Matters of taste

Some food bloggers want a code of ethics. But the proposals would put most British newspaper food writers out of business
June 3, 2009
Maltese cuisine and press junkets

A few months ago, the Maltese tourist board offered to fly me and a gaggle of other hacks to the island to explore Maltese cuisine. This sounded like a joke, so I went—and it was. Not that Malta doesn't have a cuisine: it does. But it's the cuisine of a middle-rank Eastbourne hotel in the 1970s. That's Malta, a dusty south coast resort for the elderly of England that happens to be a few miles from north Africa.

On the first evening the staff of the tourist board took us to watch a noted Maltese chef cook and serve the favourites of the contemporary Maltese kitchen. The first course was minestrone and the second a Mrs Beeton staple, stewed beef olives. The beef was the best, the chef told me: imported from New Zealand.



This is what you get if you had the British as your colonial power—great bureaucrats, but no croissants. And lots of margarine. The Maltese import most of their vegetables from Italy and have only just started growing olives again. Their diet has made them the unhealthiest and fattest people in southern Europe, I was told. I'm not surprised, since the non-English dish of which they are proudest is prinjolata, a great pile of sugar, flour, chocolate and butter festooned with pine nuts and artificially coloured fruit peel. It was awfully popular: we called it the Dom Mintoff, after the former prime minister of Malta.

I feel a little guilty writing this: there is a convention with these trips that you're not rude about them, which journalists usually observe until they are rich enough to afford their own holidays. The corruption of lifestyle journalism—especially in the travel sections—is so ancient and universal that it goes without questioning in the business, and the public don't seem to care. When I started work at the Independent 20 years ago there was a strict no-freebies rule, but it soon disappeared along with other good ideas of the paper's early days, such as the notion of writing as little as possible about the royal family.

Now that many newspapers have farmed out the soft end of their product to contract publishing, there seem to be no rules at all. A while ago the company behind the Sunday Times's travel supplements asked me to go to Louisiana and write about the restaurants—they would pay me, but I would have to get the New Orleans tourist board to cough up for the flight and fix all the meals. And it did. One of the officials told me that American journalists would never make such requests, but that she understood things were different in Britain. I wrote that I'd been "a guest of " in my copy, but it didn't make the published article.

Quite frequently I receive emails from small businesses asking grumpily why I haven't visited their new restaurant, or written about the samples of gluten-free bread or dolphin-friendly sardines they've sent me. A few times I've been asked if and how much they need to pay me. I always reply with a note saying that I'm not AA Gill or Matthew Norman, I live quite modestly: the usual amount will do. Sadly no one has yet taken the bait.

Can the internet change this? Can it foster a new morality among the sybarites and parasites of lifestyle hackery? A few weeks ago there was an attempt in the rarefied—but busy—area of food blogging to introduce a code of ethics. The bloggers behind SpicySaltySweet.com and FoodWoolf.com proposed a five-point code and asked others to sign up for it: 1. We will be accountable 2. We will be civil 3. We will reveal bias 4. We will disclose gifts, comps and samples. 5. We will follow the rules of good journalism. This is now being debated with the fervour only the internet can generate at foodethics.wordpress.com

Wow. As Tim Hayward, the stalwart of the Guardian's food blog Word of Mouth (declaration of interest—I'm paid to write for it) says: "That would put most British newspaper food writers out of business." Especially point two. Being habitually civil, I must mention a glorious restaurant that we visited on our last evening in Malta, the Palazzo Santa Rosa, just outside Valetta. Here we ate good things: fresh sea urchin roe on pasta, rabbit stuffed with its own liver and chocolate, pigs' cheeks stuffed with goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes. The ingredients were local; the chef-patron, Claude Camilleri, is a Maltese émigré who had recently returned from working at a London investment bank. It is an inspiring and honest place, although I'm not sure that it alone, in the old Michelin phrase, merits the detour.

A Triumph for Matters of Taste

Service was slow, but on 6th May the government at last acted on this column's suggestion that employers be stopped from using tips and voluntary service charges as a way of boosting waiters' pay over the minimum wage threshold—a measure proposed here in January 2007. The practice will be banned from October: restaurants will have to pay minimum wage. Tips are extra.

Next, please: an end to all service charges. We would like to reward the waiter directly in cash amounts proportionate to the quality of service provided. It's a crazy notion, but, hey—it works in New York. The origin of "tip," after all, is said to be a sign on a brass urn, common once in pubs and coffee houses, with the words "To Insure Promptitude." Bring it back.