In the 1970s Christmas kids' television was special not for the content, but the mere fact that for once we had daytime viewing. Terrible Randolph Scott westerns enjoyed because they were there. Maybe it will be the same with food during this period of austerity. If awareness of value reduces food wastage all the better.
Christmas for too many of us had over the last 20 or 30 years become a time of gross over-indulgence. Familiarity breeding contempt and all that, we valued the surfeit - big turkey or goose, huge ham, tins of chocolates and biscuits, massive Stiltons - less than one imagines a wartime cook valued a pound of sausages.
I have only had one brief flirtation with poverty I'm happy to say, a year as a grantless post-graduate student when I counted every previously earned penny, and parental subs, to get me through the course. That was when my lifelong love began for bacon offcuts and their endless possibilties, when potatoes were the core of many meals, and barely a crust was thrown away. What I learned then is still part of my culinary psyche.
It may be that with changes in global economic balance Britain and Europe never return to the carefree prosperity of the 90s. In which case perhaps we will learn to enjoy what we have all the more, sententious though it is to say so. I'm sure my parents enjoyed the fleeting pleasure of their seasonal indulgences - a bottle of sherry in the house and wine with Christmas dinner - far more than someone shifting more than that every day for a week or so of festivities. Is it too much to hope that governments learn to cope in similar fashion? That wastage on unfeasibly complex IT projects that inevitably fail will end? That they won't order aircraftless aircraft carriers? If they can learn - a huge if - we won't all be as badly off as we had feared.
No comments:
Post a Comment