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Our urge for food is as deep as our first fight for breath. We soon learn to use that breath to cry for attention, principally for demanding the import of food, or help in the export of wind.
Current jargon ignores the other subtle gifts of being a human being by labelling us as 'consumers'. Nothing more than Demanding Mouths. A culture of cuckoos.
From the breast we are weaned onto the nourishment of mother's constant cooking, then school dinners, and that famine called adolescence and its fridge and biscuit -tin raids.
Then our body as a shrine, a place to lobby for a fair and well tended Earth, in dietary protest, or a laboratory, where we blend extraordinary chemical and culinary cocktails. Or both. We were as wised up to life as most present-day suburban children, which is not at all. Life is something noticeably excluded from the suburbs. Lawns are defences against its more vigorous green forms.
I spent a year of my student life living on milk puddings and cannabis. I remember driving my scooter out into the distant hills, and settling down on top of one, only to remember that I had left a rice pudding in the oven...
Then we lived with partners who neglected or iron-ruled kitchens, learned the fear of fat and cholesterol, and to indulge in surreptitious chocolate.
We all I suspect need some form of cupboard counselling.
I am the eldest of twins, and wonder how much of my early life was composed of strategies to suck the best breast the most.
In an early photo of my father, he has a huge live buck rabbit draped over his lap, like a bizarre car rug. It was food. Everyone until the 1960's was haunted by the shadows of total war & its rationing, or by the enforced diet of poverty and unemployment.
Everyone afterwards is living with the consequences, an epidemic of obesity and gross over-exploitation of the World's food resources. As if no one has convinced us that it's OK now. We seem so ready to leap to trolleys to stock up at the slightest sign of shortage, our Culture's motto should be "While Stocks Last".
On Saturday morning our childhood kitchen table was laden with a bargain of fresh plunder from the local wholesale market; broilers and bacon rinds and a wicker basket of vegetables. My parents were early pioneers into European cuisine, so we ate adventurously. I remember going with my dad to Bastionellis, a cave of a shop in a very metallic part of Birmingham, where he spooned olives out of a wooden barrel.
He made his own chicken-liver pate, and roll-mops routinely. We would be called down to breakfasts of fried cods roe or even kidneys. We learned to eat what was on our plate, and fast, if we wanted seconds.
Sprouts though I remember too clearly, having sat looking at some that I wouldn't eat for the best part of a precious Sunday afternoon.
As a father myself of four, I had the same instincts to nourish. I picked and sold winkles, and then fished, and then gathered stuff to feed the urban soul, by taking mosses and the fruits and found-stuff of Growth, to the decadent but starved souls of London.
On the way home, I would stop to plunder one of their magnificent, shiny storerooms, called Sainsburys.
Food Is Good. It is the Song of the Earth. We sing it as we eat. Dorry, my daughter, hummed her satisfaction. The Earth's bounty is staggering.
My Partner, Gill, bless her, fed us for decades, while I strutted my male glory as the Provider. The negotiated territory was The Housekeeping; Though we never discussed money at table. My rule. What a strange old bird I was.
I tease my children that they grew to complain of being served lobster, again!
When we parted, I somehow ended up with my two ever-hungry boys still living at home, Matthew and Joe.
The amount young men-children eat is boggling.
I developed a theory that each was assigned a distant planet to nurture. Each gulp of food they consumed raised a mass of rejoicing on their adopted star as it appeared, shot there by some mysterious energy only known to intergalactic domestic scientists. They both still seem to have a gaunt air about them. Fine frames but a lean and hungry look.
I developed simple cooking methods that tried to match the demand for quantity with nourishment, tastiness and cost. The right cooking vessel was key: A large, heavy-bottomed shallow lidded pan. That and a good full larder of vegetables. Meat and fish and cheese were more of an optional garnish that a staple. I started to enjoy the Saturday Shop.
The initial gestures towards supper were to open a can of park bench strength beer, and put the pan on low flame with a dollop of olive oil, and cut an onion. I then cut, and added vegetables according to how long they would take to cook. The heat was low & I avoided stirring them. It was, after all, up to them there on in.
How I cut a vegetable took on the significance of a marshal art. Some I wouldn't cut at all, but break or snap, like mushrooms and french beans. A cut mushroom is a limp & slimy thing, little better in the mouth than a slug.
Others only to open them up, like peppers. I became fond of compound cutting: roughly whittling a carrot straight into the pan. Partly this was a desire to honour the structure of the vegetable, partly to make the right, bite sized morsel to the mouth.
At the end, a layer of torn spinach, and maybe some cheese topped the dish, to steam slowly. Any brassica I would garnish with a superstitious sprinkle of vinegar, in honour of a gourmet friend of my father's quiet advice one Christmas dinner, to do so to make my demon ration of sprouts palatable.
I won't mention them again.
Matthew and Joe demolished many such a meal.
We coined this fare "boyfood".
That was maybe twelve years ago, but feels far, far longer.
They both have partners, and their own hobs and pans and foibles.
And I live now in a fashion that has made such cooking methods even more relevant.
