide a “crown”, it is legal to show a Union Jack on the front and only in the small print tell you that the meat came from EU and non-EU countries.
So here are two of my main concerns about ready-prepared shortcuts: they eradicate our cooking skills, and they take us further away from knowing the provenance of our food.
However, if the good news about the reasons for the resurgence in meat sales being down to health concerns is right, then we may be due a reappraisal of these shortcuts as we certainly know that processed foods are less healthy. Even when you remove the “ultra” part of processing there can be no ignoring that even seemingly healthy fresh vegetables that have been ready chopped and packaged for you will be less nutritious than the loose whole vegetable would have been.
Then consider the cost. Chopped onions apparently cost £1.35 for 400g whilst on the opposite shelf, still sitting in their protective brown skin, loose onions cost £1.05 a kilo.
Undoubtedly it is cheaper to cook from scratch ingredients, but this has to be weighed against how you value your own time. There will also be some energy cost in cooking yourself rather than having got someone else to do so. When food costs are rising there are many actions that consumers can do to counteract this without reducing the quality of what they eat (in fact usually improving the quality). How easy people find it to exercise these options depends on their cookery skills and Colin Tudge has repeatedly talked about the intrinsic importance of cookery for good food production. Farmers need a discerning public to sell to and every year I read outraged comments about the failure of supermarkets to sell British foods at the height of their season.
Let’s hope that 2026 will be the year that people learn how to cook from scratch. I’m starting with a lesson on making gravy without the dreaded granules.
Gravy
For my recipe this month I am focussing on gravy. Firstly, I question why anyone would want to smother their delicious meat in a sauce that does nothing to enhance the natural flavours but instead overpowers them. There are so many ways we can add a moist dressing to a dish that don’t rely on gravy granules. Let’s start with a classic demi-glace such as you might serve with a roast. You need:
Onion
Meat Fat (or butter)
Plain flour
Wine or other alcohol
Homemade meat stock
I think the strap line for Bisto used to be “browns, seasons and thickens
in one”. Homemade gravy is often not as dark in colour as that made from granules or powder. The principle natural browning ingredient is caramelised onions, so when roasting meat I like to roast onions around it. Whole onions, roasted in their skin, can be eaten with the meal , or you could just place thick slices under the meat which will be removed later.
When your meat is cooked remove it from roasting tin to rest. The gravy will be made in the roasting tin to incorporate all the flavour of the meat.
Pour the excess fat and juices into a separator if you have one or just a dish. You need only 1 tablespoon of fat to incorporate the same amount of flour and, depending on how thick you like your gravy, this will make about three-quarters of a pint.
Place the roasting tin over a low heat on top of the cooker. Sprinkle over a tablespoonful of flour and mix it into the fat with a wooden spatula. Let it cook until it colours (not burns) then add a good slug of alcohol. What alcohol you use depends on what you have to hand, often it is the wine that will be served with the meal, but fortified wines such as port, madeira and sherry are also good. The alcohol will help lift the flavour deposits from the pan, so you need enough to swirl around then stir to blend into the roux (fat and flour) base you have made. Now you can begin to incorporate the meat stock. This will happen more quickly and easily if you have already heated the stock. Use your wooden spatula to stir each addition into the roux base so that it becomes one reasonably smooth sauce before you make the next addition. Allow the sauce to reach simmering point to thicken, you can cook for longer if you want the gravy thicker. The fat and meat juices that you poured off earlier will have separated so that the fat lies on top of the meat juices. A separator enables you to pour from the bottom, but otherwise you will need to pour the fat away to leave just the juices. Add the precious juices to the gravy. You can strain your gravy through a sieve to remove any lumps if necessary so don’t worry too much about them
As I type this, I realise that it sounds like a lot of work, but I promise you the flavour is worth it and, most importantly you can adapt this to different dishes. For example, if I have cooked pork chops, I might use cider instead of wine and stock. If I have cooked lamb, I would add some rosemary beneath the meat as it cooked and might also add a spoonful of redcurrant jelly to the gravy. Other vegetables in addition to onion can add to the flavour. Carrots and celery complete the “holy trinity” of flavourings which in France is known as a Mirepoix and in Italy as a soffritto. I always have these in the fridge, but it is a good idea to keep them ready diced in the freezer.
Other vegetable flavourings well worth keeping are mushrooms and tomatoes. For tomatoes I keep a jar of concentrated tomato purée made in Sicily. For mushrooms I have both dried porcini and some wild mushrooms cooked in butter and frozen in an ice cube tray. Both of these are intense flavour bombs and with their addition I would feel I could make a flavoursome gravy even without meat stock.
I haven’t discussed making the meat stock here because I have done so before here. Making stock from bones is an integral part of my cooking rhythms. It follows a Sunday Roast as night follows day, but even when I don’t have sufficient to warrant the exercise that day, I freeze them until I have enough. Chicken and game birds are usually collected to be turned into stock this way.
A final observation regarding gravy is that flour-based thickeners have been falling out of fashion for some time now. They are viewed as a remnant of Britains “stodgy” cooking. If you prefer a lighter style, simply deglaze the cooking pan with alcohol without the addition of flour and then reduce your stock until you have a consistency you are happy with. Don’t be afraid to experiment – that is the beauty of making gravy from scratch, each time could, and probably should be slightly different, not a one size fits all.
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