Thought for Food
'An apple a day keeps the doctor away'. 'You are what you eat'. 'An army marches on its stomach'. Food-related proverbs in current use are few. It is easy to forget that we are amongst the first set of historically anomalous generations that do not have to worry about food on a day-to-day basis. We are now a society where more people are killed by over- than under-eating. The continuing process of industrialisation has divorced all but a tiny minority of us from food production, and fast-spreading commercialisation has changed our relationship to the finished products in a seismic way.
In the case of university students, many of us are one step even further away from a proper concern about food. A parent or carer must at least 'worry about food', in the sense that sufficient quantities of it must be procured and supplied in a pleasing format to other people; this takes up a sizeable amount of time. In Oxford, with a thousand and one things to do, the last thing on most students' minds is "do I have enough Thousand Island dressing?"
Food in Oxford, for many, becomes entirely a matter of quantity, time and money; students feel under time pressure, yet are made very hungry by the fast pace of term-time life. The obvious, and in many ways efficacious, solutions to this problem are various: college meals, city cafés and restaurants, kebab vans, microwaveable ready-meals and Sainsbury's on Magdalen Street. Depending on the financial status of the student in question, a varying patchwork quilt of the above is usually ample to insulate oneself from the dangers of paranoid grandparents with accusations built around the words 'thin' and 'pasty'. In a city filled with 'inquiring minds', no one takes the time to ask about what they are eating, where it comes from and how it affects them.
Oxford is seemingly the only university in the country where most first-year students do not have access to a kitchen as a matter of course. For many, the food road forks very early on: on the one hand, there are college meals - usually provided at fixed times, and of unreliable quality - on the other, a series of packaged, individual food experiences that rarely satiate or nourish. Grabbed in 15-minute bursts between tute and essay, library and night out, food is most frequently divorced from either its preparation or its social aspect - or both.
What is clear from observing students cook and shop is that we do not understand food or seasonality, and that if we then decide valiantly to take our nourishment into our own hands, we are often trapping ourselves into a cycle of pasta/sauce-pasta/sauce-pasta/sauce, with the same ingredients all year round. No wonder many quickly tire of cooking for themselves - their recipe repertoires are repetitive ad nauseam. I do not wish to discourage people from preparing their own food, but this is all most of us are doing in our kitchens: 'preparing'. Very few of us 'cook', with all that this means.
Let me not get too apocalyptic about this; the reader will note that Oxford students are renowned neither for undernourishment nor for obesity. Most are relatively healthy, and find themselves, somehow, in most of the desirable nutritional groups. College meals and kebab vans mean that no-one will be starved out, whilst allowing aristocratic youngsters to indulge a suppressed taste for baked beans; a bag of Sainsbury's Granny Smiths may to me seem identical and flavourless, but they are providing thousands of us with a scurvy-beating dose of vitamin C on a daily basis.
Society at large has lost its relationship with food, and so have Oxford students. Most will bore themselves silly with Sainsbury's broccoli flown in from New Zealand all year round - including October, when the beautiful British calabrese is in full season. People think that they want certainty and ease with their food, and only in the past 30 years has the technology been available to secure this.
Until the late 1960s, for example, fresh tomatoes simply could not be purchased from October until June: they were a summer crop. Come Halloween, consumers thought nothing of saying goodbye to them until the following year, switching to tinned stores and winter vegetables. Who wanted a cool, refreshing summer salad when the temperature outside was below zero? A hot, warming tomato soup made from preserved stock was both seasonal and apt. During the cold Oxford January, I will be making the most of winter's perfectly suited gifts to make warming dishes such as stewed hare, with mashed swede and braised cabbage, or leek bakes smothered in cheese and cream. Watery tomatoes flown in from the industrialised farms of southern Spain and Israel will not help me combat the cold; 5000 miles' worth of aviation fuel for a product that just doesn't cut the mustard is the price of our want for constancy over seasonality.
In an academic context, where every college has its horrifically earnest environmental policies, few stop to apply reasoned thought to the effect their own feeding may be having on the world around them: food miles, species variety and animal welfare take second place to well-meaning RAG fund-raisers; yet a student eating an average college meal or home-prepared pasta dish may well be contributing to putting a farmer out of business.
And sadly, all but a select few will be oblivious to some of the true delights Oxford has to offer, including farmers' markets at Gloucester Green, not to mention the convenient and perennial Covered Market. Not only are their meats, cheeses, fruit and vegetables mainly organic and very seasonal, but the stallholders will offer advice on storage and preparation that will help the customer get more out of the product. During Michaelmas, I watched students buy pack after pack of insipidly identical, and not inexpensive, French Braeburns from surly blue-clad staff after waiting in queues for half an hour on Magdalen Street, whilst the English apple season was in full swing. The Covered Market, on the other hand, was quick, friendly, and cheap; their apples were organic, local and distinctive. Well, at least 'an apple a day keeps the doctor away', even if it's an irradiated, identikit Sainsbury's Braeburn flown 13,500 miles for your (lack of true) delectation.
13th Jan 2005