suggzy

Having covered some fairly ubiquitous subjects this year, I find myself casting around for another.

How it took me quite so long to realise that eating is something that everyone who is currently alive does, is a bit of a distressing vote of no confidence in the state of my intellectual acumen. That notwithstanding, it is something I the author and you the readership share in common, so we’ll go with it. Whilst I am on the subject of stuff that goes down your throat, we might pause to note that the article I wrote back in May on the subject of drinking, and my long, slow, and ultimately doomed relationship with it was, well, it was the singlemost popular thing I have ever written. 232 of you read that inside 24 hours. I can only conclude you are all absolute curtain-twitchers, with a penchant for gossiping about me over the garden fence. Fine. Clearly all I need to do, then, to become a popular writer, is bare the innermost agonies and tortures of my flawed existence on the page. Super. None of that light and frothy stuff over the last seven years got you going, then? Unbelievable. I blame the internet.

Food is on my mind. I just had tea. A microwave vegetable lasagne for one, and then a bowl of All Bran with some fat free yoghurt. Later, I shall treat myself to a couple of low-fat Rich Tea and a mug of Horlicks. Remind me to tell you my Horlicks story, by the way – it’s rude, but you’ll laugh.

Dull though that meal was, it is was a significant one, actually. It was a meal that has to be my last food for a significant amount of time. Don’t worry – nothing bad is going to happen – at least I hope it isn’t. No, it’s simply the case that I am having an operation tomorrow morning, ahead of which I must not eat for a minimum of 6 hours. In reality, it will probably prove to be about 13 or 14, I reckon, as I am largely a habitual creature. I had the option of the rather enjoyable vegetable keema and pea curry I made yesterday (baked it – worked well, might try that again), as there is a second portion available. However, it has made me fart quite magnificently all day (proper, tearing a sheet apart farts – you could have powered something with them), and I am worried that I will fart whilst ‘under’ tomorrow, put the surgeons off, and they’ll make a mistake and accidentally cut something out of me that I actually need.

LIVE UPDATE: 48 hours have marched on. I needed (and have now had) my gallbladder taking out, as it has, in middle age, gone on the blink. I don’t know how well it served me for the first 47.3 years of life, but when it developed something called biliary colic back in later June, I thought I might be dying, as I was in so much incredible pain. I’m always a bit circumspect about talking about pain, in a woe-is-me-it-was-so-awful way, because I realise that blokes in particular have a tendency to over egg the pudding (a little food reference there – this is all coming together nicely, isn’t it?) when it comes to illness and pain. However, having discussed the matter with a few women I know who have been ‘de-gallbladdered’ but also borne several children, they all assure me they would rather go through the process of birthing all of those children consecutively than go through a single additional second of gallbladder and gallstone pain. So I now feel quite justified in the fact that just four months or so ago I was lying on the ground in A&E, crying my eyes out, in what I considered to be agony.

Top tip on painkillers, by the way? Everyone assumes, in such a crisis of pain, that morphine is the pinnacle of analgesia. Mentioned in a hushed voice, the stuff of Thomas de Quincey – it’s considered the promised land, for those of us who are hurting. It may very well be just that, for very many people – but not necessarily. I had two or three good mouthfuls whilst they worked out what to do with me, and aside from tasting oddly agreeable, it did nothing for me. However, the real joy came some time later, when I was admitted, and I was given paracetamol in liquid form, intravenously. Now that, truly, was the badger. Not only did it get to work on alleviating the pain, but it also helped me give rather less of a shit about the predicament in which I found myself. So much so that I am considering getting a case in for Christmas. Does anyone ‘know a guy’? I do find it curious that something one blithely takes in tablet form for a headache or a toothache can have such a transformative effect in a liquid format. One lives (gladly) and learns.

