The perils of eating

 
 
Hi, I’m Kate and I write How Not To Draw. I like to draw (despite the title) and I’m apparently a bit odd, so I’m going to write for you about the perils of eating.
I’ll admit, if there’s one thing I’m very, very OCD about, it’s food. There is SO MUCH that can go wrong with food. I love the stuff, I do, I can eat and eat until the cows come home, and then I’ll roast them and eat them with gravy too. But let me tell you 10 things that can – AND DO –go wrong with food.
 

1. Burnt food.

Food is a bitch. It will spend what seems like forever being in that slightly raw, if-you-eat-me-you-might-die stage, and the minute you turn up the heat, or turn your back for a second, it will skip right through the tasty stage of being cooked and go straight to the tastes-like-soot, setting off the smoke detector stage. Bacon and bread are the worst culprits, and yet still the tastiest. DAMN YOU.

 

2. Edge-food.

Ok, I’ve since realised that this is NOT JUST SPECIFIC TO ME, so bear with me while I explain. Edge-food, a phenomenon discovered by me, is the BANE OF ALL SOCIETY. Edge-food is wrong, and the cheapest food manufacturers use this to their advantage, because edge-food is cheap. Edge-food is all the stuff you don’t want: that bit of melon next to the skin that is harder than a boot; the white bits on an orange that feel a bit like you’re eating string; and of course, CRUST. Yes, edge-food is always there, waiting of the periphery of something tasty, telling you to come closer, closer, until it’s sucked you into its trap where everything tastes of feet and has the texture of a cowpat. I hate you, edge-food.

 

3. Ugly food.

It just sucks that ugly food is almost ALWAYS tasty food. When you go on a date, there is the perpetual struggle between enjoying your meal and not coming across as a messy, sauce-faced thicko. You look down at the menu: spaghetti bolognaise – gives you the options of twirling for hours because you swear some Italian git has greased your fork and it won’t stay on; sucking up strands and spraying pasta juice all over your face and looking like a toddler; or cutting it up, and again looking like a toddler. Or maybe the chicken kiev – but then you imagine cutting into it and garlic butter spurting into your eye and dribbling down your chin. Not sexy. So you go for the seafood, everyone loves seafood… Until you fire a particularly stubborn mussel down your date’s nice white shirt. FOOD DOES NOT WANT YOU TO FIND LOVE.

 

4. Finger food.

Whoever designed finger food was evil. Pure evil. It is almost always covered in some kind of goo – think ribs, chocolate éclairs, chicken satay sticks… you always come away from a canapé party feeling like you’ve been fingerpainting with condiments. Depending on the party, you may have been, but food is supposed to make you happy, not make you feel like a messy child in need of a good bath. And the worst of all is when the host fails to provide napkins, leaving you to lick your fingers clean, as if that renders you unsticky for the rest of the night, shaking hands with other sticky people. Bleh.

 

5. Holiday food.

You surely must have experienced the phenomenon of holiday food. Your mum/dad/evil stepmother starts to stockpile food somewhere, and you start to notice it has different properties to normal food: it’s all oddly festive, or themed, or oddly tiny in proportion to normal things (tiny bottles of alcohol, massive boxes of biscuits) and you realise that the holiday food is here to stay. However, holiday food is NEVER TO BE EATEN. (until the holiday in question, that is). This pile of festive food will sit, like a harvest tribute, for as long as it takes for you to crave Christmas pudding so bad you think you need to go to rehab. And then it will come out, and be a massive anti-climax. Bah.

 

6. Effort food.

Many of the good foods in this world – roast dinners, cupcakes, soup – are the most time-consuming. Yes, you can buy these things in shops and restaurants, but it’s never the same, is it? The thing is, if you crave anything that takes more than half an hour to make, you just have to ignore it. Of course, the cravings only get worse, until you end up either just getting off your ass and doing it, or trying to stifle the craving with more food. Either way you get fat. No fair.

 

7. School/University/Work food.

Always, always, always the worst food you will ever eat. Regardless of whether you pay enough for your education to raise a million African children or not, you will always get the same processed, breaded and pathetic-looking meat, accompanied with beans and some kind of potatoey accompaniment. In the last term at university, I have had enough varieties of shaped potato to make a whole episode of Sesame Street.
This paragraph was brought to you by the spherical spud.

 

8. TV food.

Before the advent of TV chefs and that M&S advert, it wasn’t so bad; everything looked at least a little bit real. Now we’re too busy drooling over Nigella’s sexy soufflés and Jamie’s herd of babies to notice that pretty much 60% of their meals are impossible, and most of the time you only realise this half-way through a recipe which suddenly calls for either an ingredient like Himalayan yak mucus or a small army of bowls which you just don’t have. Heston Blumenthal is the worst culprit, narrating his cooking as if you’re supposed to follow along, then casually dropping in sentences like ‘now, pop it in your centrifuge…’ Pure evil. Pure, tasty evil.

 

9. Sneaky food.

Like a ninja in an invisibility cloak, you don’t even realise this food is happening to you until you look to your side and see 15 empty crisp packets and the remains of a hog roast. This is the equivalent of amnesia in the culinary world; you wake up two hours later to find that you’ve gained 8 pounds and all your friends have left you for someone less inclined to eat everything in the cupboard.

 

10. Health food

Diet food will deceive you with its promise of 50% less calories (for a start, it should be ‘fewer’… Grumble grumble Grammar Nazi grumble) when really, it means 50% less food and 100% less taste! YUM! Another problem with health food is that it’s pretty much rabbit food and bird seed, just cleverly repackaged to appeal to humans with the same amount of brain. Plus it tastes like floor.