How to Eat (74 page)

There’s a lot on the market now that comes in pathetically small portions; here, at least, you can work it to your advantage. But beware of distracting yourself or getting yourself in the wrong frame of mind; so much of all this is in the head, that if you get yourself out of the mood, you can just end up making it harder for, if not actually sabotaging, yourself. This, again, is where the temple food idea comes in. You want to make a fetish, almost, out of eating the food that’s going to make all this easier. So as far as dessert is concerned, this really means fruit. The same principles apply: make it look beautiful and take longer eating it.

And for this you naturally don’t need recipes; the list of ideas that follows is presented just to jolt your memory and help you draw up your shopping lists.

• Peel and de-pith an orange, slice it finely, and arrange serenely on a plate. Pour over a drop or two of orange-flower water and sprinkle over a pinch of ground cinnamon.

• Cut a papaya in half, get rid of the seeds, and fill the cavities (avocado-style) with raspberries or chopped strawberries.

• Or peel the papaya before scooping out the seeds, then put it cut side down on a plate, slice across thinly, and fan out, this time nouvelle-cuisine style, and squeeze the juice of a lime over the fleshy pink slices.

• With a sharp knife, make an incision, skin-deep, all around (lengthwise rather than through its equator) a mango—the best are the little Asian ones, sometimes available—and then peel off one side’s skin. Hold the mango over a plate and, with the knife, do some cross-hatching, right through to the stone, to form little squares; then take the knife and slice it downwards, scraping the stone and therefore cutting off all the little squares, which will then drop into the plate. Do the same to the other half. Or just eat the mango, peeled but otherwise left as is, in the bath.

• Make yourself a kind of Japanese food plate with as much dexterity as you can muster; arrange melon, pineapple, kiwi, orange, artfully chiselled—and then, with quiet ceremony, eat them.

• Hull and halve good strawberries; sprinkle over some balsamic vinegar.

• Cut crosses in figs—as if quartering them without cutting right through them—so that they open like bird-throated flowers. Eat as is if they’re perfect; otherwise, dust with vanilla sugar, a pinch of confectioners’ sugar mixed with ground cinnamon, or honey diluted with rosewater, and blitz them under a searing broiler.

• Make a tropical fruit salad by chopping some or all of papaya, melon, mango, or pineapple, and pour over the seed-crunchy pulp of one or two passion fruits mixed with the juice of half an orange.

• The perfect peach should be eaten alone and unadulterated. But less good, and more prevalent, specimens need both bolstering and camouflage. Tip some blueberries into a bowl and, holding a peach over it, slice the peach into segments, then stir in. (This, too, symbiotically, is a way of salvaging inferior berries.)

• Never forget watermelon in summer; keep it well wrapped in the fridge and carve off great wedges of it to eat as you want. And make a salad by cutting chunky squares of watermelon, adding pomegranate seeds (see
page 241
for advice as to the best way to release them from their pithy nest) and only a small amount of freshly chopped mint.

• The health-farm special: if you can manage to keep pumpkin seeds in the cupboard without raiding it and eating the rest of the opened packet in one go, then keep pumpkin and flax (the latter less bingeworthy) seeds in store to sprinkle, in teaspoonfuls, over some fat-free yogurt. Add a teaspoon of oatmeal and another of runny honey. Dried banana chips are wonderful, but safest to avoid, though a small fresh, sliced banana is worth considering. And try to get Greek mountain honey, as you get maximum sweetness and flavor for your teaspoonful. Just banana, yogurt as above, and a sprinkling of brown sugar eaten after a couple of minutes’ steeping (enough time for the sugar to go caramelly but not enough time for the banana to go black) is wonderful and very—all things being relative—filling.

• Fill a bowl with cold water and ice cubes; to this add, simply, a small bunch of grapes.

• Ditto, but with a couple of handfuls of cherries.

• Not quite temple food, but relatively restrained all the same: fold some raspberries or blackberries into a small bowl of fat-free yogurt, add a teaspoon of confectioners’ sugar, and crumble in a meringue.

