Why is British cuisine so bland?

The honest answer is a combination of factors. 1) that quality of ingredients is much much higher in Britain- excellent meat and very high food standards comparatively to most other places. Most recipes and standards involved work to bring out and highlight the natural quality of the food, and so a culture of adding extra chemicals and spices and syrups and seasoning salts never evolved. This isn't actually "blandness" but it can read as such to people from other countries whose brains are used to a massive hit of e numbers, corn syrup and spices with every bite. Once the palate adjusts the flavour of the basic ingredients comes through more 2) most cultures exciting, "non bland" food has evolved in the last 100 years - anything in Italian, Thai, American, was invented for tourism and culture export reasons. Not to say it isn't eaten by people living there, but it's not actually the long culinary tradition it's presented as, it's mostly modern "gimmick" food. 99.9 % of all meals in history were rice or a root vegetable, boiled in water perhaps with an egg or meat drippings. English cuisine is actually more flavourful than most of that 3) it's actually just not really true - indian curry, arguably the most highly spiced food type available the world over, is way way way more popular than any dish you would think of as British- British people get their flavour hit from this, the bland stuff is comfort or fast food which brings me to 4) drinking - British drink drink drink drink - and nothing tasted better than bland fast food when you're drunk. Most tourist areas are, for locals, places you'd go when you're drinking, so most food there will be drunk food 5) there's actually a very rich history of British food reaching back hundreds of years, and its entirely likely that curry, among many other flavoured foods, were first eaten here - for example one of th eewrliest known European cookbooks is named "the forme of currey" and contains recipes where dry spices are sautéed with onions, before neat is browned and then water is added to make a spiced gravy- ie. A curry - and one of the earliest complete records of spiced food recipes we have