Anyway, yes, so the organ of evil is gone from my gut. I’m told that, when they chopped it open, it contained no bile whatsoever (judging by the news, that’s all soaked into Tory MPs, now – there is none left), but just stacks and stacks of gallstones. Had I changed my diet in favour of anything much fatty, since the summer, it would probably have edged another one of those rocks out into the duct and crippled me once more. All I was left with was bag or marbles, the like of which I possessed as a little boy.

To stagger back in the direction of our main theme – food and eating – this predicament was caused by a sequence of changes I had made in my diet, over the last two years or so. But before I focus on that, we need to go back in time a little.

The subject of diets and dieting has been discussed, exposed, decried and re-invented a million times over. If you live in the First World, and you are not fat, then you know someone who is. Guarantee it. We are now so utterly desperate to reverse the trend that we have been hoodwinked into either buying subscriptions for boxes of expensive ‘selected for you’ ingredients and recipe cards so we can cook stuff we were all perfectly capable of looking up in the first place, with a mere atom or two of effort. It seems to be that, or various different compounds of protein dust are supposed to take the place of plates of actual food.

I’m not sneering because I am not immune to the lures of dieting.

Those of you who know me in real life, or through Facebook etc. will recall that 2012-2013 was a bit of a transformative year, for me, as I managed, through exercise and diet, to knock off a final total of 102lb. To some extent this was done through walking and then running about, with lots of water drunk, but I also went the low carb route to shedding the stones. Not quite the Atkins approach to things, exactly, but the fact that at that time in my life I still ate meat was quite helpful. I didn’t fight shy of the bacon and the sausages, no, but equally I became big chums with broccoli, cauliflower and pak choi, along the way. Essentially, and I am sure you know this, if you lay off the carbohydrate, your body doesn’t have it in the way between you and the consumption of your excess stores of fat. Stick with it, you’ll finish up in ketosis, and the chub will fall of you. It is, undoubtedly, not for everyone. I found it miraculous, but that’s me.

But then, on January 1^st 2020, I became a vegetarian, and joined SWK’s team in so doing. It was a decision (an ethical one, mostly) that had been coming for some time. Trouble is, and was, that it came with the arrival of the pandemic, and an awful lot of sitting down. Exercise didn’t come to a halt, or anything, but it reduced. With the advent of a veggie diet, the reduction of one’s carbohydrate became tricky. And I ate too much sugar. I have craved sugar ever since I gave up alcohol – it’s getting better, but it’s always there – I understand a lot of people have the same issue.

So – allowing for my vegetarianism, I decided to return to the low carb route again, back in the late Spring of this year, to reverse some of the weight gain. And, alas, it backfired on me quite spectacularly. The reason why? Well – I’m not 100 per cent sure on this, but basically the fat in my diet, which had been fine the first time, had suddenly gained horrendous prominence, it collected in my late gallbladder, and turned into rocks. I went boom – and that was dreadful.

As I type this, I am just eating stuff I feel like and getting better again. My overall size and shape will be addressed once I am in state of wellness and no pain. It’s on the list, as so many things are, in my little life.

Food and eating isn’t always about diets and the desire for the physically transformative, of course. It’s a simple, daily set of activities that we all engage in a range of different ways. It extends across a vast range – from a bowl of cornflakes in front of the telly, to a Michelin starred meal for eight in a restaurant, costing thousands.

I didn’t really start cooking for myself on a regular basis until I left University. And it didn’t take long for me to realise that it represented a creative outlet, for me. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that it had pretty good effects on my mental health, particularly once I began living on my own, at age 25, and a certain amount of traditions and routines around the preparation of meals began to build up. Friday night became a sacrosanct affair, for the most part. Home from work – beer, cook spicy food – wine – telly, rabbit on at my mate Nick whilst pissed (over the ‘phone), then eventually drop off on sofa.

