The world might be speeding up but time taken over food and drink - from dry-aged meat to meticulously brewed coffee - yields more than deliciousness
On the day I went to see the Hayward Gallery’s hit Andreas Gursky retrospective, the image that seemed both to be drawing the most people to it and to be holding their attention the longest was 99 Cent, a photograph from 2001 depicting the interior of a bargain basement supermarket, its aisles heaving with all kinds of brightly coloured pre-packaged goods. On the wall beside this image, the curators dutifully inform visitors of the artist’s message, which has to do with mass production and instant gratification. But the crowd, I noticed, didn’t seem much interested in any of this; most were too busy staring at the piled-high Kit Kats and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Human nature being what it is, I predict a huge upturn in sales of sweet things at the gallery’s cafe for as long as this exhibition runs.
I thought about 99 Cent later, as I read The Missing Ingredient, an interesting and clever new book by Jenny Linford which seeks to unpick the role played by time in food and its flavour; the image’s toxic soulless-ness addresses quite perfectly the more inhuman aspects of what Linford calls our endless “quest to speed up our relationship with food”. Soylent, a meal substitute designed, as she notes, by a Californian tech entrepreneur for those keen to avoid “wasting time” deciding what to have for lunch, isn’t one of the products we can see on Gursky’s shelves; even if it weren’t for the fact that it wasn’t invented until 2013, its minimalist packaging wouldn’t really work in this realm of purple foil and yellow cellophane.
Slower eaters are far less likely to be obese than those who wolf down their food
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