“Happy New Year!”

Fine Food with

Charles Campion

Food writer and critic

• It’s time to go left field rather than safety-first
• “Fashion or for keeps?”
• “New year and new possibilities”
• “What is in a name?”
• “The art of shopping”

Welcome to a New Year as yet untarnished and still full of optimism. Magazine editors everywhere will have got together and commissioned a raft of pieces about the future for January. What are the trends for 2017? Will there be some new 'must-cook' foods? Will there be developments so earth-shattering that the face of retail is changed beyond all recognition? This time last year, all the speculation was about Brexit. No one knew how it would end up and we still don’t, although it is fair to say that the result managed to be both unexpected and inconclusive

At the beginning of the old year, who would have predicted that 2016 would be remembered for a big supermarket’s small war with a food manufacturer over Marmite? Two sides groping for some kind of publicity advantage. Another year-defining development was the rise and rise of gluten, or rather the lack of it.

Suddenly gluten-free was the thing to be. A number of products that had never ever contained gluten started to emblazon ‘Gluten-Free’ on their labels. Last year saw the launch of a gluten-free dog food – presumably Towser had been munching his way through a wheat field when he saw the error of his ways and went gluten-free. Perhaps this hound could try eating meat?

2016 was once billed as the year of the spiraliser, but mercifully courgette spaghetti didn’t catch on – too wet and flabby. Yet another assault on our culinary heartland came from a different and surprising direction. According to the research boffins, the public is falling out of love with tinned food. Tinned soup has borne the brunt of this development and is down 8%. Heinz tinned tomato soup may be a lurid colour, it may not taste of tomato, it may have a dodgy chemical smell to it, but surely it is a part of everyone’s gastronomic journey? Then there is the tinned sponge pudding, whose sales slid down by 30%. Solid, unyielding, chewy sponge with a dripping crown of golden syrup, a week’s worth of calories in a single hit.

What’s going on when we no longer defend our comfort foods? Goodness knows what will happen to that tinned steak and kidney pie beloved of bedsit dwellers everywhere. A shallow tin with deep brown, gloopy, gravy and some brave chunks of meat swimming through it. Meanwhile the crust is detached and cooked separately, ending up golden and flaky.

Another trend that greets the New Year is eating insects, worms and bugs. All of which makes perfect sense if you live somewhere where there is very little to eat.  Last autumn saw something of a push for insects. How about cricket bolognese? Sadly, this is not dinner served at a Test Match but rather one of many suggestions that we should all be munching on insects. Perhaps start with the cricket flour energy bar?

There have always been strange gimmicks on the food aisles – five or six years ago one of the bigger department stores sold a natty line in chocolate-covered scorpions. What makes the world of food and drink so rewarding is the unpredictability of the public; it would take a very foolhardy scribe to predicate what lies in wait for us in 2017, and even if the hamburger marches on through our menus and a gluten-free range is a must-have, nobody knows the when, where and why of it all. Make mine a tinned syrup sponge pudding!