Saturday 30 July 2011

Food

A celebration of one of life's greatest sensual pleasures

I love food, love the smells which come from the kitchen when something is cooking, the exotic (to me) aroma of the herbs in thai curry paste, the scent of a lemon sorbet - so slight you have to put your nose right down into the icy crystals to smell it, the garlic and thyme and basil you smell in home made pasta sauces...a leg of lamb slowcooking in the oven on a sunny day. Did I mention I love food?

Yet, like a lot of women (and even men) I have been known to have a slightly screwed up relationship with this delicious pleasure. Food is beautiful, wonderous, amazing, associated with banquets for kings, the queen of Sheba reclining on her golden couch and reaching a lazy hand for another grape, yet it is also the stuff of sin, of evil, it gives us cancer, we are told, it makes us fat, it stops us being attractive, it gives us spots...and so forth?

Remember the apple in Eve's Eden? In some versions it is a pomegranate, which I find far more convincing a tempation, remember Persephone who ate six pomegrante seeds in Hades and was consigned to spend six months of the year there? Six months in Hades, an expulsion from Eden...look girls, that's what you get from eating!

Magazines are also full of 'lose a stone in three weeks' and 'get bikini ready' features, which don't really help, while skinniness is held up as something to aspire to. A slim woman is attractive, we are told, she is in control, she has power, she deserves the world's approval and approbition. I am ashamed to say that this is an idea I buy into, and whilst I would never consciously judge another person for being overweight (dear God, I've been there) I am still supercritical of my own figure, and sometimes the figures of others (and then I have to force myself to snap the hell out of it.)

I'm fairly typical, uk size eight to ten, yet I torture myself about food, about eating. I look in mirrors and imagine I am fat...I know logically this is not the case, but I see the flesh on the top of my arms, my round face, my chubby cheeks. My BMI is 21, I know that this is healthy, so why do I long to be the low end of healthy. Why do I think -'if only I was eight and a half stone' instead of almost nine? And why do I, like a lot of women I know, use one of life's greatest pleasures to torture myself?

So many of my friends do the same thing...depriving themselves when they are hungry, denying their natural appetite and making rules about when they can and can't eat - I know women who eat very little during the day and then let themselves go at night, this isn't cool as it leads to them thinking 'Shit, this is the only time I'm allowing myself to eat' and therefore shovelling food down with complete disregard to appetite. I think that our fucked up relationship with food is one of the main reasons for weight gain, and that if food was something we accepted, enjoyed, cherished, and never apologised for, then food would reward us, not only with intense pleasure but also with the body we should have naturally. Any man will tell you that the female body is a beautiful thing, and yes, some people are programmed to be skinny and some less so.

Sophie Dahl, the beautiful beautiful supermodel who wrote a cook book said 'sexy is having the energy to romp with you beloved.' I completely agree, sexy is also however enjoying food, enjoying life and enjoying your body. Taste buds are practivally an erogoneous zone.

I am therefore deciding here and now to become a self-confessed gourmet....a gourmet is not greedy, a gourmet doesn't binge on crap (something I have been horribly guilty of), a gourmet doesn't binge on anything, but eats beautiful foods, explores ingredients, reads cooks books as sensually as one would read the kama sutra, and cooks things which are in season as oftenas they can.

Therefore I am teaching myself to cook beautiful flavoursome things. I'm currently addicted to The BBC's Good Food Website which has over 7000 recipes, as well as features about seasonal ingredients...fresh pea and runner bean risotto is only one of the mouthwatering things on the list. I am already saving recipes into a file, and dreaming about the circumstances in which I will make these beautiful dishes....


In summer I will revel in fresh vegetables. I will cook with oranges, lemons, basil, rocket (God, I love the bitter taste it has.) I will cook with Fennel - I've never cooked with Fennel before - but I will make the following luscious recipe for a friend and I, and we shall relish every bite, as we sit drenched in the summer sunlight.

I have already composed fantasies about so many of the recipes I have read. The slow cooked stews I will make in winter, before I leave the house for a three hour walk up Arthur's Seat, Blackford hill and along the beach from Portobello, before coming back, freeing, to smell the juices coaguling, and to know that I will be warm.

Of course, I am never alone in these fantasies. Food is something which should be shared...it's a way in which you can give pleasure and recieve it, without any of the weirdness which comes with sex. Although, saying that, cooking for someone you lust after would be one of the best things ever.


Have any of you seen 'Like Water for Chocolate' where the girl, not allowed to marry her true love, pours all her emotions and frustrations into the food she makes, causing everyone to weep uncontrollably when they taste the cake she has made for the wedding of her beloved to her sister?

I imagine filling a thai curry with love, with desire, with longing, which an invisible he will taste and feel with every bite. I am therefore looing up how to make a genuine Thai Curry paste, so I can say to him, when we meet 'why not swing round for supper sometime'

1 comment:

  1. This blog post makes me hungry... evocative descriptions of food torture me, like cooking TV shows do. (which maybe proves your point)

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