chrisgregory.com

I turned forty years old on the Equinox. I share a birthday with JS Bach and Russ Meyer, so from the sublime to the – well, I guess it depends on your opinion of Bach. I don’t make a thing of birthdays, usually, but I enjoy the type of cooking involved in social events and Kate sold me on a theme for the party.

I have very fond memories of the family get-togethers of my childhood, in rural South Australia through the late seventies and early eighties. If I ever ran a restaurant I would want it to mimic the experience, somehow. There would be a gas griller and a keg of beer, and a tape player with a pile of tapes, all containing the music of Slim Dusty. Trestle tables would be set up and the surfaces lined with butcher’s paper. On one table would be salads, which would all have meat in them, and on the other would be a variety of multi-coloured home-made desserts, usually containing jelly and marshmallows.

To me, that’s probably as good as it gets. While I don’t doubt that finer fare exists, I have yet to enjoy the same level of pleasure in a commercial setting. I doubt that it’s possible without some pre-existing personal relationship between the people who prepare the food and the people who consume it. Social food has meaning beyond and sometimes unrelated to satisfying base nutritional requirements.

Kate sent out invites using modern methods, through email, Facebook and a few phone calls. To suit the ‘theme’, Kate asked people to bring a dessert or a salad, of the kind that was popular in the seventies.

This made me feel a little sad. Somewhere between my childhood and now, food changed. Partly it’s changed circumstances: I sort of made the shift from rural working-class life and culture to a kind of middle-class urbanity. My tastes have changed. To some of my friends, the idea of social food is fairly alien. Middle-class preferences are for reproductions of other people’s cuisines, the particulars of which depend almost wholly on current fashion. The food Kate was describing seemed shameful to some of them, like a trap set to trigger deeply-felt status anxieties. One refused and said they would bring a ‘good’ salad.

The idea of having a theme for a social function seemed alien but unavoidable. Few of the people that I know have a strong sense of identity attached to the foods they consume, not in the way that the people around me when I was growing up did. For better and for worse; I remember various foodstuffs I’d now consider staples being referred to as ‘wog food’ or worse. But at the same time, nobody talked about authenticity, or making other people’s food. The food they made belonged to them, and by sharing it they were sharing themselves.

Browsing through old cookbooks, there was a fairly abrupt transition in the seventies, from cookbooks that focussed on entertaining guests or cooking for pleasure, to books that promoted simple cooking or healthy cooking above all else. The involved desserts and carefully crafted appetisers, meant to be made at home before transporting to social events, became unfashionable and were mostly replaced by commercial substitutes, in much the same way that commercial interests like shopping malls supplanted town squares in the eighties.

An unhealthy paranoia about food hygiene and home preparation standards, often the result of overzealous regulation and commercial lobbying, combined with puritanical notions about health and persecutory fantasies about pleasurable eating, invoking a litany of negative consequences resulting from even the briefest transgression, have made sharing food outside of the immediate family unit a morally and ethically loaded act. The solution, often enough, is to avoid the situation entirely. Eating a meal before the social event or, as host, providing solely commercially-prepared food, are increasingly common occurrences. There is little value given to preparing food for others as an act of friendship, or respect, or love.

Conversely, there seems to be no shame in providing for guests in the most perfunctory fashion. If effort is involved, it is aimed solely at boosting the host’s social status; evidence of the host’s good taste and ability to conform to current fashions through seemingly authentic reproductions of whichever dishes are currently favoured by the established culinary authorities. Any concession to the needs or preferences of the guest are negotiated as a series passive-aggressive refusals, often involving squeamishness masquerading as morality or some self-diagnosed physical intolerance (statistically, these are significantly more likely to be imagined than real).

Puritanism, perhaps an expression of the cultural implications of the fifty-fold increase in the incidence of obsessive compulsive disorders over the last thirty years, has severely curtailed the imaginative and aesthetically grandiose elements once common in social foods. The ideologies of healthy eating have become so constrictive and constipated as to disallow any expression of unrestrained joy through food and drink, even for a special occasion, when the rules of everyday nutritional balance should be relaxed or, ideally, abandoned completely.

The event went well. People ate, on the whole, much more than they should on any average day. There was a trestle table for the desserts, not as many as I remembered from my childhood, and not as skilfully prepared (the knowledge of such things, and the skills required, having atrophied), but still, I was moved that there were people who would care enough about me to do such things.