What are you like when it comes to trying new, unusual or exotic food?
If someone mentions snails in garlic butter as a starter to a nice meal one evening, do you immediately rush out to the bathroom to throw up in disgust - politely say… “No thanks, not just now” – or do you think… “well I’ll give it a go and plunge in hopeful that they taste better than they look!”.
Or are you one of the fortunate one’s who has been enjoying them for years and can sink a dozen or so before getting on with whatever feast is on offer?
We are all created differently aren’t we, largely I suppose, based on what sort of food you were given when we were young and still forming our likes and dislikes in the culinary department.
I know, when I was just a kid, I couldn’t stand the taste of Brussels sprouts, I hated most other vegetables too and wine or beer seemed like some sort of poison. But what a difference eighty years can make!
I love sprouts now, especially fried or baked rather than boiled and pretty well all vegetables are good, as an accompaniment to meat of course, I wouldn’t want to go vegetarian.
And of course, alcohol tends to grow on one, over the years, sipping at first from small glasses supplied by helpful parents, then the binge-drinking of youth, before you learned that the way you feel now is nothing compared with the way you’ll be feeling in an hour if you carry on at this rate, until you eventually come out the other side and can enjoy a decent drink, especially with those snails in garlic butter we talked about earlier.
Another way we grow up with food is in the quality of what we consume. Teenagers and many other young people start their ‘public’ eating by going to the local fish and chip shop, McDonald’s or Red Rooster.
All they want is something that is cheap, quick, strong tasting and fills you up, not necessarily good for you, especially if you eat it too often, and it has to be washed down with Coke, Pepsi, or one of those drinks that are ‘supposed’ to give you more energy, though to what purpose is anyone’s guess!
When I was young, over eighty years ago, a lot of what we now ‘enjoy’ hadn’t even been invented… not in the form with which we are now familiar anyway.
Rice was eaten as a pudding after a meal. You wouldn't dream of eating it fried as part of the main course.
What we now enjoy as muesli would have been listed as cattle food just after the war, and yoghurt was some sort of waste product left over during the processing of milk.
Chinese food was eaten only by Chinese people, using those funny stick things of theirs instead of a civilised knife and fork.
Olive oil was kept, in a small bottle, in the first-aid kit, ready to flush out blocked ears – you wouldn’t dream of cooking with it, it was far too ‘oily’ up to ‘dripping’ or ‘lard’.
And if anyone was foolish enough to offer you an eel to cook for tea. Well… that was pretty close to being a snake wasn’t it, and who on earth would want to eat a snake?
Some foods weren’t exotic, but they were treated with a great deal of suspicion when they first appeared on the shop shelves, (no supermarkets then!), things like sliced bread sold wrapped in expensive plastic bags; who on earth would ever be so lazy that they couldn’t be bothered to cut the slices for themselves?
‘It will never catch on’ became a very familiar phrase at this time.
And imagine biscuits coming packed in neat little wrappers instead of the old way, when you could go into the biscuit-shop with its walls lined with those big square boxes full of loose biscuits.
You could stroll around, picking six of those, a dozen of this one, and another dozen of that variety, making up a mixture to suit YOU!
Now you have to buy a whole pack of whatever you want, only getting a mixture if you buy a whole pack of each variety, and a lot of those will be broken in the pack, whereas you could long ago, go to the box of broken biscuits and buy them cheaper!
We do enjoy a much wider choice of food today, from all over the world, but I can’t help thinking a few vital points have been lost along the way.
© 2023 Brian Lee
