A taste for deprivation? Fish, chips and leaving the European Union

This paper explores the relationship between food culture and political behaviour through the lens of the United Kingdom’s referendum on leaving the European Union. It finds a significant relationship between the prevalence of fish and chip shops in a given area and voting patterns in the Brexit referendum, demonstrating that constituencies with higher proportions of fish and chip shops tended to show stronger support for Brexit. Conversely, areas with greater culinary diversity or a higher prevalence of Japanese restaurants exhibited the opposite trend, aligning with more cosmopolitan and pro-Remain tendencies. Using constituency-level data, the study situates fish and chip shop density within broader socio-economic and cultural frameworks, including industrial legacies, educational attainment, employment patterns, and demographic factors. These findings reinforce narratives such as the “left behind” and “let down” frameworks, while highlighting the value of culinary landscapes as proxies for political behaviour. By examining the geopolitics of food, this research sheds light on the interplay between social inequality, cultural identity, and electoral outcomes in modern British society.