I got a different coffee for today’s dispatch, something close to my favourite: grown at high altitude, thin and citrussy, a little sour, never burnt. Dark roast is rich and delicious and I’ll obviously drink anything, but the first time I had an espresso made from Ethiopian beans at a cafe my mate used to run back in Brighton, it was like my tongue had been glazed in some hyper-sensory layer; a kind of haptic drape, that linked up and sparked whole new connections in my brain. I wonder if that’s what actually happens: that among the repleted folds of your brain there are synapses which lie completely dormant, but are coaxed into firing for the first time by specific stimuli – in this case the subtle revolution of taste? Can food renew the structure of your brain? Probably not. I have literally no idea.
It’s hard to talk about the specificities of coffee without sounding like a prick. As if you have a horse in the race; like you’ve uncritically crawled head-and-body into the fart-sniffing envelope of microroasters and house blends, malic and tartaric. I am open and receptive to the tactile experience of deeply attending to anything, but there is something about the way coffee ‘culture’ has spun itself a language of consumerist felicity, of categories and discretion, that I can’t help but find distasteful. A lot of that is a class thing (Nescafe Gold Blend was the summit of luxury growing up), but coffee specifically also retains a whiff of colonial syntax – and often all too real exploitative and extractive practices – that are difficult to stomach or disregard.
But this isn’t specific to coffee. I struggle with any kind of preciousness about food. Preciousness in the sense of signification, of emphasis placed on regional specificity, exoticism, performative prep or of value gleaned from rarity; not in the sense of anything cooked with care – because I will never relinquish the belief that food is a right. I suppose the tacit celebration of scarcity that comes from fetishising what is discreet, artisanal, when actual, very real scarcity is the lived reality for millions is what I find repulsive.
And yet I hatefollow a couple of the least nauseating, superficially humble foodblog Instagram pages that post this kind of stuff, so I am obviously amenable to its faintly aspirational soft-lit worksurfaces, to the saliva-inducing glow of a dish that is beautiful and looks like it tastes really, really, good. There is a clear contradiction here. I know that I cannot daub everyone with this brush; I do not know anyone’s background or the context of their relationship to food – nor is this something I would ever, ever wish to judge – but often any writing or social media post that revels in the (very real and completely justified) joy of attention; in an appreciation for texture, origin, palette, colour, instinctively sends some part of me in the completely opposite direction. I recoil from effete refinement; from the consensus that food exists primarily as a thoroughly individuated and aesthetic experience.
All of this is compounded further by the current moment, in which fewer and fewer people in this country have reliable access to food, when foodbank use is higher than it’s ever been, when kids and parents and vulnerable people of every conceivable background are skipping meals to keep the lights on. We’re actually nearing my least favourite part of the calendar in The Discourse, (and half the reason I deleted Twitter alone), the onset of Autumn: The season when the most poisonous pundits and fucking vacuous, blimp-headed columnists in the U.K inevitably squirm, as if inextricably summoned, completing some dynastic rite of passage, out of their gilded halls d'entrée, to bemoan that people living in poverty should go out foraging in the hedgerows, chance apple scrumping, or stuff balled newspaper down their trousers to keep warm.
This is a logic of neofeudalism. Every year without fail, as sure as the sunrise, some decrepit Tory backbencher with a name that sounds like a Dark Souls boss will cough up a puerile spiel about how their morning porridge only costs 12p; conveniently omitting the manuka honey, fresh blueberries or nine quid peanut butter that a multi-generational retainer making a tenner an hour has to doggedly stir in on their behalf. These people are burrowed into our hereditary media culture like ticks, and the unmitigated violence and utter predictability of their dirge – not to mention the glaring ubiquity of their opinions in our public sphere – always drags me back to the unwelcome, (and inadequately defeatist) conclusion that England is a very sick place.
Ultimately, obviously, everyone should be assured the experience of enjoying food in its fortifying multiplicities, and generally I think everyone does draw pleasure from the food that they eat, irrespective of what it is. Most people take a similar degree of joy in their meals regardless of whether the food is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – another binary I’d like to see erased – because the social and sensorial experience of food is (again, obviously) a matter of subjective experience. At some point in my life, I have enjoyed fish fingers and Potato Smilies probably about as much as I enjoyed the only restaurant Set Menu meal I’ve ever eaten. Probably, I have no taste. Probably I am a philistine.
