You are what you eat?

I love food - it's a wonder that I can fit into trousers anywhere between a 32-inch waist and 38-inches (if one believes what it says on the labels). I love cooking and I love eating - in short, I love food for its own sake. What I cook and what I buy is not, for me, a lifestyle statement, a political badge, a  gilded certificate of ethical beliefs - food is what sustains me and is undoubtedly my greatest pleasure (obsession, some may say) in life. 

 

 

I'm unashamedly middle-class, although I think I would have made rather a good aristocrat - I eat lunch and dinner, not dinner and tea; I sit on a sofa (not a settee), in my living-room (not my lounge), and I go to the loo, not the toilet.

I discovered, back in the early-1980s, when I was training in cocktails, that I have a very good palate - I can imagine flavours and build up quite complex combinations in my head; I never thought to be exceptional and it is only with the passing of years and the transfer of that gift to cooking that I have accepted it is quite rare.

As I was not formally taught in catering - I studied Sociology - I do not find myself hidebound by tradition: a friend who is a very successful restaurateur, at the age of 16 or 17 told one of his catering lecturers that he (the teacher) didn't know what he was talking about and quit college. He's never looked back, and has been a tremendous inspiration to me over the last 25 years.

So, I've nailed my colours to the mast - now, to the excellent article on food and class in yesterday's Food Monthly, Observer, 13th March 2011. Louise Carpenter makes it very clear that this does not pretend to be an empirical study, it is little more than a series of vignettes, but no less illuminating for that. What I can't quite get my head round is this: the father of one of the families featured (2 adults and 2 kids, one of whom is vegetarian) is German (resident in the UK for 20 years), describes himself as "working-class", is said to be a "dinner lady" for a local nursery, and spends £178 on food in a week - £65 of that on meat for just 2 dishes: shin of beef on Saturday night and pork belly for Sunday lunch. Lovely ingredients, honest "peasant food" - the sort of thing that I buy regularly, but pay little more than £3 a pound for. I'm greedy and allow half-a-pound of meat or fish per person, so for six meals - remember that the pubescent daughter is vegetarian - my meat cost would be less than a tenner. Their meat cost, at that allowance, equates to £21.66 per pound. That's close on £50 a kilo! Just to pay their weekly food bills - nothing else - would entail a gross taxable income of more than £12,000. How, I want to know, do they afford it?

A Souper Cause!

As a lover and passionate advocate of home-made soups any time, I think this is an excellent idea - instead of the poor supping at soup kitchens, the rest of us have one day of it, for charity.
Super Soup Lunch, Friday, the 25th March 2011

Love food, hate waste!

Reading Jay Rayner in this month's Food Monthly, Observer, 13th March 2011, I find myself nodding and chuckling simultaneously. Is it the fabled Yiddish parsimony in our cultural DNA - I've just bagged and frozen a few  spoonfuls of barbecued pork sauce because it may come in useful - which continues despite a love of shellfish, pork and the unkosher mixing of milk and meat, or is it just an Everyman's love of food? You tell me.  Not just Shepherd's Pie, Scouse and Bubble & Squeak - so many dishes from around the world would not have seen the light of day if it weren't for leftovers and I, for one, abhor the Health & Hygiene regulations which saw an end to the constantly-bubbling stockpot in almost every catering kitchen. With no leftovers in my fridge at this precise moment, I think I'll have to go and create some.......

Blue-rinse Gourmets who outlive their doctors.....

Interestingly, on the same day I wrote of my suspicions concerning the research into the amount of red meat it is now recommended adults limit themselves to, The New York Times published a heart-warming article on some maverick elderly gourmands who defy such nannying.

NY Times, 28th February 2011.

The writer of the piece, Henry Alford, does acknowldege: It’s the rare gourmand who, after 60 or so, doesn’t alter the way he or she eats, even in some tiny way. One praiseworthy exception, Larry Garfield, 95, of Key Biscayne, Fla., worked in the carpet industry until he was 83. Mr. Garfield, unchanged in his alimentary ways even though he’s had his gallbladder and prostate removed and had a quintuple bypass in 1992, said, not without satisfaction, “The main thing to understand about the people who have constantly warned me about what I eat is that I’m here and they’re not.”

That, for me, says it all.