More and more often I find myself sitting in a restaurant and feeling my appetite ebb as I face the same precisely calibrated combination of boredom and irritation.
Something similar happens in many of our better shops, and at domestic tables.
As I choke down yet another piece of overcooked duck, or wince my way through an espresso that is shiny with bitter oils instead of kissed with golden foam, I try to remind myself of the culinary emancipation that accompanied our more general liberation in the early 1990s.
Before 1990, if you wanted balsamic vinegar you had to scour the big city delis to find a single dusty bottle — now you find it sloshed over salads everywhere with irrational exuberance. As for eating out, people who once kept the tills at Mike’s Kitchen ringing have exchanged botox burgers for sushi and Vietnamese.
The explanation is probably simple: South Africa opened up to outside influence at just about the same time as a food revolution swept British restaurants and, more importantly, supermarkets.
It is the latter from which our major chains take their inspiration and you can be sure the free-range chicken in Woolworths had an antecedent at Marks & Spencer, and the pesto at Pick n Pay was thoroughly consumer tested by Tesco.
This is all very well and good: I like being able to pick up fish sauce and fabric softener at the same time. What makes me sad, and very often annoyed, is the way in which previously unimagined cuisines are now assimilated as lifestyle trends and then completely emptied of everything that made them dynamic, interesting and, more to the point, delicious, in the first place.
Those little trays of sushi you can buy at the deli are a good example, the rice slowly solidifying while the fish turns rancid under white fluorescent lights. As for bottled pesto — Melissa van Hoogstraten and Raymond Ackerman, this means you — it’s supposed to be an explosion of summer, not an embalming fluid for ancient garlic and cheap Parmesan substitutes.
That said, convenience foods provide only the most obvious examples. Restaurants, by and large, are no better.
How often have you stared down the barrel of a ‘Thai salad” with strips of leathery calamari and wilted lettuce because the rest of the menu was even more terrifying (pasta with tomato and avocado, anyone?). And why do chefs who apparently wouldn’t know lemongrass from lemon verbena offer Singapore noodles alongside the house salad?
Unsurprisingly, domestic cooks take their cues from the shops and magazines, which is why you found yourself on the receiving end of so many vaguely coconutty curried dishes a few years ago and why you are currently gagging on Jamie’s fish pie. It’s not so much that people can’t cook — most can — it’s just that they are determined to cook fashionably and they lack the time, money or imagination to get it right.
It seems to me that a severe disorder of perception is sweeping through our nibbling classes, a kind of anorexia in reverse. We’re not starving ourselves to look like the people in the magazines, we’re stuffing ourselves to look like the people in the magazines.
This is the only conceivable explanation for the outrageous popularity of the dewy-lipped Jamie Oliver and his lad-about-town cookery manuals. Oliver gives us page after page of democratised nosh that is just adequately simple and tasty to keep the punters coming back to the stainless-steel hob and just sufficiently globalised to pretend to contemporary gloss without any embarrassing cultural content (pigs feet, hard work, that kind of thing). He’s the Jamiroquai of the culinary world, all hat and no beef-on-the-bone.
That said, even the Naked Chef has his uses — and not just as a stalking horse for the new anorexics. Oliver eases people into more interesting cooking, a culinary gateway drug if you will, and the number of people asking their grocers for savoy cabbage is sure to increase. There is already more in our shops, both deluxe and down-at-heel, than there has ever been before, and some local restaurants border on being good.
It’s a fine time to eat if you can avoid food prepared and marketed by people who want you to dine on an improved version of yourself — it’s a common enough practice, but it will give you indigestion every time.