The (Loveable) Cult of Food
The West Australian
Ros Thomas
Published: Saturday August 18, 2012
Section: Opinion

The Chinese have got it all wrong. 2012 is not the Year of the Dragon, it’s the Year of the Bean. Top billing on menus  everywhere – beans.  A puree of Italian cannellini, New Mexican black beans,  a Moroccan tagine of beans. For breakfast.

I think 2011 was the year of the duck:  crispy-skinned, Peking, confit, smoked. Some might argue 2010 was the year of the duck too, but I say it was the year of the pig:  shredded, pulled, sticky, slow-roasted, gorgeously soft belly.  (Mine).

What is going on with food these days? It’s a loveable cult. I am just as happy to go to bed with Delicious magazine as I am with delicious man. I have a recipe drawer stuffed to Christmas with cuttings ripped from cooking journals and recipes I’ve printed excitedly from the internet. If there’s nothing on telly I surf Nigella.

Our house is finely divided into two camps – the one that can’t get enough of that voluptuous pomme (de terre) Nigella Lawson with her gastroporn voice and her elegant fingers licking and poking  (me) and the camp which thinks she’s an overblown heifer with a lardy rear and even lardier recipes. (Two guesses.) And yet my lifelong dinner companion loves his food to distraction. He just doesn’t want to seduce it. Or be seduced by it. Or cook it for that matter.

Even the smaller members of the house are enjoying their five star taste of haute cuisine. Spaghetti bolognaise is now ragu, cauliflower cheese is au gratin. A loaf of white bread is pane di casa – even our five year old knows that. Next we Michelin-rated housewives will be attempting pomegranate foams and foraging for edible toadstools and salad weeds in the empty block up the road. It’s a cordon bleu revival, a blue ribbon renaissance in the culinary arts.

Food has gone a bit silly hasn’t it? Or is it just me? I blame ‘Masterchef’. It was as addictive as a packet of chips. Universally more-ish. Even with those annoying ad breaks that sliced right into the middle of judging. But Masterchef’s sweet genius was that it brought families round the television once again. Not since The Two Ronnies have I known so many kids and parents coming together to watch the box .

Food TV has been cleverly basting our appetites for meals we used to go out for – five hour lamb, home made pasta, most things foreign. In the last year, I have cooked Sicilian apple cake (to thunderous applause) and Asian dumplings (to stunned silence).

I’ve started visiting farmers’ markets, and see all the neighbours there. And my gym instructor. (Who caught me hand-to-mouth with a croissant.) Those Saturday markets are friendly places. No one jostles you or jumps the coffee queue. Nobody is cranky or rude, and everyone lolls around in the winter sun, chatty and mellow. I bought the best tasting strawberries I’ve had in ages, and watched with satisfaction as my two smallest ones worked their way through the entire punnet as they scootered home.

I’m trying to be a bit agrarian at home too. I like the idea of being more self sufficient. I now give my salad trimmings to a friend who has chooks. I’ve start making jam from the Italian mamma’s fig tree up the road. I make cumquat chutney from my own.

And I’m  feeding my children dirt. Not the lettuce suffocated in plastic from the supermarket, but the still gritty one a farmer cut from its stalk yesterday. And whatever the rain splashed up on my herb patch. And the newly fallen apple I collected on a visit to a straggly orchard and wiped clean on my shirt.

I  want to feed them more of nature, in all its irregular-shaped, less-than-shiny diversity. I hope it helps make them more robust and less homogenized. I’m not falling for advertisers who tell me my house is a bomb shelter for germs and I need their arsenal of anti-bacterials. Soap and water will do fine. I don’t think I’m grubby enough for hospital grade disinfectant.

As the first of the processed food generation, (polony, peanut paste anyone?) I have come full circle and decided I would like to control what my children are eating.  And now, well into the crustless cut and thrust of school lunches, and because I am at home, I am able to indulge in the whims and comforts of a spot of home cooking.

I get inspiration from loitering outside my local French patisserie, drinking  in the window display with its drift of icing sugar and warm bread smells curling in the air. Or planting carrots so the kids can delight in the ritual of choosing which one is ready for life above ground. Or picking vivid handfuls of parsley from the pots by the front door. (Only for parsley does total neglect pays handsome dividends.)

A girlfriend’s husband is so eager to reduce his carbon footprint he’s dug up his front lawn and replaced it with an impressive vegetable garden at considerable expense. Having never grown anything but a bald patch, his Herculean efforts have produced exactly two heads of lettuce. Undeterred, he hired a gardener from Mandurah to drive to Perth and back once a week to tend it for him.

No wonder a small voice in the back of my head is feeding me a middle class reproach – is this all just self-indulgence? Who are we kidding that the home food revival is helping anyone but ourselves? That with our veggie patches and a bag of farm oranges from the Saturday market, we stand together in defiance against the supermarket goliaths, and they’re shaking with fear under the neon lights at their checkouts?

I bet they couldn’t give a jot that they’re losing two bucks a week from some suburban mum who’s proudly growing her own parsley. Because I seem to find myself in the local supermarket every single day regardless. It’s cheap and it’s close and it’s open on a Monday. I’d like to buy organic milk, but at half the price, the three-dollar one is kinder to my back pocket. And my bottom line rules my world.

I’m not sure where our food revival is headed, no doubt into stranger and more exciting territories: where quinoa trumps rice as the world’s greatest living carbohydrate, and ceviche hooks itself a dedicated fan club. (I’m going to take some convincing that raw white fish in a lemon bath is anything but unappetising.) Perhaps it’s food theatre that will keep us glued to the box at night, watching that mouthful of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall  (Hugh Fearlessly-Eat-It-all) making a career honeypot out of his farm produce in ‘River Cottage’. Or Jamie Oliver turning boarding school cooks with tuckshop arms into bastions of healthy eating.

I’ll happily spend a little bit more to go back to basics. Just not a whole lot more. And if that’s not enough to make a difference to farmers, am I just being selfish? Am I deluding myself to think changing the way I eat rewards anyone but me? (One lovely friend suggests it’s all about mental health anyway.)

Obviously it’s more time-consuming cooking from scratch. But hey – isn’t that what being at home with small children is about? Small pleasures filtered from their excitement at licking the beaters and the greedy thrill of a half scraped bowl. A window into how food memories grow from seed, and become cherished links to childhood later on. Peace of mind knowing I am feeding them from my own hand.

If only I can stop my eldest from begging for a sausage roll from the school canteen. That really takes the cake.