Too organic

Being a foodie used to be such a simple business: you liked good food, eating, cooking, dining out and generally over-indulging. The important thing though, was that it was fun. It was about pleasure, enjoyment and sharing with as many mates as you could invite but, ever so slowly, things have changed. Suddenly it’s not fun anymore and I feel like I’ve lost my way.

Let me tell you about last week’s shopping.

I buy my bacon from a small, artisanal concern. They breed their own pigs on an organic diet better than mine, butcher them themselves, hand-cure and slice the meat. It looks lovely. Unfortunately it has an over-salted, porcine flavour that tastes like licking a boar after a strenuous workout. As it contains no filthy nitrates, if not consumed within a week of purchase, it also tends to grow a luxuriant grey pelt of deeply organic mould. I continue to buy it because they’re a small producer and we all know what’s happening to the British pig industry but I’ve realised that I’m going off bacon.

I get an organic box so I can always have good quality veg. As usual, by Thursday and Friday, I was racking brains and recipe books to come up with interesting ways with the unidentifiable ‘knobbly root’. It’s a different root each week, the flavour varying unpredictably between swede and chard stalk and, though I’m sure it’s really useful for Carpathian peasants to feed to their goats, it usually ends up in the worm bin. The veg box that was supposed to be a pleasure is now such a source of guilty waste that I’m considering canceling it.

I try to buy game whenever I can - you know, low-cholesterol, tasty, abundant and under-appreciated game. I’m not sure if they shoot them with Bazookas or just swat them out of the air with cricket bats but this week, yet again, it took an hour to remove blood, bone fragments, shrapnel and feathers from inside a wild duck. By the time I’d triaged the corpse there was just enough meat to ruin a salad with a handful of duck lardons that tasted as greasy and fishy as otter confit.

When my ideologically impeccable greengrocer brought out a few kilos of nice looking Kenyan fine beans, I stood before them, spavined by indecision. Should I boycott them and damage a growing industry in a needy country, pretend they were never discovered or just hold off till they grow them within 20 kilometres of Camden Town? Is it better if they’re organic or is it unfair to expect a bunch of impoverished African farmers to conform to the strictures of a UK organics lobby? Above all, am I really supposed to run through this elaborate thought experiment in international economics for everything in my basket. I just thought the bloody beans would be good in a sharp mustardy dressing but the moral dilemnas were frankly too challenging. I went home confused, angry and beanless.

There were twenty-one meals this week. What with the guilt, the goat fodder, roadkill surgery, the in-store moral meltdown and having to shave the bacon, the pleasure or enjoyment score was - well shall we say considerably lower that I’d have liked.

It used to be said that the British didn’t know how to take pleasure in eating, which was why we had no decent ingredients, cuisine or food culture. That, of course, was long ago, before we had our Great Food Renaissance. Now we have world-class ingredients, excellent cuisine and a reinvigorated, booming food culture - so why are we working so hard at removing the pleasure? Well I’ve had enough. I’m resetting the compass. As of today, I’m buying local, artisanal, free-range and 'certified pure by the organic Thought Police', if and only if, it’s fun to cook and eat. I’m cutting guilt out of my diet. As of today, I’m going to be a foodie again..