Food & Feelings

Maybe it’s because I know what it feels like to be poor, but even now I’m not, food can inspire feelings in me like almost nothing else.

I’ve actually written about it a tiny bit here already, in my blog post about a pasta recipe that has been a staple for me since I was sixteen. I’ve been thinking about it more lately too, possibly because we’re in a Cost of Living Crisis (don’t know if you’ve noticed). Or maybe because I’ve seen yet another proliferation of People Online chatting shit about British food being shit, or perhaps it’s because my class consciousness is ramping up on a scale unheard of even for me, Mouthy Ex-Homeless Gobshite.

Today specifically, I’m thinking about it because I read this bloody wonderful article by Poppy Noor in the Guardian, which touches a little bit on the idea of what “good food” is, and how it shifts culturally based on things like socioeconomics, culture, and class.

I think that’s why I get genuinely upset when people around the world (and within Britain, honestly) do that last “British food is awful” thing. I mean, I also get upset when people are rude about food from other cultures because it’s unnecessary, usually has its borders butted right up against racism, and because I know how much I hate it when people do it to me.

It’s that whole “treat others as you wish to be treated” thing. I’m not a Christian, but I feel like Big Jesus was right about that bit.

And look, I want to take a brief interlude to say: I do understand why Britain (and more specifically England) is an easy target for jokes like this. It’s okay to make fun of the colonisers, and historically, this nation has been responsible for some truly heinous shit. Some of it isn’t even all that historic, in fact. I’m writing this the day after the death of the Queen, and I spend a lot of time online, so I’m not insensitive to the way my country is viewed internationally. In pretty much all cases, I get it. Make fun of us.

But.

Obviously, there’s a “but”.

Poppy Noor’s article touches on one of the reasons I find it so uncomfortable, I think, when she says:

These things aren’t “working-class foods” – they are the foods of my youth. They remind me of adventure, going on school trips, of loitering around after school with my friends while sharing a snack. They fill me with joy and nostalgia.

And a lot of the “British food” people denigrate is also classified in the cultural consciousness as “working-class food”. It’s the stodgy puddings, the jam roly-poly and custard, the spotted dick. I saw a Twitter thread recently where people were slagging off the Yorkshire pudding (given I’m from Yorkshire this one cut especially deep), but this feels weird to me, because not only are they delicious, they were specifically designed to be a filler food for families with too many bellies to feed and only a tiny amount of meat available. It’s also the food my grandmothers cooked for me, and I don’t take it kindly when people are rude about my grandmothers.

Possibly, not all of the criticism is for haggis, laverbread, black pudding, pickled whelks and other foods that originate from the working class, but the people going on about afternoon tea don’t seem to know we don’t all have cake towers for lunch on a regular basis. That’s… not what we eat. And most of those dishes that people love to hate generally come from traditionally “poor” food. Welsh lamb cawl comes from medieval peasant cooking. So, it comes from hundreds of years of history, AND it comes from poverty. And, by the way, it tastes fucking great.

All of this also ignores the fact that yes, our nation has been responsible for a lot of colonialism, and partly because of that, we are an island nation full of immigrant populations. To me, that’s one of the very best things about being British, is that our little island is full of a wide variety of languages, cultures, food. You honestly cannot say “British food has no spice” because what, are you telling me the British-Pakistani diaspora in Bradford isn’t British? The Caribbean and West African communities that live around me in South London aren’t British? You can fuck off with that.

There is also possibly a soupcon of guilt involved in my feelings about food right now.

When I was at my brokest, I cooked way more than I do now. Out of necessity, mostly; I had less than a tenner to feed myself every week, so why would I waste money on takeaways or going out for dinner? I prided myself on being able to make something tasty out of practically nothing, that would fill me up and probably had a good couple of servings of veg in it too. Now, when I have a well-paid job and I’m no longer living under the horrible shroud of housing insecurity, I sometimes begrudge cooking. I’d rather pay for convenience, a lot of the time.

A lot of this is obviously circumstance. Full-time job, mental health, trying to write another bloody novel… sometimes something has to give, and very often it’s housework and cooking. But that’s another thing, for me, that’s great about a lot of the food I like to eat: I often like it because it’s low-maintenance. You can whack a stew in a big pan and leave it simmering for hours while you get on with work. You can have a box of frozen meat pies in your freezer for the night you need them. That bacon and tomato-based pasta I like? Fifteen minutes, max.

I could write so much more about food and traditions around food. I could talk about the stuff I just learned from Ruth Goodman about medieval cooking. I could talk about the ways we erroneously use food to judge each other, and the powerful emotions and memories food can evoke.

But I won’t, because I’m off to make a vegetable soup out of frozen veg I’ve got left over in the fridge. Cost of living, innit. Maybe I just typed all this out because I was hungry.