Food is now perceived as a series of dangerous substances, to be sent to an icy grave as soon as possible, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
THE GREAT debate has begun, and although I am a bit annoyed that I did not begin it myself, I am satisfied overall that the subject – such a vital one – has finally been brought to the public arena.
This is not the debate about whether HM Queen Elizabeth should visit these shores. Everybody knows she’ll only want to see our race horses, and that we’ll only want to see her at a couple of Famine memorials, for the crack.
It would be nice to feel that a royal visit was going to bind the wounds inflicted by centuries of oppression, but actually all it’s going to mean is a lot of traffic disruption and a great deal of Garda overtime which the country can ill afford.
Much better, surely, to chopper the queen in to whichever counties are home to the biggest stud farms (Kildare? Tipperary?) and leave O’Connell Street for the people.
No, the great debate is on quite another subject, and it has been started, appropriately enough, in the London Times, a newspaper which has been perceived to have been on a bit of a slide in recent years. But now gravitas is restored, as the Thunderer has provided the forum for a discussion on Foods That Do Not Need To Go In The Fridge.
This is a subject dear to every right-thinking person’s heart and, apart from the fantastic piece of journalism conducted by a man who lived on foods that were past their sell-by date for a period of one month, there has been little public discussion of this burning – or perhaps chilling – issue.
Now, Caitlin Moran, perhaps the finest columnist of her generation, and certainly the funniest, has turned her attention to our promiscuous use of the refrigerator, the oubliette of modern times.
Caitlin Moran’s point is that people now put what used to be called preserves in the fridge. That is, ketchup, marmalade, jams and squash. (Note: I do not think squash is a preserve, but we’ll let that pass.) Even mustard, she points out, is now kept in the fridge, and all of this is completely unnecessary because these things are PRESERVES (her capitals) and will last for years at room temperature.
Hastily grabbing our jar of Dijon and that nubbly, grainy one that you can never find when you’re looking for it from the top shelf of our own fridge, one can only nod furiously in agreement. I know people who keep pickled blooming onions in the fridge. What kind of teenage madness is that?
You wouldn’t mind but we live in a country that is so cold for 355 days of the year that you could keep all your jars of marmalade, jams and ketchup outside the back door and thereby suddenly be able to glimpse the walls of your fridge, which would make a nice change.
In fact, I plan to construct exactly that storage system, just as soon as Lidl get in some more of those barbecue cool boxes.
There is a wider sociological point here – food is perceived in the modern world as a series of dangerous substances, to be sent to an icy grave as soon as possible – but let’s gallop past that and admit that the world is divided into two types of people.
There are the people who cheerfully whisk the fur off jam, and then there are the people who gag as they watch people whisk the fur off jam.
Then the people who cheerfully whisk the fur off jam give a hearty Joyce Grenfell sort of laugh in a sadistic way, watching as their associates turn green.
You either come from a household in which everyone had to cut a few blue circles off the top of the marmalade, and didn’t make any big fuss about it, or you are the type of person who keeps horseradish in the fridge. I have just discovered that there is a horseradish in our fridge, but I certainly didn’t put it there.
The arguments which occur between these two groupings are bitter. In the kitchen, the jam-whiskers have to hide every sign of putrescence or even natural decline from their more hygienic co-habitants, who patrol the fridge and food presses, sniffing out decay. Thus you have half of an entire generation willing to throw out ordinary cream which is in the process of going sour, shortly before going out to buy sour cream. It is crazy.
Someone has just patiently explained to me that it is the ubiquity of central heating and the scarcity of good vinegar which has led us to this epidemic of refrigeration. He did concede the egg issue – no eggs in the fridge, ever. But the real reason our fridges are so full is that the most inappropriate items have “Refrigerate after opening” written on their sides. Not since the shampoo manufacturers came up with that shameless piece of instruction “Lather, rinse, repeat,” or the clothes manufacturers tried to cover themselves by putting “Dry Clean Only” on all their labels has so much been wasted by so many.
Truly, the insurance industry runs every aspect of human existence. It is amazing it’s going to let the queen come here at all.