Dialogue: Never mind the food just bring on the wine

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Somebody asked me the other day what was the biggest cultural change I had noticed over the past 30 years and I replied without hesitating even to pick my teeth: "Food and booze."

"How come?" asked Somebody.

"The world, or at least the Western part of it, is awash not only with the stuff itself," I went on.

"But with advice on where to get it, whether to get it fast or slow, how to prepare it, cook it, eat it and whether after it's gone down the hatch it will do you good or ill in both the short-term and long-term."

"Has it not always been like that?" asked Someone in what was becoming an interrogation.

"Nah. When Mrs Beeton in her cookbook wrote 'First catch your hare' she signalled that the stuff was harder to get in those days.

"In fact, if you think back through literature about the only time food comes up - and I'm talking about coming up in the historical rather than the regurgitant, splattering sense - is when people didn't have enough. Which was frequently.

"Oliver Twist didn't worry about calories or cholesterol, he worried about stopping nagging hunger. Have you ever been really hungry with the prospect of staying that way for the foreseeable future? People nowadays are obsessed with the abundance of food, whereas once they were obsessed with its scarcity. Hunger nowadays comes not from a pain in the pit of the stomach but from an excitement of the nose and the mouth."

Somebody, who happened to be a close relative, retreated, suspecting, quite rightly, that a homily was about to follow as surely as the main follows an entree (except in the US where the main is the entree).

But I couldn't help thinking on about the constant acts of will required to curb one's intake of food and beverage against the onslaught of hourly seductions - smells from cookie shops, hints of potential delectations from television advertisements, from cookbooks and magazines.

When I was working shifts in a news agency in Wellington what seems like a century ago, the only fast food was available from milkbars which served tinned tomato soup and toast, tinned baked beans and/or spaghetti on toast, and poached or scrambled eggs, yep, on toast.

Cholesterol wasn't a problem with eggs because it hadn't been invented yet. Dieting wasn't a self-imposed stricture, it was something you had to consciously break; whereas dieting in any modern Western community is as difficult as celibacy in a harem.

Nostalgically, I hunted out a favourite old book of mine that touches on haute cuisine, The Impressions of a New Zealand Pastoralist on Tour, by A. W. Rutherford. Rutherford was a Canterbury cocky who toured Europe in the first decade of the 20th century, not with the reverential eye of a colonial observing an older, higher culture, nor with the easily kidnapped credulity of a Herodotus, but with the patient disdain of someone from the vastly more elevated cultural and moral plane of the Antipodes, including Australia ("another of God's great countries").

Among many observations, he compared to their grave disadvantage the riding style of British cavalry officers to that of colonial farmers and thought French cuisine sad and disgusting compared with your Sunday South Island roast. He abstained from meat during the visit to France because he never felt confident it wasn't horse, mule or goat, all equally repugnant to him.

"The restaurants [of Paris], of which one hears so much," he wrote, "are mean, shabby affairs, half on the path and half inside. I allude to the respectable ones. It is a matter of common knowledge that the swell restaurants are the haunts of gilded vice ... " Some other quotes:

"Meat is not safe in France; it may be most anything, and they have a number of messy plates with no particular flavour, which they gobble up, they are ugly eaters."

"The fish is always poor, and sometimes stale."

"[The cheese] was vile stuff and required an acquired taste."

"The cheap wines of France are deadly rubbish. I'd join the Prohibs in preference to drinking them."

Something I've noticed about the great teachers, both religious and secular, is they were invariably faddy eaters and drinkers. They seem to have made virtues of their likes (communion wine, fish on Fridays?), and vices of the foods they didn't have a taste for (oysters, beef?).

The faddiest of all was Confucius. According to the Analects, he would not eat rice "affected by the weather, or turned, nor fish that was unsound, nor flesh that was tainted ... nor anything improperly cut, nor anything without its proper seasoning, nor bought wine or dried meat from the market." He "did not allow what he took to exceed the flavour of the rice."

It must have been hell for Mrs Confucius and the kitchen staff, but by the time dinner was ready he may have been jolly and uncensorious because the Analects reports: "Only in wine he had set no limit, short of mental confusion."

Me, too.