The joy of food
I recently came across my late mum’s copy of The Hamlyn All-Colour Cookbook from the 70s. Flicking through its butter-smeared pages, a blurry home movie whirred inside my head; my mother serving sangria and platters of food to a laughter-filled room.
The dishes – mostly taken from the aforementioned (all colour!) book – were meat-centric and rich, cheese sauces aplenty, coronation chicken de rigueur, the desserts heavy on sugar and whipped cream. And there was almost certainly more greenery in the flower arrangements than in the dishes themselves.
Many of the meal components were unsophisticated by today’s standards – tinned fruit, canned fish, white rice, curries made from powder, very little made from scratch – but I mused that there was one ingredient in plentiful supply that these days is harder to come by. Joy.
The abandoned and unquestioning pleasure in food. Not a clean-eating requirement in sight. Perhaps a fleeting and jovial mention of ‘oh I’ll go back on my diet next week’, but for the most part just the sheer thrill of an evening well spent with people you love.
Nostalgia is a blinkered beast… and as the sentimentality faded like cigar smoke, I realised that of course the way we eat now is far better. We have an infinitely greater selection of foods, especially fresh produce; we have the benefit of 50 years of studies and research to guide us to better nutritional choices; we’re aware of the effects of certain foods on conditions such as coeliac disease and diabetes. And yet…
A recent analysis of Google data trends by the website Chef’s Pencil shows Kiwis are the fourth most diet-obsessed population in the world – with ‘keto' (low carb, high fat) the most researched topic. Medically prescribed diet plans aside, has our obsession with ‘the right way to eat’ tainted our
