#350 - Getting there

Three more entries till I catch up.

Yesterday I had started about the obsession of the West with food - and how it got transferred to the East.I know this because I watched it happen. Thirty years ago salad = coleslaw and Chinese food = to be honest Chinese food is the same, just awful and gloopy and overly sweet. But if you went to a pub you would just bascialy get something with fries.  Burger, fish, chicken chop - you get it. The most basic variation was out of the question. You couldn't get ginger in the supermarket, you had to go to a specialist shop. And the ginger would be terrible. Anything else more exotic than pepper was non-existent unless they used it in a cake. It is true, the French had better food, and the Italians and the Spanish. I'm talking about the English and the Irish. They had terrible terrible food. I once bought a book about Irish cooking, the small A6 ones which they in tourist shops to see what Irish people had - I may still have it somewhere. There was Guinness and oysters and something about ham and colcannon which is essentially mash potatoes with spring onions. No there was no great food culture. Salad was served with tinned pineapple and a blob of mayo and egg. Nothing was fresh. The only lettuce was iceberg. The only meat was bacon. So when the people of these islands act like foodies, it does drive me a bit mad. 

Guys, you have no food culture. Just chill.

HOWEVER, tell you what, who had a food culture? The whole of Asia, that's who. We have more food culture in the fingernail on our little finger than the entire county times five. We live and breathe food culture. Our hawkers just got recognised for being a UN status treasure. Honestly, we have food culture. We fall out of bed into food culture. How can you tell that a food is a national treausre.

1. It is easy to make and quick to make

2. It is cheap to make

3. You can eat it at any time of the day

4. It tastes awesome

5. It is relatively healthy

Even the simplest breakfast we have of half boiled eggs with black sauce, bread on toast and kaya with black coffee... even THAT is the best thing since anything. It is better than any cereal, granola or muesli you can put in front of me - and why??? Because it has been refined through the millennia by Asian people. We had a food culture which we didn't make a song and dance about and we didn't have to make stupid TV shows about.

So when these cooking programmes started popping out of the TV like a rash throughout the 90s, it did puzzle me that there were no cooking programmes which were being done in Asia. It seemed obvious there should have been some... but no, Asian people stuck to little old ladies - or men - cooking, making simple food. And then the mid 2000s struck and that was the beginning of the end. 

The same way in which youth became oddly fetishised, food also became fetishised in Asia. Asian people began to have the same travel cooking shows which were utterly moronic. I always think that it's a waste of time watching shows about people traveling and eating. For a start you are not the person traveling and you clearly have no interest in traveling, and secondly why watch them cook when you will not have the ingredients nor the know how in cooking the thing. It's bizarre. But this was something which really caught on. TV chefs traveled and cooked. Celebrities traveled and cooked. Encouraging people to travel and cook. It was nauseating. Boring. Awful. 

That's the other thing, the whole over traveling thing. This traveling genre, together with cheap flights has made the world accessible to people who aren't really interested in traveling. They are interested in the kudos that traveling brings, but not really interested in the journey. They want to boast about the places they have been to at cocktail parties and show off to their friends, they way the show off their children's universities or school results, but really, they don't really gain very much from travel, except becoming even more intolerably obnoxious. 

Yes, so food culture became unbearably obnoxious. People who were eating the most stodgy, tasteless food now were going to mind numbing pernicketty detail and fussiness about the food they ate. It was doing my head it. Complaining in the way people who had nothing growing up who suddenly accidentally had access to something nice then pretend they have had the something nice all their lives. 

The same thing has happened to fitness. The overdoing of it, the overdrive. The same thing is now happening to nature. People trying to out Herod Herod online. It drives me nuts. Just sit down and shut up ok. We all know what you are doing. Calm down. Good for you. Now go get another life.

Do things, many things, not just one thing and then overdo it. Sooo exhausting. 

OK I think I really got that off my chest now.