Here and there, a repertoire began to build. A store of favourites were filed away in the grey matter. It became the case that particular days were for particular sorts of meals. Some seasonality to this emerged. My burgeoning love of travel started to inform the stuff I made up (which is to say flavour combinations, or modes of composition that I became aware of). Recipes, by and large, have rarely informed that which finished up being served. I suppose I glance at the odd one just to be vaguely assured that something I fancy making is ‘on the right lines’, but I’m not a measurer and a worrier about sequences, timings and what have you. That tends to be a blessing and a curse, of course. Now and again, I will knock up something that hints at the likely existence of a kind and benevolent God, to whom I should give thanks for my gifts. On other occasions, I sit and chew my way through something truly execrable, having not seen inspiration bless me that day. Under such circumstances, I have the aspect about me of a grumpy 6-year-old, and am less than genial company as a result.

I like conventional meals, and I also like odd ones. These days, whole wheat pasta, pesto and grated cheddar is an absolute guaranteed midweek winner  – certainly have it every week. From pan to gob in 12 minutes – lovely. In the same vein, I also like my ‘take’ on a French Bread Pizza – composed thusly:

1. Slice a baguette in half, lengthways. Brush with oil, and place in oven for 5-6 mins.
2. Slice up a ball of mozzarella
3. Mash up a can of pilchards in tomato sauce
4. Slather the fish gunge over the toasted surface of the bread, and finish with slices of the mozzarella
5. Season heavily (I am one on those ‘auto-condimentors’) and return to oven until cheese is blistered and bubby
6. Eat (in my case, to the background disgust of Sarah The First)

What do we think of that one, then?

Given the proportion of my life (before I started marrying people) where I spent time preparing food and working in the kitchen on my own, there were inevitable incidents when flying sols. My hands bear a couple of decent-sized scars from those days including a very neat-looking horseshoe on the index finger of my left hand, when a delicate wine glass exploded in the washing up bowl, leading to a scene not unlike this one:

At least, that’s roughly how I remember it. I also have a thumb with a couple of decent nicks out of it, following my adventures in chopping up red cabbage (another one of life’s low-carb joys – just keep your digits out of the way).

On one quite memorable occasion, I finished up with a different sort of injury, at the other end of my body, to the amusement of many people I have explained it to, since it happened, about 17 years ago.

For a while, way back then, I was working in Cambridge and living in West Norfolk. Mostly, the working day was supported by a simple commute on the train, but now and again it was necessary to travel to a different site, by car. And so, one Winter evening, I found myself driving home in quite heavy snow, via the supermarket, so as to make my evening’s catering a bit easier. I popped in and grabbed myself a shop-bought curry, rice, and Naan bread, along with a beer to drink whilst the oven did its stuff. Home in on what was becoming rather a white-out of an evening. Oven on, food in, beer open, shorts on, telly on, and a fine evening in prospect.

After the required 35 minutes was up, I gathered up a plate, and a fork, and scraped my rice onto the former, using the latter. I then reached into the oven and fished out my main dish. As I did so, it buckled under its own weight, there in my hand, and the flimsy package bent back onto itself, and disgorged its fiery contents directly downwards, and onto my left foot. The pain was instant, and incredible. My presence of mind kicked in, for once, and I raced out of the kitchen door, into the falling snow – there was a good three inches on the ground, by then. I hop-skipped-ran a circuit of the top of the garden, like a little girl warming up for an intense hopscotch match at morning break. The relief was just as instant, as the snow got to work on freezing my burning flesh. With the worst of things over, I limped back into the house for some follow-up care of my wound. I then rather moodily had a somewhat unexciting dinner of rice and bread, before going to bed.

The following morning, I popped into the spare bedroom to pick up some papers for work, before I took my singed, blistered and weeping foot for a trip to the office. I chanced to look out of the window, and down to the garden below. After my foray of the evening before, the snow had stopped – although not in time to cover up the map of my adventures. So it was, as the snow gradually melted away, that for the next 48 hours or so the garden bore a quite bright orange circle, about 14 feet in diameter.

I suppose this proves I don’t really need to leave the country to hit upon injury or misadventure. It was far from the only food-related tragedy to strike me, in adult life. I still recall, all too well, the dawning morning after a friend’s birthday in London. Around the same point in time, if I remember rightly?

