The celery-hating Fake Foodie who loves eating
For the best part of a decade I have worked a hand-reared, artisan sausage roll’s throw from Borough Market. I have also worked really closely with people whom I consider to be ‘proper foodies’. And I fooled them for a while.
I joined in the conversations about delicious meals cooked from scratch on weekday evenings, marvelling at the complicated lengths my clever friends were going to, creating Masterchef-worthy menus on random Tuesdays. I gathered recipes from them, hoping that some of their culinary genius might rub off on me, and most of these dishes were tried once, oohed and ahhed over and never tried again because life got in the way.
I can’t remember how I was rumbled but rumbled I was. Perhaps it was me turning my nose up at anything slightly off-piste, by which I mean lamb or celery. Maybe me glazing over at the mention of a jus or the idea of starting something ‘the day before’ actually eating it. Whatever it was, I earned the nickname ‘Fake Foodie’ and, as work nicknames go, it could have been (and has been) a lot worse.
I might give celery, or as I more aptly describe it ‘water with hair in it’, a wide berth, not even slightly convinced (and I did try adding it to my bolognese recipe) that the umami outweighed the “oooh, what’s with the celery in this?” but a lunchtime wander around Borough Market with my favourite colleagues is still a lot of fun. I can’t look at the crustaceans in their tanks without wanting to cry and, whilst a Ginger Pig burger is - without question - the best burger to throw on a BBQ, some of the things I’ve seen in there are never ever going to pass my lips.
I place the blame for my fussiness firmly with the organisers of a summer ‘Activity Week’ I went to in the early ‘80s, at the age of 10 or 11. One of the things they organised was a ‘behind the scenes’ tour of the local butchers in Broadway. I mean, why? What possible good could have come from this ‘activity’? I have ‘memories’ of squealing animals, shiny stainless steel tables and sharp knives but I’m guessing these aren’t real memories, more the active imagination of a pre-teen having the scales torn from before their eyes about the origin story of their favourite food. What I do know was real is that I didn’t eat meat again until my late teens when I went to America to study and the combination of a doctor telling me I was anaemic, and more burgers and steaks on offer than I had ever seen before, took my Activity Week trauma and trampled all over it.
My fussiness is aided and abetted by marriage to a man who - whilst much more daring than me in the foods he’ll eat - shares a particular loathing of certain things. We bonded over the pointlessness of celery (clearly we didn’t but how romantic does that sound, not!) Both of us believe that sweet potato and parsnips can get in the bin. I dislike them mostly because they masquerade as proper carbs and seemingly revel in hoodwinking poor unsuspecting carb-lovers. Oooh look, one roast potato left, I’ll have that to mop up the last of this gravy and then, bam, first bite and it reveals itself as a craftily cut fucking disgusting parsnip (I did warn you there would be random profanity). The horror! And as for sweet potato fries, honestly. Just eat the fries, the regular ones made from regular potatoes, and stop with the orange nonsense. I will allow my very lovely friend K, a bit of slack here because she’s had to put up with me ribbing her for years about her dislike of potatoes, in every form. I know, makes my weird fussiness look almost normal!
Don’t get me wrong, I really love food. There’s nothing I enjoy more than hitting a breakfast buffet hard; tucking into a perfect roast chicken Sunday lunch; pulling something I batch-cooked from the freezer and letting someone else reheat it so I can thank them for ‘making’ my dinner; putting my Instant Pot through its paces so I can fill said freezer with neatly labelled meals. But I’ll never reach for anything remotely ‘unusual’, preferring the comfort of things I’ve eaten for years and maybe that’s it. Food might not be my love language (that’s a story for another day) but it is my comfort blanket. Eating food I love whilst discussing with people I love what we’re going to eat for our next meal is one of my favourite things to do and I don’t take the privilege of being able to do that lightly.
“The only thing I like better than talking about food is eating.”
John Walters