(no subject)
I think tonight I'm going to have a little ramble about food. Back in December, I sort of exploded on the subject, let out all my anger and my fears and my frustration and discovered that I'm far from the only person like that. This came as a bit of a surprise, to say the least, and also made me feel like I'd said something a bit stupid.
I've never met anyone in my life who eats like me. I guess there are plenty on the internet but you don't tend to meet them very often in real life. Prior to December, the only other one I knew in existence was a boy about my age who lived in Cornwall when he was four and who I had vague plans to marry at one point despite the fact that the sum total of my knowledge about him is in this sentence.
Anyway, that wasn't going to be what I rambled about. It's about dieting, actually.
There is a lady at work who is rather on the large side and has been on various diets and part of various slimming clubs for most of her life now. So far so good. Except she talks a lot about how she's trying to lose weight. Also fine. Every time I look up from my desk, she's eating something. This is why I get irate. That and the fact that our office is in fact a suspended mezzanine floor and she shakes my entire desk every time she stomps past me and as I sit between her and the printer/toilet/door, I get rattled a lot. And it's bad. You can actually see my monitor shaking, it goes out of focus and wobbles until she's gone. I'm sorry. I'm being a bitch. Other people also shake my computer, slim people, small people, large people. Everyone does it. But she's the one who annoys me because she's always going on about losing weight and she's also always fucking eating!
It's simple. If you want to lose weight, you need to eat less and exercise more. I can grasp this principle. I have yet to apply it, which is why I have a football up my jumper. It's winter. I'm allowed to have a tubby middle in the winter. And I'm lazy. But I comprehend what to do if I do decide I can be bothered to de-tub. But this woman apparently hasn't grasped this principle. This woman still seems to believe such things as this:
Overheard in the office today. "If I blend a banana, it's a Sin. But if I eat a banana, it's not."
I am a mouse. I am shy and quiet and I don't interrupt conversations. But this pinged my bullshit button so hard that even I went over to demand to know what she was talking about. She genuinely seems to think there's a connection between weight loss and whether she eats a banana in big bites or lots of nibbles, because when she's nibbling it, she's sort of blending it in her mouth. A little more enquiry got us to the point where she said it's not ok to make smoothies. Ah, I thought. "Do you add milk or stuff to it?" No, just fruit, she says. I can only think that her smoothies are massive things containing all the fruit in the entire supermarket. But come on! The idea that you're more likely to lose weight if you eat a banana in big bites?! And I said most of this and she said, proper grateful and not sarcastic, that I should come and tell her slimming club leader this. I told her that I'd be out of there; I wouldn't be sticking around listening to the leader talking rubbish like that. I was stared at. I don't usually show my assertive side at work. I think it came as a surprise. "Would you?" "Yes," I said. "I would."
She eats low-fat things, which is a good start. But she piles the low-fat things together. It's never "I ate [this]." It's always "I ate [this] with low-fat [that] on top and then I had low-fat [something-else], so that's good for you." I swear, she eats more in snacks during the day at work (ie 9am -3pm - she has to be home in the afternoon to look after her son. He's thirteen.) than I eat in meals through an entire dawn-to-dusk day. Endless bars of that squidgy baked stuff that I can't quite call a cereal bar but is somehow in that category. What is the name for that stuff? Biscuits from the barrel and from the supply in her drawer. Mid-morning apples and oranges. She has about eight cups of tea with milk and has recently started drinking hot chocolate. Low-fat hot chocolate, obviously. I can't help noticing that the people in the office who whine the most about not being able to lose weight are also the people who drink the most tea. Is it a coincidence?
It's not the fat people who bother me. It's the people who go on and on about wanting to lose weight and then rather than eating less, become dependent on stupid things like the banana bullshit or eating carbs and protein from different plates because... well, just for God's sake! I have to listen to you whine because your brain and arse were swapped at birth? (paraphrasing from the Lies of Locke Lamora). People become convinced of such stupid things when they're trying to lose weight. Eat less! Exercise more! It's not rocket science! Stop going on about the latest ludicrous diet suggestion! Eat the damn banana whichever way tastes best! It's stil just a fucking banana!!
