Cheese is everything – and other irrefutable truths
As I write, I am about to celebrate a major birthday (yes, 40 … again), and while I’d rather not think too much about my face, my bum and various other body parts – I’d rather not think about them because, in fact, I don’t dislike them even half as much as the world tells me I should – this seems a good moment to take stock. For half a century now, I have been a hearty eater (ie a greedy pig). For 30 years, I have been a cook: first a rubbish one, then quite a competent one. For a quarter of a century, I have written about food, or edited writing about food by other people. What, then, have I learned so far? What are the bullet points? Uncap your pens, and we will begin…
1 Let’s get the pomposity out of the way. Food, and by extension the ability to cook it, is very important. This cannot be overstated. Good food makes people happy and healthy. It punctuates the days in the loveliest and, sometimes, the most memorable ways. It connects to kindness, to generosity and even, I think, to sanity. But you don’t have to take my word for this. “Good cooking is a moral agent,” wrote Joseph Conrad in his introduction to the cookbook his wife Jessie published in 1923. Joseph bloody Conrad. I rest my case.
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