(The following is a piece I was asked to write for the Afri Conference, and I will be reading it on Saturday 5th February, 2011).

When I first sat down to write a piece for tonight’s event, I drew a bit of a blank. Given a theme of ‘food or famine’ my chances of coming up with something funny seemed, well, if you’ll pardon my first pun, slim enough. And then one evening over Christmas, I happened to watch Irish comedian Andrew Maxwell’s latest DVD, and lo and behold, halfway through, he makes a joke about the famine.
And you can hear the murmur of discomfort through his audience, which Maxwell has clearly anticipated as his immediate retort is ‘What – too soon?’ Having gotten his laugh, he goes on to explain that Irish people are very uncomfortable with discussing the famine. He wonders is it guilt -after all, he says, each and every one of us are clearly descended from the wily few that came up with ways to survive without the potato!
It’s the age old Irish problem though isn’t it? If it’s worth doing, it’s worth feeling guilty about… My own heaving kitchen bookshelf is roughly divided in two. One half is made up of beautiful books telling me countless ways to cook wonderful food, the other half is made up of equally beautiful books advising me not to eat any of it.
And the guilt doesn’t stop with calories, oh no, calorie-guilt? That’s so last year. Now you’ve to feel guilty about how may air miles your fillet of seabass has clocked up on its way to the plate. How Fairtrade is your coffee? Or more basic again – how Irish is your food? In Naas we are currently facing the loss of our only ‘Irish’ supermarket, which is a huge shame, yes Aldi and Lidl are cheaper than SuperQuinn, but there was always the sense that you were paying that bit extra for the good of the country – ok, ok, that’s a complete lie. I paid extra because it tasted better, but you can’t admit that, not if you want to avoid the guilt.
This list goes on; how ‘in season’ is my rhubarb. Are my apples organic? Are my lemons waxed? I mean come on, these days I haven’t time to worry whether or not my legs are waxed let alone my lemons. It’s the same kind of craziness that leads people to worry more about how their chicken has been brought up than they do their kids. Their children might be spending 17 hours a day stuck in front of the x-box, but it’s not a problem as long as the chicken they’re about to eat has been out in the fresh air to play. It’s like the reverse-racism I’ve developed towards bread, pasta and rice. It’s almost starting to unnerve me – what do you mean you’re white? Sssshhhhh!!!! Look at me – do I look like I eat white? What? You’ve the goodness of both? A likely story, I know your sort, I had a boyfriend like you once, promised allsorts and then left me with a severe bout of colic…
It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t keep changing the rules. In the not so distant past eggs were to be treated like a controlled substance – any more than one a day (six a week at the most) and your heart was going to explode causing little bits of egg coated arteries to shoot into space. Now, eggs are great. Eat loads of them, they say, the more the merrier, pile them in. In fact, so huge is their acceptance into the fold, that people who up to now would have balked at the idea of keeping a hamster are packing their tiny gardens with quaint little hen coops so that they can have endless numbers of fresh eggs daily.
Butter was replaced by sunflower oil, which in turn was replaced by Olive oil. Now we find out that when heated Olive oil becomes every bit as evil as its other oily counterparts. So why not just go back to butter. Sure the ads were great, and we might get to find out who exactly did bring that horse to France…
And so it goes on. I’m currently on a diet where I’ve decided not to eat any bread or potatoes for the month of January. Now, you won’t find this diet in a book . It’s my own invention. I’ve called it the Hunt Ball Diet and all you need is the desire to fit into something tight and satiny at a given date not far enough into the future. Its success is in direct correlation with your level of competitive vanity, which in turns depends on the stunning good looks of the friends you are trying to keep up with. If you can throw in the added complex of being the only one in the group to have had two children in the last four years you’re guaranteed to lose a pound or two.
But then diets have always had funny names. Instead of just telling people to Eat Less and Move More – they come up with names like The Cabbage Soup Diet or the South Beach Diet. Only last weekend, in an article in the Sunday Times, I read about the Caveman Diet. Apparently when we all lived in caves we weren’t carrying around all these extra pounds. Ah yes, but we’d no Sky Plus either, I’ll keep my few pounds thanks. Anyhow, I didn’t pay this particular diet too much attention as it advocates that you eat most of your food raw. And to me, the practice of cooking is the best bit.
The hissing sizzle of a steak as it hits the smoking griddle pan, the waft of garlic drifting across the room, even the precision of chopping and dicing. It’s the almost religious routine of it. The very terms used are enough to make me salivate – panfry, shallow fry, deeeeeep fry… I used to work in a restaurant kitchen, even toyed with the idea of becoming a Chef. That was just after I wanted to be a Vet and just before I trained to be a Fashion Designer – a fleeting fancy but the love of cooking has stayed with me.
And we are lucky in Ireland to have such a vast array of wonderful ingredients to choose from. Without accumulating any air miles, fresh, in-season produce is always available. We’ve come a long, long way from being dependant on the lowly potato. And it’s no harm, to pause every now and again to acknowledge how lucky we really are. To remember that some countries are still dependant on their potato equivalents. And when you do this, you realize that it’s gratitude not guilt you should be feeling… Which leads to a whole other type of guilt. And sure isn’t that just grand…