Two things have happened this week.
We have an aphid problem.
I think I have lost the joy of cooking.
Let me deal with these in order. I am not a gardener, my wife is, although it's important to say that our aphid problem is not a gardening issue. We have a 150-year-old pear tree in our little garden, you see, and it is very much a dominant presence; a charming, occasionally dangerous (falling pears certainly leave a mark), often beautifully blossomed, or humming with the calming thrum of bees, and very much a welcome, dominant presence. And, save a bit of branch maintenance each year, the assumption is that it will keep doing what it does, season after season, as it has done it for such a long time already.
We noticed the leaves first. Birds and bees flit about the canopy above us, as they always do at this time of year, feeding and pollinating and making merry, and thus some otherwise healthy leaves fall; but this year the leaves come down candied, sticky and dusted with something crystalline them that brings to mind fine strips of candied citrus, or even little sage leaves that have been dipped in sugar syrup and the finest caster sugar. Although it’s not caster sugar, is it? We know that now. It is unclear why this year there is a sudden infestation, no doubt some sage gardening mind will know why, but my pop-analysis points to a confluence of factors regarding temperature and rain that means things weren’t killed off when it was cold, and have thrived as it has warmed up, just in a way that most years doesn’t happen.
The point I am driving at is that sometimes these potentially devastating situations crop up out of nowhere, even when all apparent variables are, to all intents and purposes, similar, if not exactly the same, as one would claim they have always been. And then suddenly there’s an aphid problem, and you worry you might lose the whole tree.
Aphids aside, I spent a very happy and fascinating afternoon this week at the David Hockney exhibition at Lightroom in Kings Cross.
Ah. Already I can feel the eye-rolls starting at the back, a typical response that accompanies David Hockney (and artists like him - i.e. pleasing, commercially successful, etc) and his work and his perspective. It is almost irrefutable that David Hockney is, at the same time, the greatest living artist we have, and an artist who finds himself much derided and traduced. If you like David Hockney, the eye-roller suggests, you don’t really like art, do you? You don't really understand the complexity or nuance of life, do you? You’re not really a serious person, are you?
Anyway, there's a fascinating section of voice-over Hockney starts to expand upon and explore his views on perspective and how it's been his lifelong obsession. And how perspective was ostensibly invented/or at least formally described by Brunelleschi in Italy in the 1400s, and how it's very useful indeed for architectural drawing, but not particularly useful at all as a way of depicting the world we see as an artist. We follow his line of thought, we follow as this leads him to start painting with a camera, and then back again into paint as the limitations of the camera impact and limit the realisation of the thought, the execution of the art. Anyway, the point is he is developing and finessing a very legitimate and serious point and it is fascinating, and then he stops, and he says:
“Really, I want my art to be joyful, actually.”
And it struck me, it struck me to the point of getting out my phone and scribbling down the quote, verbatim, that we live in a world now where a lot of writing about food and a lot of analysis of food and critique of food and restaurants and cooks and cookbooks has lost its joy. Are we all worried about being caught out for being too one-dimensional or not considering every eventuality, every thought, every potential nuance and every potential outcome from eating a thing or writing about a thing or cooking a thing? Are we allowed to cook the food of a country other than our own or appreciate something we love as if we’ve just discovered it for the first time? There is always the risk of appropriating a culture or misinterpreting something, and we have to consider if we’re the right person to be putting a spotlight on this thing because there are people from the culture that you're getting excited about who'd be better placed to put the thing in the spotlight if they choose to put it in the spotlight at all.
Why does this worry me though? I am just cooking my tea. Making lunch. No one cares what I cook. And yet it does matter somehow. It matters because I associate myself with the people putting this energy into the world. I align my values with theirs, largely, and I feel they ‘are the right side of the argument’ on things that seem to matter in my small echo chamber. It is because of them and the opinions they espouse that I consider the produce I buy, the places I eat, the way I host, what I cook for tea, and how I make my lunch.
Because of this low pervading energy emitted from social media, largely, and some outlets such as this one and some national publications too, our food and cooking and produce and purchasing and eating out has been moved forward, has improved vastly, for sure, but the other side of that coin seems to be a turbulent wake of judgement that froths and boils behind the boat of progress, and if you get caught up in the wake, it can be hard to keep your head above water, hard to breathe.
And that, I think, is where I find myself with cooking. It feels hard to breathe.
And so it was that Hockney’s croaking Yorkshire brogue brought this into sharp relief, and snapped me out of it too.
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