Americans Think The Brits do WHAT?

I don’t even like tea that much, but after a horrible winter day, when it’s dark, cold and miserable, I’ll take a cup of Yorkshire Tea and enjoy it. So when Americans say that British people love tea, I can’t entirely argue. I’ve joined in myself.

In 2022, after six years living in the UK, I looked at some familiar American stereotypes about the Brits. As a Canadian, I appointed myself the referee, although several of the food and drink questions were harder to settle than a simple true or false. What I’d experienced here needed a bit more explanation.

A pub is somewhere to spend time

The idea that British people are always at the pub usually comes with a second claim about how much they drink. I wanted to separate those two things, because going to a pub doesn’t necessarily mean drinking alcohol. To me, pubs could be places to unwind, read a book, spend time with family or meet friends.

I thought they were a huge part of the community, although I wasn’t talking about every pub being the same. A Wetherspoons could have quite a different atmosphere from a little local pub in the middle of a village. On the whole, though, I found that pubs could be comforting places where people spent time together.

There was a part of the drinking stereotype that I recognised from my own outings. It had been quite rare for me to go to a pub with people and have everybody stop at one drink each. Once we were there, people tended to have more than one. That was something I’d noticed, rather than a claim that every British person drank.

I also thought the choice of non-alcoholic and lower-alcohol drinks had grown since I’d moved here. By that point, beer and cider options were becoming easier to get hold of, although I corrected myself when I said it was easy. Not super easy. I knew some Wetherspoons offered non-alcoholic drinks, too, and thought some of those alternatives were actually really tasty.

I liked the food people dismissed

Another stereotype was that Brits loved their bland British food. From what I’d seen, plenty of British people did have a soft spot for their own cuisine, but I wouldn’t have called it all bland. There was a lot that I genuinely enjoyed eating.

I loved a Scotch egg and a steak and ale pie, and you could give me fish and chips any day of the week. A Sunday roast with big, fluffy Yorkshire puddings was another thing I was very happy about. Those were the foods I was thinking of when I pushed back on the idea that British food wasn’t worth getting excited about.

I’d done plenty of taste tests and tried cooking British foods and puddings myself. Some of the more traditional things could seem a bit bland to me, sure. I could give the stereotype that much without writing off the everyday British food I liked. My verdict was a mixture, with a fairly enthusiastic defence of the things I wanted to eat.

Tea had a place even in my coffee-loving life

The tea stereotype was the one I was most willing to agree with, though I wasn’t suggesting that every British person was obsessed with it. People drank coffee as well. I loved coffee myself, but wouldn’t have more than one a day, whereas I knew tea drinkers who were happy having several cups.

What stood out to me was the way tea could fit almost any situation. A breakup, starting a new job, a stressful day, even something dramatic happening in a favourite television programme could all lead to the same suggestion. Have a cup of tea. I saw it as something people used to soothe themselves.

That was where my own winter cup came in. I didn’t need to become a person who loved tea all the time to appreciate it after a miserable day. Give me that cup of Yorkshire and I’d enjoy it, coffee preference and all.

Watch my original video about British food and drink stereotypes.