I'm French and haven't interacted much with English persons or the media (I only know English because of social media) and basically all I know is they're cooking like they hate food, can you confirm?
I can confirm that a lot of British food looks unappealing, maybe even downright awful, to the rest of the world. I mean, who looks at beans on toast or stew and goes... yeah baby?
But it is a very uneven cobble-path to be on, one step in the wrong direction and you enter Classist valley and you don't come out again. Classism is the most grievous, evil thing in this country that starves and kills more people than people realize, or maybe even care about.
British food, especially how I and countless others before me have experienced it, has only ever been a means to fill us up.
Stew for example, and broths and porridge and all things brown and boring to look at, are some of the cheapest and most hearty meals anyone can have. You can scrape together the meager amount in your cupboards and make a lot of food for next to nothing.
Growing up, we would have one bowl of stew with a piece of bread and it would do us the entire day. That was true for my family for bygone generations and it will be true for us for many more. What good is bright and colourful French food or Spanish food when you can’t even afford the pepper?
Nice food is a luxury that a mass amount of British people cannot afford. Even a takeaway is a luxury. Even microwave meals that aren’t Sheppard’s pie or something of that ilk are more expensive.
So we stick to brown broths. Stews. Beans. Bread. And get laughed at for it- perhaps ignorantly, I mean, who Colonialise the world and doesn’t have great food after it- the answer is simple, Colonialism isn’t for the poor. The poor didn’t display their Pineapples and Spices for neighbours to see and throw them when they were rotten. Poor people in this country have never experienced food the way that affluent people have.
To really answer your question- we don’t hate food! We love food! Hearty and filling food, for sitting around with Kin and sharing stories, a dram, a drama, a tale of woe, to come together as people do and remind yourself that you aren’t alone.
All of that love? That is what a boring stew is to me. Ugly British beans on chips is my mother and I walking for two hours in the rain to buy the cheapest bag of chips that we could buy to feed the eight people in our house plus our grandparents and having an absolute laugh as we did.
I think the whole ‘British food sucks’ argument is really quite ignorant, distasteful and downright rude.
TLDR;
British people don’t hate food they are just Poor