Anyway, during the day before, Swaggers, the then Mrs Swaggers and I had taken in the Bodyworks Exhibition in East London, and then treated ourselves to a late lunch of a Brick Lane curry.

During the middle part of the evening, the resultant campolybacter food poisoning struck Swaggers down first. He was pouring with sweat (last time I ever loaned him a shirt, I recall), and was dragged off to home base, whilst I continued to enjoy the party. I undertook to meet him there the next day, when I was to collect my car, and drive back up to East Anglia.

I dropped off on a sofa at my friend’s house at around 1.00am, or so. I then woke an hour later, having realised I was sleeping alongside a cat. Big error. I like cats, but I am horribly allergic to them, and my asthma was beating a hearty tattoo my chest. The only solution, then, was to leave the property, and start walking in the cool air of the morning so that things settled down again. I reasoned that, eventually, the Tube would re-start, and all would be well.

And it would have been well, sort of. It would have been well, had it not been a Sunday morning in East London, about 12 miles from where I needed to be. It would have been well, had it not transpired to be four hours before I could get the Tube to White City. And it would have been well, had my own version of the food poisoning that had struck my colleague not announced itself in my trousers at roughly 3.00am, as I walked through the throngs of people leaving London’s various ‘nite spots’.

I spent more than three hours, navigating West, via the maps in bus shelters (none of your GPS-for-all, back then) whilst enduring multiple, incredible stomach cramps, in an effort to avoid further, hideous embarrassment. Ordinarily, the beeps of passing minicabs would have meant sweet relief – but let’s be honest, how do you broker a fare discussion when you are sweating poison, and smell lightly of a poorly-digested Lamb Bhuna? You don’t (at least I didn’t). At least, as time wore on, the number of clubbers ran down, and I had less company to explain myself to.

It would be wrong to say that things every actually got better, because they didn’t. Some semblance of the dawn started to rise, and I found a shop that was open, so just brazened it out to buy a bottle of water with the change in my pocket. And finally, finally, I managed to get the first Tube service of the day, crumpled into a seat as far away from any other humanity as I could find. Further staggering followed, together with explanations at the intercom outside the flats where Swaggers lived at the time, as I woke a couple of people up rather earlier than expected, on their day of rest. I showered my aching and foul body off – put my clothing into the sturdiest bags I could find, and into the boot of my car, which I then drove all the way to Norfolk, with all of the windows open – partly to compete with the smell, and partly so as to keep myself awake. I then went to bed for four days, and lost a stone in weight.

All of this has taken a rather grisly turn, hasn’t it? Sorry about that – I didn’t set out to discuss this subject in quite this way, but there you are – reminiscences are many and varied, the older you get. It might be a bit more fun to mention some of my Tip Top Eating Experiences, maybe? Good and bad ones:

1. Ham and chicken noodles in a noodle bar in Kyoto, with our old chum Benj (you will remember him – I sang at his wedding). This remains the singlemost delicious bowl of food I have every consumed in my life, which probably has something to tell us about the fact that complicated and expensive does not necessarily pass as the byword for amazingly good. Also notable as this was a trip where language was often a problem – the food arrived only after we had looked up the Japanese for “you choose for us, please?” On a different occasion, I got what I am going to describe as a chopped liver curry. That was very far from the most delicious plate of food I have ever consumed. It’s in the bottom ten – but for context, I once ate a can of dog food, to win a bet.

• Fricasseed bear, with a pint of honey beer. In a Medieval restaurant in Tallinn, Estonia. Something eye-watering like thirty quid, which these days would horrify me, but hey, life is nothing without experiences to draw upon, and witter about on the internet, now is it?

• Nine-course, Michelin-starred Thai meal in Copenhagen. With wine. For two. Something stupid like £350. Most expensive meal I have ever paid for, if you discount my occasional weddings. Curried red lobster ice cream is a thing, it transpires, and a very delicious thing it is too. All very jolly – feel no need to ever do such a thing ever again, however. We’re having frozen pizza tonight – £1.75 each, plus toppings from the fridge.