(A couple of days ago, I also couldn't mind my own business. She was talking about something on ITV on Thursday. She can't remember what it's called but it's got a famous Scottish actor in it. I immediately clicked what she was talking about, but I waited, hoping I was wrong. "He's a surgeon. I can't remember his name but he's a really famous Scottish actor." I was right. I couldn't resist. "You're thinking of James Nesbitt," I said. "And he's not Scottish. He's Irish." This woman, for the record, has an Irish father. I can't remember if I said the other day that I feel comparatively hugely well-informed compared to the Guides? Well, I feel pretty well informed compared to this woman. She spouts a multitude of gibberish and doesn't know most of the basic sort of useless information I thought everyone in the world knows.)
Anyway, I'm being a bitch. At least I'm honest about it. I was talking about food.
See, I have an academic interest in food. I like cookbooks. I like cooking. I like watching other people cook. I was discussing this with Annie last weekend. She feels I'm missing out on a lot by not eating but she's slightly mollified by the fact that I take an interest in food. She's glad I like cookbooks and cooking although she doesn't understand how I don't feel the eating afterwards is the best part of cooking. When you're old, you should befriend me, move me into your house and provide me with rubber gloves. I'd cook a lot more if there was anyone to eat it. Of course, I'm a beginner and you should have patience because I'm liable to have a few failures. I like cookbooks. I look at these recipes and sigh because no one will eat it. There is also an element of linguistics in there. A part of what makes curry so interesting is learning to make sense of the words. The curry cookbook we had at uni had an entire chapter devoted to understanding what the names mean and why. Likewise with my pasta cookbook. When people talk about food, I like to at least know what things are. To learn what "saag" and "dopiaza" and "masala" and "arrabiata" actually mean and what they used to mean and what they're used for.
My dad eats everything. Except tomatoes. Curry and pasta cookbooks are packed with tomatoes. My sister eats lots of things but is on a diet and not quite adventurous enough anyway. My mum... well. I'd always believed she was a normal eater. She's not. She eats meat and veg and potatoes. No seafood. No fish (FoodIgnorant here doesn't know if one is considered a subcategory of the other. Help?). No spices. No rice. No pasta. Just chops. Mince. Boiled potatoes. Mash. Bacon. Sunday roast. In short, nothing that's interesting to cook. My grandparents haven't yet twigged that food has moved on since the 40s and that vegetables don't have to be boiled down to a state that's only slightly above gloop.
My friends are good friends but I'm not sure any of them are willing to let me take over their kitchen for a few hours, cause destruction and devastation and slowly learn to cook things. What I've learnt from years of Guide camp and caving weekends is that I can do an excellent cooked breakfast. I can fry sausages and bacon and eggs and mushrooms, I can scramble eggs, I can heat beans (if someone else opens the tin. I have yet to master the humble tin opener. In my defence, I eat nothing that comes out of a tin. I can open and slice bread and I can open jars. Tin-opening is not relevant to my diet), I can cook hash browns and I can make eggy bread (which is eggy bread. Not fucking French toast). I can do pasta bolognese. I can chop onions and peppers and peel and slice carrots, etc. I can barbecue burgers. I am frequently left in charge of the cooking on Guide camp while the QM and the kitchen assistant patrol get on with the business of eating.
I want to make a curry. I want to do smoked roasted vegetables. I want to make stuffed pasta shells and handmade ravioli and pastini in broth. Maybe even a homemade pasta alla carbonara. My own pasties. (Pasties smell amazing. The only time I feel like I'm missing out is when I walk past Greggs. Oh, the smell of pasties and pizza... I've somehow never taken to the smell of coffee.)
I know. It doesn't make sense to want to cook without wanting to eat.
Oh, fine. I've already rambled for thirty-five minutes. I may as well add the last bit.
