Food for Thought

by Michael Coren

Food is not food alone.

It is context and company, surroundings and experience, memory and moment. The most stunning sunset on a sumptuous beach can be empty and slight, if you’re alone and unloved. An urban banality becomes glorious, if you’re in love and happy. Similarly with food. It is more than body fuel, of course, but so tasty and satisfying when you’re hungry. I will never forget a hot summer day in 2008 in northern Israel. We were hiking around close to the border of Lebanon and Syria, looking at crusader castles, modern battlefields, hills and sand that had seen millennia of history.

We had water, but the food ran out some time earlier. There was no danger, but there was plenty of discomfort. There, mirage-like, emerged an Arab version of a fast-food stand at the side of a dusty road. Believe me when I say this place would not have passed Canadian health regulations by a desert mile. On the menu: hand-made, full of cooked oil, local spices, and goodness knows what else: bread-based wrap, with meat and sauces. I have never tasted anything so good in my entire life.

Back 40 years, and a food aroma from my childhood that even now conjures up memories of Mum, Dad, and the English seaside consisting of winds, cold, sea, and endless fun. Fish and chips, or less the actual fish and chips than the copious helpings of salt and vinegar. That smell can lift me and send me, like some epicure time-traveler, back a generation. Odd as it sounds, it even makes me slightly emotional – remembering parents now gone, a time now disappeared.

Words can do it too. “Ploughman’s Lunch”: the phrase may be a 1960s marketing ploy, or might have origins a century or so earlier. It doesn’t matter. It forms a vision of country life, cheese, warm afternoons, hard work, bread, beer, more beer, pubs, and life as it ought to be. I’m sure ploughmen could barely stand at the end of the working day, but it’s the ideal and not the reality that the food connection produces.

It’s my first Indian meal, in an anonymous suburban restaurant, with a friend who was far more sophisticated and knew what to order. Chicken korma has never lost its status since then, no matter how many times I eat Indian food. It’s the waiter in a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn who had a London accent, and who realized as we chatted to each other that he grew up 200 yards from me.  

It’s camaraderie, shared joy, and fulfillment. It is not snobby, foody nonsense and looking down on straightforward fare, but sheer relish and enjoyment of something that we need that also gives us such innocent, uncluttered satisfaction and pleasure. I eat therefore I am. I enjoy eating therefore I am. I eat too much, therefore I am, well, forced to go to the gym four times a week. It’s worth it. Trenchermen of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your former waistline.

Coren’s latest book is Why Catholics Are Right (McClelland & Stewart).