At a dinner I co-hosted recently, it became clear before we sat down to eat that there was going to be plenty of nothing for everyone.
The vegetarian couldn’t eat the foie gras. The dairy-free guest said: ”Are those parmesan shavings in the salad? The wheat intolerant (”I bloat!”) couldn’t eat the bread, but took one look at my face and said he’d scrape off the foie gras with a spoon.
The last guest arrived, saw the main course — fat, fresh prawns popping in a flaming pan — and reminded me that he had a fatal seafood allergy and had I forgotten the time he went into anaphylactic shock half way through the Creole Surprise in Knysna?
Well, you can’t really argue with a fatal condition, so I sweetly suggested he try the foie gras, which had become my default dish for everyone except the vegetarian as evidence mounted against the rest of the menu. ”Er, no thanks,” he said, ”just thinking about what they do to the goose makes me want to vomit.”
While the guests foraged for their dinner in my pantry — out came a jar of Nutella, a can of kidney beans — I did the only thing a ruined hostess could do and popped a bottle of fizz.
”Drink, anyone?” You’d think I was giving away iPhones the way everyone lunged towards me. Funny that. Nobody was allergic to alcohol. I mean, with the variety and number of allergies gathered under one roof, statistically, what were the chances?
I don’t know if it’s an age thing, a class thing or a fashion thing, but more and more of the delightful people I break gluten-free bread with are turning into absolute pansies. These are people who once climbed mountains with ropes between their own teeth and ate whole Toblerones; people who partied all night then fried some bacon and went to work.
Naturally, time and grease will take their toll, even on the strongest of constitutions. It is around this time that many people with any brains left figure out they’re going to live too long to make attractive corpses and they start to think about making what evangelical food gurus like to call ”healthy lifestyle choices”.
Even a food fool like me (refuse to climb the mountain, eat the Toblerone anyway) would have to agree that such decisions, if acted on, seem like a sensible way to stave off death, disease and flab. I sit in awe of people who make such healthy decisions because I get tired if I stand for long.
But healthy lifestyle choices are also a way for the world’s on-trend affluent folk to switch consumer allegiance to the organic produce increasingly available at classy supermarkets. Organic food is more expensive than ordinary food that has been treated with pesticides, growth hormones and antibiotics. I’m not sure why. It must cost farmers a fortune to give their sick chickens antibiotics, never mind all that time spent out in the fields tenderly spraying their crops with life-prolonging hormones. I would be so grateful if someone took the time to spray me with hormones.
For those who can afford it, organic food is a big win-win: you can have that buzzy-fuzzy feeling that you’ve done your bit to save your body, your family and — gasp — the planet, for the pricey price of a free-range chicken or a jar of badger-friendly honey.
This week I ran into a friend of the badgers who just moved to California, practically the international HQ of eco-chic.
Even she was shocked to find that grocery shopping there has become a political act.
Presumably of the risk-free kind: upscale suburbanites in San Francisco don’t have to risk getting shot for their beliefs. And doing the right thing takes up no more of their valuable time than slapping down the dollars and congratulating themselves that the eggs they brought came from chickens raised in a ”cage-free” environment. With added Omega-3s.
The other day an Indian colleague was selling jars of her mother’s homemade lemon atchar at the office. Interested, I asked her if it was very hot. ”Not very,” she said, ”it’s white-friendly.”
I understood this to mean that no white people were harmed in the making of the product and bought two. It felt so good.