Feeding Babies and Small Children

Good eating starts in the cradle.
Nutritionists and obstetricians would probably insist that it begins much earlier, but I am talking not so much of the food necessary for good health but the food necessary for a good life. Certainly, they sometimes overlap, and for a child they are inextricably linked. The moment a baby is put to the breast, he or she learns that eating is one of the foremost pleasures of life; seeking that pleasure is also how he or she stays alive and keeps growing.

Latter-day puritans might think about copying the infant model. In the 1980s there was a comparative study of the eating habits of some workers in the southwest of France and a group of, to use a serviceable but tellingly passé term, health nuts in California. The French ate enormous amounts of red meat and butter and even drank brandy with their breakfasts. But they enjoyed it. The San Franciscans ate few saturated fats, no meat, and a lot of alfalfa sprouts, and worried constantly about whether they were eating correctly, whether they had absorbed the right balance of vitamins and nutrients. They were careful to take supplements where they thought necessary. The incidence of heart disease among the Californians was much higher than among the southwestern French. It was concluded (I can only believe the scientists in question were French) that a major contributing factor was the anxiety that accompanied the Americans’ eating. Since that study, some scientists have made other claims about the health-giving properties of red wine. The discrepancy between the sort of diet some Americans feel is a sinful and self-destructive preparation for cardiac arrest and the low incidence of heart disease in France has since become known as the French Paradox.

I believe that food should never be thought of as mere fuel. Nor should it be venerated on the one hand, feared on the other. Turning such a life-giving pleasure into a joyless, guilt-ridden, and anxiety-provoking but necessary exercise is verging on the criminal. But more—and especially where children are concerned—it is almost bound to be counterproductive.

You can never, alas, ensure good health. But you can learn to enjoy good eating. I’m not sure you can teach it, but you can encourage. If you want children to develop their own taste—and for food other than burgers and pizza—they need to be given good food. I distrust, however, those who have stringent rules about which food is good and which not. The only way to judge whether food is good or not is by tasting it, by eating it. If a child likes pizza and burgers, then it is pointless telling him or her that pizza and burgers are not good to eat. (Anyway, they are.)

There is a lot of fear accompanying judgments about packaged and junk foods. And underneath it all, the fear seems not to be so much about what they will do to the child but about what they will say about the parent. Too often what passes for love of food is, at best, fashion-consciousness, at worst, snobbery. Just as snobbery is in some sense about social insecurity, so food snobbery is really an indication of how frightened and insecure people are about food. They feel that they need to be told what they should like because they have never learned to trust their own palates. This is why it is crucial to eat well, eat passionately, as a child. Love of food should be something we take in with our mother’s milk, not a complicated body of knowledge amassed from food magazines in our twenties and thirties. What’s good to eat isn’t an orthodoxy. But if we don’t eat well young, we don’t have much to build on. Foundations are everything.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I met the French obstetrician Michel Odent at a party. Of course, during a first pregnancy you are obsessed with it all, and we spoke about babies for as long as I could keep him talking. He told me that one of the reasons breast milk was better than formula was that its taste changed all the time. Whatever a woman’s been eating informs the flavor of her milk, and so a breast-fed child has a varied diet from the very beginning. That’s to say, the baby learns that unpredictability is in the very nature of food, of life—that change and difference, within a secure context, are not frightening but desirable and to be savored. I should admit here that I am a bottle-fed baby who grew up to eat anything. But I certainly ate very little, and that unwillingly, as a child.

M. Odent also told me his research had shown that the children of women who had been instructed to eat fish during pregnancy grew up to adore seafood. I happened to mention this to a friend of mine, who said that when she’d been pregnant she’d had a craving throughout for olives. Her son, from about eighteen months, had shown a marked and otherwise surprising preference for them; they aren’t, after all, exactly normal baby fare. Anecdotal evidence is frowned upon by scientists, but I made a point of eating huge amounts of broccoli while pregnant in the hope of having that rare thing, a child who loved vegetables. I don’t mind if it’s a coincidence or a result of my intake, but my daughter does love broccoli. While pregnant, I also had to have, every day, a bagel with a slice of smoked salmon on it. Maybe that explains my daughter’s extravagant, early, and continuing passion for smoked salmon.

