Vignettes

DISGUST

Why did our children always say “That’s dis-custing” as if it were a ‘c’ rather than a ‘g’ in the middle of the word?  To be fair, they didn’t say it about Sunday roast, or Thursday pizza, but at least one of them uttered the crushing word most other days. Maybe the ‘c’ is more guttural, more evocative of their repulsion and their response to our feeble efforts to poison (correction: feed) them.

GREEDY

“You greedy pig!”

Poor pigs, they haven’t got a chance, snorting and grubbing towards their destiny of becoming paintbrushes, shoes, handbags, all-day-breakfasts and gourmet dinners. Shunned by whole religions, how can the humble pig have such a mighty influence? You could say the pig’s existence has turned out to be a pig in a poke.

GUT-FEELING

If you feel it in your gut, it’s true.

Guts are slimy, warm and throbbing, the things that spilled out of human bodies drawn and quartered on the gallows, or on the bombed-out battlefield.

Guts is what your Gran made a stinking pan of, white and frothy, and fed to your Dad while the rest of the family went “pooh!” and held your noses.

Like the fish on the slab you were gutted when you didn’t get the job. It takes guts to admit that you weren’t good enough.

HUNGRY

If I’m hungry it’s because it’s time for the next meal.  Simple as.  I don’t know hunger because there was no meal on its way, or from purposeful starving of the body’s needs, or from failed harvests, or just not enough to go around. I’ve never had to scrape the barrel, tighten my belt, go to school on an empty stomach, live from hand to mouth or cry over spilt milk.  How can I write about hunger? How can I not write about hunger? It’s a universal condition. Kit de Waal says ‘As writers we have to make things up if we want to spin a good yarn’ but warns of cultural appropriation: ‘Do not dip your pen in someone else’s blood’[1] but write respectfully.

SATIATED

Baby sucking, soporific, at your breast: sucked-up, satisfied, sluggish eyes, gratified, somnolent, smug, smiling, sleepy state of bliss, seventh heaven, sated. Hunger assuaged, thirst slaked, desire soothed, appetite subdued.

STUFFED

Food is the stuff of life, or is my life stuffed with food? Eating until it hurts during family Christmases was my teenage experience. Roxane Gay tells how she ‘ate and ate and ate to build [her] body into a fortress.’ [2]  Yet suppressing painful emotion by stuffing your face is counter-productive, producing fat and self-loathing.  Gay’s memoir of her ‘unruly body’ describes the unspoken pain (a rape) that her child self could not articulate, and spends the next decades stuffing down the hurt while imagining the luxury of being ‘comfortable in one’s body’.

Can ‘stuffed’ ever be pleasurable? Transient? A moment of well-being before returning to the norm? Watching my six-foot-four teenage son eat three pizzas then display his protruding belly, swollen as if pregnant, is an example.  Maybe ‘stuffed’ is the province of youthful growth spurts.

LET US GIVE THANKS FOR THE CO-OP

Oh Co-op, thank you for your bounteous shelves. Your abundance spilleth over into my cupboards and lights up the inside of my fridge. Every day you renew my spirit as I am reminded of the copious produce with which you nurture me. May your doors never close on the needy, your opening hours remain for sixteen hours of every day, your freezer and chill cabinet overflow with offers. I promise to devote my life to your service, to visit you all the weeks of the year.

As your devout follower, I will collect the coupons you bestow on me, and offer up my credit card as a small token of my gratitude and devotion.  Though I can never aspire to match your benevolence, I will try nevertheless to feed my family on the recipes in your magazine, so that they will know the goodness that you convey to us mere consumers.

I thank the heavens that you have gone forth and multiplied, so that whichever way I turn, I can find your blue and white sign shining like a beacon of virtue and hope.

In the name of the farmer, the shop, and the checkout,

Ah-hem.

 

[1] Kit de Waal, ‘Don’t dip your pen in someone else’s blood: writers and the other’,  Accessed 30th October 2018

 [2] I listened to Roxane Gay read her memoir Hunger on 22nd March 2019, abridged by Rowan Routh, a BBC Books production for BBC Sounds.  Gay, Roxane, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, 2017, HarperCollins, New York.