It’s easy to be superior about food. Take those jars of supermarket gloop for example. You could regard them as nasty confections of lurid colours, chemicals, preservatives, salts and gelatinous gums. Because that’s what they are. No-one can argue. Instant sanctimony! Chicken Tonight comes to mind, as does Kan-Tong fluorescent sweet and sour sauce, which resembles the kind of glue my children use to stick sections of egg carton, painted noodles and glitter onto large sheets of butcher’s paper at kindergarten. (Perhaps, by contrast, I should make pasta alfredo with Clag instead of Maggi dried alfredo powder one night. A few glasses of chardonnay beforehand and I shouldn’t even notice the difference.) They wouldn’t make products like these if people didn’t buy them, the good angel on my right shoulder whispers. The market drives demand. But if they didn’t make it, people wouldn’t be able to buy it, replies the bad angel on my left shoulder. Begone, bad angel with your nanny state thin...
Recipes and ruminations from a small house in a big city.