Thinking about food (as usual...)

Cooking is easy. There’s no great skill involved in reading a recipe, buying the ingredients and following the dot-to-dot instructions that have been laid out for you by someone who’s done it a thousand times already - as long as you choose Delia Smith over Heston Blumenthal, anybody can be a Jamie Oliver. What’s not easy, though, is owning up to the real reason behind such an activity. I believe that there’s more psychology going on in the kitchen then there is in any other room in the house; the bedroom may be a minefield of Freud-related anecdotal evidence, but when it comes to what we voluntarily offer to put in other people’s mouths at the dining room table, a sausage is no longer just a sausage.

Cooking for six people, in your own home, involves a lot of work. But I’m not ashamed to admit that, for me, it’s one heck of a power trip - a reliable way of ‘buying’ trust, limelight, gratitude and even a kind of love. For some, having a stovetop full of pots to fuss over is a way of overcoming shyness; for others, the dinner party is a chance to show off how much they can afford to spend. But there’s really no shame in admitting any of this. Rather than swim against the invisible tides that carry us back to the kitchen, identifying your personal reasons for throwing yourself headlong into the world of food (and millions of us do it, whether via magazines, books and TV shows, or by regularly cooking up a storm at home) can ultimately only make you an even better foodie; after all, all the best chefs are slightly psychotic.

But while most men are happy to scoff whatever is put in front of them, many women go through a whole gamut of emotions, considerations and judgment calls before they raise fork to mouth. Take ‘first date food’: pasta, for example, is a no-no-no – there’s no room for instant bloat in a size 10 LBD, slippery strands of spaghetti play havoc with lipgloss and the, erm, ‘wind’ potential is way too risky to gamble with. Meanwhile, seafood is too salacious, Tex-Mex is common and curry is downright blokeish. Anything French, though, makes us look sophisticated, and salad is a safe all-rounder; we’ll go home starving, but at least we’ll have looked all delicate and pretty while gazing into your eyes. But what do we go home to? Chocolate - which fluctuates between being a girl’s best friend or a potential WMD. Advertisers are well aware of this: consider the bar of Galaxy stashed in an underwear drawer, the woman who has to flash her underwear to co-workers because the calorie count in a bag of Maltesers ‘isn’t naughty enough’ or the iconographic, phallic imagery that promotes a Cadbury’s Flake and tell me that women and chocolate have a healthy relationship?

Such complicated psychology gets even trickier when it comes to shopping. I know women who carry pristine Waitrose carrier bags folded up in their handbags when heading off to shop at Lidl, burn ready meal packets rather than put them out in the Green Box for all the road to see and decant Nescafe into an ancient FairTrade-labelled jar before their friends drop in for coffee. In Girl World, it seems, You Are What You’re Seen To Eat. In my world, beef masala ravioli with a side of chicken wings and a hot chocolate sauce maketh the woman.