note: with apologies to Pink Floyd, @ChrxstopherHall, Liam Williams, George Carlin, and the Mandatory Redistribution Party podcast.
eat free or die frying
Diners!
Put down your forks, knives, spoons, and any other cutleries you may feast with, and heed these words.
You don’t have to eat the way you do, or the way others tell you to.
I hereby launch an attack on eating etiquette, a disciplining of food consumption habits by bourgeois tastes that must be sliced and diced and mashed underfoot.
Please note that this essay offers no instruction on what you ought to eat: of course you should follow the best scientific wisdom on the issue of nutrition. This is about how to eat, and I — unlike your peers — will never tell you how you eat is wrong if it makes no difference as to how you excrete.
“I’m a reasonable, tolerant person,” you might protest, “it is all the same to me too”. Well, I can assure you that my culinary experiences have only ever proven otherwise. Let me explain.
When I was just a little boy, I asked my mother what should I eat, and she said:
If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat?
… or words to that effect. It was a long time ago.
I assumed that it was a child’s duty to follow the laws of adult behaviour because I had not yet earnt my rightful place at the table. I had not sourced and purchased the food on my plate, therefore I’d do as I was told. It was for that same reason that I had to protect my clothes from spillage with a napkin, remove my elbows from the table, hold my fork in my left hand and my knife in my right, ask for condiments situated away from me instead of grasping for them, etc etc, and I did this all on the implicit proviso that once I became an adult, I would assume responsibility for myself and no longer be bound by others’ rules.
Lo and behold, I perform none of these rituals now, unless I wish to. And I haven’t suffered for it once. But you wouldn’t know it from the grief I receive for my food choices nowadays. Why is this? Let me posit a conjecture.
For centuries, when humankind struggled with the very real life and death matter of food scarcity, the issue of eating etiquette was only a problem for those wealthy enough to not have to worry about where their next meal came from. In other words, they had nothing better to do at the dining table where they took their regular mealtimes for granted, so they decided to inject an unwelcome element of bouji supremacy to proceedings by engaging in the false pursuit of sophistication through the abominable concept of table manners. It stands today as a negative consequence of a genuine advancement in the human condition, that is, we have hurdled the Malthusian barrier of food production and now live in abundance — distribution is another matter — but somehow we have retained many of the pointless social and moral codes of eating. Progress can have its downsides after all.
And so, with every meal, we continue to give credence to a useless distinction, best uttered by the culinary matriarch of England’s Victorian era, Mrs Beeton: ‘Creatures of the inferior races eat and drink; man only dines’.1
Worse still, as some eaters wish to distinguish themselves as superior to their peers at the act of putting food in their mouths, so others wish to believe they cater a ‘better sort of food’ for those very mouths.
A privileged few who call themselves ‘chefs’ leverage their Michelin-starred opinions in order to dictate from their lofty ivory kitchen worktops what constitutes ‘good taste’. And a few more — ‘foodies’ — assume the role of apostles to the chefs’ doctrine, amplifying their idols’ assertions as though they were decrees or immutable laws of cooking, only revealed by scientific inquiry.
And since the days of Mrs Beeton, the operation has become ever slicker. Whole industries have developed in order to condition us to eat food at certain times of the day, week, month or even year. Try having a Brussels sprout or mince pie outside of Christmas, or strawberries and cream outside of Wimbledon tennis court season, and see what judgements befall you. Hot cross buns outside of Easter? Sacrilegious (teacakes, however, raise not an eyebrow)!
Those are merely special occasions though: what about one’s daily habits? Take breakfast; what is it, but the first meal of the day? Why, then, does it matter whether it is consumed in the am or the pm, Kellogg’s? Because that regularity guarantees its consumption, and by extension, its consistent and continual demand! This is understandably a good thing for those who crave a daily morning routine. But you’d best not tell anyone if you want to have a bowl of cereal after dark, because that is just rude and odd! And while we are at it, why do we pour the milk after the cornflakes? Why not before? Why must it be milk? What’s wrong with orange juice? Or fizzy pop? Or water? Who appointed the food industry gatekeepers to our tastebuds?
FLAVOUR IS JUST A BOURGEOIS INDULGENCE!
In all fairness to cereal merchants, they are not the ones who cast judgement over people’s eating habits. I’ve seen the most liberal-minded folks become tyrants, issuing their edicts of false refinements: ‘You can’t mix chocolate with cheese! You can’t put grapes on a pizza! Honey doesn’t go on this — it’s savoury! Are you really gonna put pepper on that? And raisins? That can never work!’ And for what?
At what point does all this stuff just break down and become just a lot of stupid s— that somebody made up?
Who is to tell you, a fully grown adult, how to eat any more than how to dress, how to talk, how to breathe!?
If you feel like eating all (three) courses of a meal at the same time, do it.
If you wish to eat your Kit Kat sideways, do it! Hell, why not stick some raisins on it and dip it in salsa sauce too?
Ever thought of taking your tea differently? Do it!
Is it not the joyful abandon of experimentation that allows us to discover new combinations of flavours?
We have laboured ceaselessly to reach the point where we can eat what we like. Now we must strive for the freedom to eat how we like. So let’s put an end to the arbitrary rules and stifling scientism governing our culinary desires, and free ourselves of the expectations of others!
Cast off the customs and mores restricting your eating habits. Satisfy yourself, how you please. Do not force feed yourself lies about how you ought to eat. Some people do not have that luxury. But we who do, lack the courage to demand it as a right.
To paraphrase both Marie Antoinette and Burger King — ‘Let them have cake, I say! Have it your way.’
eat free or die frying.png
1 Mrs Beeton’s book Household Management, 1861 https://www.exclassics.com/beeton/beetcont.htm
‘CHAPTER XL DINNERS AND DINING’