Apparently, it may be time to start loving English food again. The Guardian is calling for us to re-examine our neglected national cuisine, with chef-writer Lewis Bassett noting the rise of croissants and sourdough in the UK and asking: “Where did all the bath buns and Sally Lunns go?” He observes a middle-class obsession with the cuisines of foreign cultures over our own, and lays blame on socio-economic factors including industrialisation, urbanisation and wartime rationing. He is right about the neglect, but his analysis of the cause is way off the mark. Instead, perhaps we ought to examine our own prejudices and ask whether a particularly English self-hatred is the actual root of this particular malaise.

When Jacques Chirac declared in 2005 that Britain had Europe’s worst food after Finland, British writer Stephen Pollard enthusiastically agreed. Step into an average British restaurant, he argued, and you would be lucky to find something worth eating. While dining at St John, the restaurant that helped revive traditional English cooking in the Nineties, actor Sam Neill declared in the Observer in 2014: “I like British food, which is mostly terrible, but when it’s good it’s fantastic.”

And when, later that year, the American ambassador complained about enduring endless servings of lamb and potatoes, Guardian writer Stuart Heritage sprang to our defence by invoking the stereotype of Britons as “bad-toothed idiots” enduring “essentially indigestible dinners”. How casually we insult our food, even while praising it.

Where does such middle-class self-loathing come from? As is often the case, George Orwell had an answer. Writing in 1941, he attacked the English intelligentsia as “negative creatures” who had spent the run-up to war sneering at patriotism, only to reverse their position once war began. They “sniggered at the Union Jack and regarded physical courage as barbarous”. Orwell thought English intellectuals were almost unique in being ashamed of their own nationality. They took “their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow”, feeling obliged to ridicule everything English, from horse racing to suet puddings. Culinary contempt and embarrassment for one’s own country were prerequisites for sophistication.

This is nothing new, as the English have been denigrating their own dishes for hundreds of years. The aristocratic Whigs were besotted with French chefs. The mid-18th-century Duke of Newcastle was heartsick when he lost his beloved chef Pierre Clouet and lamented his replacement’s dreadful sauces. All this while Britain spent much of that same century fighting France.

Hannah Glasse, the great English cookery writer, had little patience for such fashionable snobbery. So common were French cooks that her 1747 cookbook complained of “French tricks” and a “French booby”, observing that English gentlemen would rather be cheated by a Frenchman than employ a competent English cook. Yet her own book included French dishes alongside early English recipes. It is possible, after all, to love foreign and domestic cooking simultaneously.

Bassett and I agree that English food deserves pride, and that industrialisation and rationing did epoch-defining damage. But he diagnoses a cultural problem and prescribes an economic explanation. He notes that artisanal English food is an expensive middle-class preserve. Yet many of the people quoted here can afford to eat whichever cuisine they please, and still chose to dislike English food. Money or access isn’t their problem.

English food is nonetheless enjoying a revival of sorts — at least among culinary elites. Jeremy King has resurrected Simpson’s in the Strand, complete with roast beef carving trolleys and giant Yorkshire puddings, while the Georgian Simpson’s Tavern has returned as Cloth Cornhill, serving sausages and lamb chops. Chefs are finding renewed pleasure in the dishes and traditions we supposedly abandoned.

We needn’t stop loving French pastries or Italian pasta to rediscover our own suet puddings. But if we’re serious about English culinary self-love, perhaps we should begin by challenging our culinary self-loathing.