# Questions of Appetite  ## Metadata - Author: [[Jonn Elledge from The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything]] - Full Title: Questions of Appetite - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: A question I’ve often wondered about, and which I warn you straight off I won’t be answering, is why there’s no real British cuisine. ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > How does this happen? An unusually centralised state is probably a factor: it probably isn’t a coincidence that England and France, which unified early and whose capitals have always dominated the rest of the countries, have primates while countries which unified later (Germany, Italy) or those with strong subnational units (Australia, the US) do not. There’s almost certainly a sort of feedback loop at work: a city that reaches a certain level of size and influence will tend to keep sucking in people and money. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hv4dh2b6nwphresn1y7wpm2w)) > As a result, there’s some debate about whether a primate city is the sort of thing a country might actually want. Some economists, geographers and people who decide whether we should be building better transport links in London or in Leeds argue that such a city is *generative* – that is, the agglomeration effects of having one massive, successful city is what creates the wealth with which it can generously subsidise the rest of the country. Others would say it’s *parasitic* – a term I’m not going to patronise anyone by explaining. My suspicion is it can be either, or even both at once, depending on context and other aspects of a national economy, and that trying to reduce this to a simple binary is lots of fun when having fights on the internet, but potentially a terrible way to actually understand and govern an actually-existing country. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hv4dje2z3cnkn8jgnderhx19)) > Patrick’s email also drew my attention to Sark’s weird constitutional history. Until recently, he notes, the island was the “last feudal state in Europe”. That changed in 2008, when the “chief pleas” – the island’s brilliantly named parliament – was elected for the first time [following a row](https://substack.com/redirect/61d37ce0-2f78-453d-bf51-f15bc243b434?j=eyJ1IjoiNjJ0MzkifQ.xvmeteYUWuTW2048sY06HqWl8UGBClWNt9EFiNpuf-Q) between the “seigneur” (feudal lord) and his supporters, and the Barclay brothers (incredibly rich owners of the *Telegraph*) and *their* supporters. (The Barclays are resident on the tiny neighbouring island of Brecqhou, which is “constitutionally part of Sark according to everyone except their lawyers”). The result was that… > > *…until recently the main feature of [the island’s] politics was pro and anti Barclay brothers, who depending who you asked were either dragging Sark kicking and screaming into the 21st century and revitalising the economy, or using lawyers and the fact they own so many businesses on the island to bully and blackmail the islanders into abandoning their traditional way of life…* > The odd thing about this row is not just that there was a feudal state in the Channel in the same year that Goldman Sachs went down and Katy Perry released “I Kissed A Girl”, nor even that the Barclays were on the pro-reform side. The odd thing is that, after the reform law was passed, the Barclays – who owned, let’s not forget, the *Telegraph* – used the European Convention of Human Rights to [challenge](https://substack.com/redirect/92da9c1f-f3f6-42a2-b49f-e72948f8934e?j=eyJ1IjoiNjJ0MzkifQ.xvmeteYUWuTW2048sY06HqWl8UGBClWNt9EFiNpuf-Q) that new law. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hv4dtah1mzhayt8pg5b2wmc1))