But I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that solving food poverty in this country is not, as many priggish columnists have tried to argue into consensus, some progressive onboarding of working people into an affected, upwardly-mobile, upper-middle class sensibility, crashing through the glass ceiling of taste; nor would this be sustainable, nor – quite rightfully – would anyone necessarily want to. But as thick as that premise is, it’s not to say that there aren’t extreme material dearths in the access that most people have to fresh or unprocessed ingredients. And as long as we live in a time where that balance is not being redressed, and notwithstanding my own obvious slippages, wobbly ethics, and contradictions in this regard, I struggle to psychically permit the veneration of food as anything other than a utility: indistinguishable from a roof over your head, a warm and safe home, or the universal right to live in dignity. I look back on my entry from yesterday and the four quid loaf of bread that I couldn’t afford and I taste bile at the back of my throat. I think about the song Cherry Stones by Eugene McDaniels. I disgust myself.
‘In the twilight of my mind I know I’m doing something wrong.
The green and black elevator’s briingingg me dowwwwwn,
to the basement on the 13th floor!’
***
It’s now 1pm and I’ve spent the morning writing this, getting heated and coasting the caffeinated lilt of the only thing that’s passed my lips – that mug of black coffee. I haven’t even taken my Wort yet. This is something that I do more often than I’d like to admit; forget to eat, and I don’t really have an answer on how to reconcile the above rant with the obvious contravention of what I am about to write. But in any case, a little shaky now, let's remedy that.
First, without any real consideration, a forkful of peanut butter. Because obviously. It glides down my throat and lands with a thick thud in the base of my stomach; immediately quelling the anxious slosh and cramp of cold coffee.
A cute pink smoothie made of frozen bananas, frozen blueberries, more peanut butter, too-thin oat milk and a tiny pinch of salt. All banana smoothies need salt.
Next: a bastardised and hurried attempt at çilbir. I’m really, really bad at poaching eggs, even with the artful twist of dripping vinegar into the water as it boils, so I use a poacher. Problem is, my poacher is a bit shit. It has holes in the bottom – presumably to let the water scurry in from underneath – but the inevitable result is that the egg slowly bleeds strands of albumen; and ends up looking like a viscously abject jellyfish, gently bobbing in the stream of bubbles as they hurriedly scoot to the surface.
In it, on-offer Fage yoghurt with raw garlic and chopped, slightly limp parsley, salt and black pepper, all swirled through. Heated butter and olive oil with two more cloves of thick, conker-like garlic, fried until crisp, with this banging smoked paprika that you can occasionally find in the only surviving off-licences of a critically gentrified area. (My mate from Bristol introduced me to it and taught me how to make a five-ingredient chilli with this paprika, Worcester sauce, an onion, garlic, and a tin of black beans, with the jus(?) of the bean-water as the basis of the sauce. It’s really good.) Another thick slice of the bread from yesterday, with guilt now, wedged into the yoghurt and hovering over it all like a tombstone. Paprika-garlic-oil poured all over the top, peppered with brittle shards of browned garlic.
A list of things that go wrong:
- Almost burn my hand on the hot skillet by mindlessly grabbing the handle immediately after it comes off the heat.
- Drop half of the food on the table while I try and type while eating; an amalgamation of eggs and yoghurt, crispy garlic and paprika-oil slide clean off the doorstop-crust of bread onto the baby-blue formica.
- Forget to put a teaspoon of oil underneath the eggs so they stick to the foil that I’ve wrapped the leaky poacher in, and I have to peel them from their slightly sci-fi casing. They remind me of the images of salons in the sixties; with everyone’s hair done up in foil, encased parasitically by the drier on its long stalk. The experience is not unlike trying to peel a semi-melted Creme Egg that’s been left out in the rain.
***
I’m too late to cook dinner after finishing up another piece of writing. Instead, a collection of sensory impressions – some culinary, some not – from my walk in the park at dusk: the warm boon of a home-cooked curry, viscid in the cool air underneath some unseen open window, (I’m struck through with the image of raisins in sauce); immediately followed by six planks of freshly cut wood standing to attention outside a garage; the sharp lance of sawdust, of half-remembered sap; a nest of four tiny eggs lodged in the hollow of a streetlamp, the crack of an opening in the loose front-plate the mother’s door; the want for a hot chocolate that I don’t follow through.
Wes Knowler is a writer living in London. @otter_cobra