Amuse bouche... Festival Freak

‘Ooh, look,” said Jess, “there’s that Korean van. I hoped they’d be here. I’ve wanted to try their tacos for ages.” Lisa’s heart sank. “What’s a Korean taco?” Lisa asked, trying to sound positive.

“I’m not 100pc sure, but I suppose there’s kimchi involved,” said Jess. “I mean, like, what’s Korean food without kimchi?”

“Yeah,” said Lisa, with a hollow laugh.

Lisa wasn’t certain what kimchi was, exactly. It wasn’t that she lived under a rock or anything. Like, she’d heard of it and she knew it was fermented, but that was as far as she went.

Even the word fermented made Lisa feel sick.

When did everyone get so weird about food? Like, only five or six years ago, when they were still in school, everyone ate like Lisa. In sixth year, when they were allowed to go down the main street and buy their own lunch, absolutely everyone ate the same thing. Crisp baguettes. Sometimes with a bag of crisps on the side.

Then, in college, it all changed. Lisa was suddenly some sort of picky-eater outsider. Everyone was eliminating normal stuff like bread and butter and, well, crisps, and including freaky food like ancient grains and avocados with everything and fecking kimchi.

Lisa’s mother liked to go on about how Lisa had been a great eater when she was very small. She’d had a Brazilian minder who fed her all sorts; spicy and everything. And Lisa had hoovered it up.

Lisa’s mum liked this particular narrative, the what-ever-happened-to-Lisa narrative, but always without mentioning that she was a woeful cook herself. Lisa’s mother kept jars of sauce in business, and put Lisa off veg for life by boiling every one of them to within an inch of its life. Lisa imagined that kimchi tasted much like her mother’s celery and cabbage melange.

Festivals, much as Lisa liked her music, were turning into a real problem. The bloody food vans seemed to matter as much to her friends as the music. The weirder the better, hence Korean tacos, or Mexican sushi, or — and she’d even tried this one — a duck spice bag.

When did everything get so complicated? When did Lisa become so uncool?

Lisa was reaching the point where she was going to have to admit that, fundamentally, she liked festival food that was beige, ideally both breadcrumbed and between pieces of something bready.

And a can of Coke. Full-fat. If anyone offered her another kombucha, she was going to be sick. Like, literally.