I was intrigued by an article I read lately about a mother who cooked five different dinners a day for her family, all of whom are finicky eaters.
Now there’s a woman who’s made five rods for her own back. She justified it by explaining that each of her children can’t eat particular foodstuffs. Listen missus, “can’t eat” often means “won’t eat, because I don’t like it”. My mother would’ve given them short shrift. “Eat it or leave it. This is not a hotel.”
While I’ve every sympathy for people with genuine medically-diagnosed food allergies or intolerances, the ethics of eating have gone clean mad. You’re nobody these days if you don’t have an ‘issue’ with something or other – and if you haven’t, then a plethora of nutritionists, dieticians and television gurus will predispose you to imagine you have.
Food – its purchase, preparation and consumption, occupies an unhealthy proportion of our time. Consider how our eating patterns have changed in the last few decades. The day was once measured by breakfast, dinner, tea and supper, eaten together as a family. Plain and wholesome fare, bought from the local butcher, fishmonger and greengrocer; homemade soups, stews, pies and casseroles; a roast and trifle on a Sunday. The only processed foods in our house were Birds custard powder and Batchelors dried marrowfat peas, which ricocheted into an enamel bowl like bullets, to be submerged in boiling water with a mysteriously dissolving tablet and left to steep overnight. Morning found them plump and green with their coats floating on the surface like little translucent moons.
Eating out was a rare treat. I remember from childhood the ubiquitous ‘mixed grill’ in the Montague Arms Hotel, Portstewart, and afternoon tea in Derry’s Foster’s Restaurant, with its triple-decker cake stands, silver service and elderly waitresses with bad feet. Snack foods not yet invented, a ‘piece and jam’ allayed our hunger pangs and sweets were strictly for Saturdays. Then, we ate to live. Now, we’re living to eat.
The rot set in I believe, with Vesta curry – a pungent-smelling compound with bits in it, which, when hydrated, turned into a Gauguin-esque yellow sludge, served over rice. It was all downhill after that, with the advent of supermarkets, coffee bars, American films, affordable continental package holidays, ethnic restaurants and, above all, the influence of television, which, from its earliest days, featured celebrity chefs demonstrating there’s more to gustatory delight than meat and two veg.
The result? A sofa-bound generation with a bottle of water welded to one hand, a shop-bought Americano in the other, watching people make real food while phoning through an order for a takeaway, or getting up only to microwave a ready-meal when the spirit moves us – which is not often enough for our ever-expanding girth. We see no irony in consuming half our body weight in crisps ‘n’ dip while watching diet programmes. Apparently, women’s waist measurement has increased by SEVEN inches in the last 30 years. Like cattle we’re constantly grazing – eating ‘on the hoof’ as it were.
Not all have clambered aboard the calorie-laden gravy train. Growing in number are the gluten, sugar and additive-free disciples of gloop. These ‘clean greeners’ have opted out of entire food groups for ethical and/or health reasons. Laudable no doubt, but they’re the dinner guests from hell and their earnest evangelism makes me want to stuff myself with deep-fried Mars bars.
The young are particularly susceptible to food faddism. One frustrated mother told me: “For sixteen years I couldn’t get a green thing into that child’s mouth. Now, she’s juicing the entire contents of the vegetable drawer and living on green slime.” Meeting her again after some months, I asked after her daughter. Apparently, it only took a fish supper from the local chippy, glistening with crispy batter and a redolent with vinegary chips to mend her broken heart after a failed romance.
We’re a contradictory society. Obesity’s rife – as is anorexia. We seek comfort in food – and perfection in its denial. “Everything in moderation” advised one of the original evangelists. Failing that, buy a firm foundation garment.