What is the result of genetic predisposition, what of upbringing, I don’t know, but they’re linked. The way we nurture is part of our nature; the environment we create comes out of what and who we are. It is impossible to convey the pleasures of eating, the real voluptuous joy to be gotten from food, if we don’t feel that joy ourselves. Eating disorders are passed on from mother to daughter (this is not sexist, just—sadly—true) but, even before we get on to such complexities and difficulties, it becomes obvious that our attitude to food colors our children’s attitude to food.

From the beginning, you should expect your child to like the taste of the food you’re offering rather than nervously expecting it to cause alarm. Nervousness conveys itself to the child. I don’t mean that you should force anything. Of course, all people—children and adults—have their own taste, their own likes and dislikes, and there is no point battling against that. Mostly, though, a child will change, and food given on one day and rejected will be devoured on another day. But that’s if you don’t push it the first time.

I do think (and given that this is a chapter devoted to the eating practices of the young, I feel justified in rattling this particular cage), that there is a tendency to wean too young in the West. All babies are different and there may well be some who are ready to go on to solid foods at eleven weeks. There is a hopeful theory that babies will sleep longer once they have solid food and not just milk in their tummies. But giving babies solid food before their digestions can take it is more likely to make them miserable. By the time my daughter was three months old, I was being made to feel that I was in some way negligent for failing to offer her solid food (although she was gaining weight well and showed no signs of dissatisfaction with her diet). I then decided to try some baby rice and a little puréed something. She wasn’t interested, so I waited until she seemed ready for it. This happened to be at about four-and-three-quarter months. It worked—I offered, she ate. She remains what people call a good eater.

Both my children are growing up in a household where food plays a central part. They see me cooking, see me eating. Food is thus part of the whole fabric of their lives, not just the constituent parts of mealtimes. I accept that when they go to school we will have to enter a less permissive, more picky stage of eating. But I believe that if you give babies and small children the right foundation, if they see you eat with pleasure and eat pleasurably with you, then, at the end of all the faddishness, they will return to familial normality, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. There shouldn’t be too much veneration, too much pressure. Let it all just happen. Don’t look for trouble.

This brings me to dairy and gluten and the whole, very contemporary, issue of food intolerances. I don’t believe in them. Of course allergies exist but, on the whole, allergies manifest themselves radically: you know if you’re allergic to some food or other because you are ill, suddenly and as a direct result of having eaten something. The symptoms are incontestably presented. The general malaise that food intolerances are supposed to bring about is much more suspicious. I can’t help thinking that adults who are keen to ascribe any number of symptoms—tiredness, lack of energy and enthusiasm—to food intolerance might be better advised to look to their own increasing age for a cause for this insidious drying-up of zip, pep, and go.

Babies, I admit, don’t have the same sort of mechanisms in place (although children certainly can learn very young to use food, or rather the withholding of eating it, as part of the parent-child power struggle—but this is not really a food issue, although you can turn it into one). But we, on behalf of our babies, fuss too much about the wrong things. Our fanatical attention to our children’s intake, our obsessive worrying about what terrible things some food can do to them, and our almost primitive belief in the magical properties of other near-voodoo foods, might be doing our children more harm than any of the foodstuffs in question. To live in fear of some food-borne catastrophe is going to be exhausting as well as unhelpful, both day to day and at a more profound psychological level. I should own up here, I suppose, that I did wait until I happened to be in the doctor’s office with my children before giving them a peanut-butter sandwich for the first time. Although statistically I knew that chances of either of them having some fatal nut allergy were remote, I allowed myself to give in to overprotective maternal neurosis. I am not immune on this score. I worry intermittently about pesticides and shrink from providing adulterated food of indeterminate or covert origin. But I try to resist the notion that children need to be protected from the evils of wheat, milk, sugar, and fat.