I don't like meat. This isn't from the standpoint of "oh, I think it's wrong to eat living creatures" or anything, although I kind of can't comprehend looking at a cow or a lamb or even a pig and then eating it. Actually, when it comes to meat, FoodIgnorant here says: why don't we eat horses? Or rather, why do the British tend to regard continental Europeans as barbarians for eating it? What's the difference between eating a cow and eating a horse? I can see why it might be seen as bad and wrong to eat dogs, for example. Dogs are pets. Dogs are part of the family. Eating a dog is next thing to cannibalism. But horses? You eat everything else that comes out of a farmyard. Except donkeys. Why don't you eat donkeys? I am asking this from pure ignorance. I don't understand. I wondered if it might be a Biblical thing. Apparently one of the early books says that animals must be Clean, ie have cloven hooves and chew the cud. But we eat pigs and pigs are definitely Unclean, so that's not it. Also brings up the question of camels. They have cloven hooves and I imagine they'd chew the cud. Would you eat a camel? How does everyone know the unwritten rules of what animals you should and shouldn't eat?
Personally, I don't like dead bodies and a cooked chicken on a plate in the fridge is a corpse. I can't touch a corpse. I loathe chicken carcasses. They sit in the fridge for weeks and then they get thrown away. Why not just save the sitting time and throw it away immediately? With uncooked meat, if someone else cuts it up and puts it in the pan I'll happily cook it. I actively enjoy cooking bacon and sausages but I hate touching them. I suppose if I had rubber gloves on, I could maybe handle small bits of meat, bits of chicken for a curry, maybe. I don't like the idea of beef. My mind tells me it's bloody and squidgy. "Bloody" is nasty but somehow, "squidgy" is worse. Don't like pork but am largely unbothered by ham or bacon. I'm not entirely sure what gammon is but for years, my childish mind was convinved it was a sea bird. Yes, I confused gammon with gannet. I understand it's some kind of ham. My mind has no real picture of lamb or mutton.
But fish. *shudders*. It's no secret that I loathe tuna and that I'm full-on phobic about it. I genuinely could not poke a bowl of tuna with a ten-foot stick. I hate it with a passion beyond any reason. And I hate fishy stuff in general. To the point where I tend to be disappointed by people who do like it. Alex and Joey don't eat fish because even in fiction, I cannot cook something fishy and I can't let them eat it (Actually, Alex is edging alarmingly close to becoming vegetarian which I really don't want to happen!). My soul droops a little every time Ed Byrne mentions eating it. Which he actually does quite a few times. Admittedly, I am hyper-sensitive to the subjects of Ed Byrne and fish. I notice every time the two come together. And you know how much I must hate fish if I have a problem with Ed Byrne, beloved of mine, liking it because in general, he can do no wrong in my eyes. My hatred of fish overrules my love of that boy. Or to put it another way "If you like fish - I judge you." Phobias are irrational. Please don't take it personally. And don't tell me how much you love fish. I will be disappointed. (This may or may not be linked to several years of being force-fed fish fingers and potato waffles. Probably not, since I don't feel the same murderous hatred for waffles. I don't know where the fish-hatred comes from, then.)
I am horrified to learn that both red and green curry paste contain fish paste or shrimp paste (I forget which exactly). The number of curries that have shrimp paste in! A full half of my curry cookbook is fish and seafood recipes. In general, I don't even read them. I enjoy reading the chicken and vegetable ones. The one that's particularly caught my attention at the moment is Peas and Cheese in Mild Curry. It's got a photo next to it and it looks lovely. But Dad and Sister don't want to eat spicy peas and fried cheese. Incidentally, I can't abide the smell of sweetcorn. I don't object to sweetcorn itself. It's pretty and I could probably touch it. But the smell!
I should write a logical and reasonable conclusion, not just finish on "sweetcorn smells!". But I'm tired. Overdoing the so-called extreme sports and then going to camp and generally pushing yourself to the point of exhaustion does have one bonus: you sleep extremely well for a few days afterwards. This week I'm out like a light pretty much the second my head hits the pillow. I have a row of smiley faces in the sleep column of my diary. Goodnight. Forgive the rambling, the bitchiness and the ignorance.
The questions, extracted for ease of finding them amid the rambling:
Is there a name for that kind of soft baked thing that's included in the cereal bar section? Like Nutri-Grain bars?
Are you less likely to lose weight if you drink lots of tea?
Fish and seafood. Is one considered a subcategory of the other? Is seafood a kind of fish? Is fish a kind of seafood?
Why don't people eat horses? Why don't people eat donkeys? Would you eat camel?
What exactly is gammon?