Over the coming months we will be reprinting Editorials written by Andrew. These tend to be themed. Do leave your comments.
FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD
It will soon be Christmas. I know that many of you will lift up your hands and huff that the jolly season is months away. Tell the high street this, go over to any bookshop cookery section and see all the new titles grabbing your attention for Christmas. Those feel good volumes that blend you into the ground because your life is grey. You know the ones, they start with personal recipes, that state, ‘my kids love these sumptious little parcels of cheese in bread, they literally wolf them down every Christmas morning before they run to open their presents, their faces glowing and their bellies full. Makes you feel like a real Mother’. Yes, they’ve sexed up cheese on toast and the fact that when their kids wake them up at five in the morning on Christmas Day their brains are incapable of cooking anything beyond toast. Yet food has become sexy in the last few years, be it to do with Nigella, whose new Nigella Express shows that formats have to move on from pouting at the camera and languidly stating that you can cook something in fifteen minutes if only you’d spend five hours shopping. Food has crept into Literature, thanks in part to the likes of Joanne Harris and the subsequent film Chocolat.
At last, we all screamed, it’s okay to revel in food and find it sexy. Let’s face facts, food and sex are the very reasons we are here, if we don’t eat, we die, if we don’t procreate, then there’s no hunters, no growers, no teenagers pushing trolleys at a supermarket.
So food is bloody well sexy but being fat isn’t, this is the paradox, eat and be merry, eat but don’t get fat and this is wrong. There are two types of people in this world, those that eat and those that pretend to eat. The latter sit in front of immaculately presented food and pick around the edges. The rest of us dream of sandwiches that would make Scooby Doo baulk. I must admit I fall into this category, I love food. So, when it was suggested that we do a food issue I was the first to shout out a plethora of people to interview. It would have been lazy to trot out the usual names, the ones that always seem to be on the front of magazines, smiling vacantly over their interpretation of a Sticky Toffee Pudding – does it annoy anyone else that traditional food is buggered up? A Sticky Toffee Pudding should come with lashings of custard not appear in the corner of a bowl too ashamed to say its own name.
Andrew Oldham's Boneyard 