Politics & Power Quote by Anne Dudley

Nobody eats in England is a punchline dressed up as a travel observation: a deliberately exaggerated bit of national caricature that lands because it flips expectations. England, the old target of culinary jokes, gets recast as a place where people are too happily saturated to bother with dinner, thanks to beer. The line is less about nutrition than about tempo and texture - pub culture as a social meal, liquid calories as community ritual, conviviality replacing cuisine.

Then the jab pivots to America, and the subtext sharpens. Bland is not only a taste critique; it is a critique of standardization. Turkey sandwiches become shorthand for a certain safe, packaged, mass-market idea of food: portable, inoffensive, engineered not to offend. In the 1980s-90s imagination especially, American eating often read as convenience first, sensation second - a country with abundance that can still feel culturally muted at the table. Dudley’s dismissal also carries the outsider’s frustration: the U.S. has spectacular regional cuisines, but visitors frequently encounter the generic middle.

Coming from a composer, the phrasing is accidentally revealing. She hears cultures the way she might hear arrangements: England as a boozy, resonant room where atmosphere does the work; America as a thin mix with the flavor EQ turned down. The humor gives her permission to be blunt, but the real point is about what a society chooses to foreground - appetite versus ambience, variety versus reliability - and how quickly those choices become stereotypes we trade like postcards.