• Rotting shark at a (50%) Icelandic wedding, washed down with ice cold shots of Brennivin distilled spirit. Notable for being a dish one could smell in the open air, from 90 feet away. It was utterly, utterly, disgusting.

• Andouillette sausages. In France, on two separate occasions. For some reason, I imagined that a second go might marry my taste buds to the dish rather more than my first one. It did not. I’m all for making use of the whole animal, if one is going to eat meat, but making sausages from arseholes is only ever going to take the diner down a cul-de-sac. A cul-de-sac that smells and tastes of poo. Oh dear.

Just to finish up, and to give us the illusion of an essay, rather than a series of silly autobiographical tales cobbled together, a couple of thoughts on a developing area of shop-bought foodstuffs? As a veggie, which I think I will remain, now, I have a healthy interest in ‘fake meat’. Protein/plant-based replacements, often to be found in sausage and burger form. Some of these, I have to say, are extraordinarily good. Full of taste, moisture and flavour. The underlying science in the delivery of these products is clearly jumping forward at a great rate of knots.  It must be the case that supply is meeting demand. Just a handful of statistics from a range of sources will tell you that 10-12% of the UK population is now vegetarian. It’s a bit of a golden time, for people like me, given this change is happening alongside brilliant developments in the brewing of non-alcoholic beer.

But there is greater potential for what sometimes gets (rather lazily) referred to as Frankenstein Food. I’ve been reading about it this week. There are countries in the world that have given state sanction to products based on meat grown in a lab. You can, for example, buy a burger in Singapore which is made of meat (chemically, it’s the same), but does not come from an animal that was killed so you could eat it. This is even more interesting. Daisy the cow produces 300l of methane every day (apologies, it’s all gone a bit tasteless again). Methane heats the world up. A lot. Ergo, if we reduce the number of Daisys, together with a lot of other animals grown simply for their meat, then we might remain above the level of the sea, at the end of the century. Alright, yes, we need to do a heap of other things as well, but it would be a very obvious starting point. Humanity staying alive versus the future of McDonalds? No contest, right?

The trouble is, of course, our innate human selfishness. Will someone whose livelihood is conditional upon keeping livestock volunteer to reduce their number ‘for the common good’? Unlikely. Much easier to pass the problem on to farmers as yet unborn. Will the industry growing the replacement meat work with governments and their economic plans to make this stuff affordable? My instinctive answer is no, they won’t. Everyone, whilst they are alive, is motivated to a greater or a lesser extent by the accrual of money, and resources in general. That goes for poor people, just as much as it goes for the stratospherically rich people. The need to strive invites inequality, I’m afraid. If the playing field remains so very far from flat, then everything like this will remain an innovation, rather than a solution. That is not cheering. I cannot really do anything about it, other than to try and adjust my behaviour in as ethical a way (defined only by me) as I can. That helps with the legacy one leaves, and stops one worrying so much as to never sleep again. Will I ever recycle enough stuff, or eat enough lentils to reverse the effect of the flights I have taken (and will doubtless still take) in my life? Probably not. But, if I don’t try at all, then it must mean the option is there for everyone not to try. If they all don’t, then we all just die out, and I don’t really take any consolation from knowing that will happen after I have myself died (probably in an ‘unseasonal heatwave’, in 40-odd years from now).

So – small changes, undertaken by everyone = net positive contribution to the least-worse-case scenario. Maybe.

As to whether I will ever raise a lab-grown piece of meat to my lips? Dunno. Innate curiosity probably means I will, yes. After all, I still eat fish, now and again (yes, I have left it to my last paragraph to mention that). Fish think and feel, so I am far from saintly in allowing them to be murdered (and battered, afterwards – how fucking cruel is that?) for my delectation and delight. But then none of us is an impact-free organism. Only the nature and the breadth of the impact is something we can allow to vary. It’s up to you. It’s up to me. It always has been.