Easy on the prawns, and stop piling your plate at ‘boo-fays’

Have you noticed that a buffet is about the best place in the world to realise that the human race is still primitive and our claim to being civilised rudely wrestled to the ground. The stranglehold on food and the way it is taken would make that wrestler weep in dismay.

This is just the sort of observation that not only gets you into trouble but also earns you the undying wrath of people who hear you or, if you write to pay your bills, read you and then nod their heads in screaming disagreement and say to themselves, ‘Oh but I am not like that; this guy exaggerates.’

Writing such stuff is easier in that you can get away with it but if you are the sort of person who lives dangerously and tends to voice his opinion that can be truly asking for it.

So, I am at this dinner for the wealthy having been invited largely by default in that the hostess once in an idle moment liked an article of mine and has decided she is a fan (very mini) and there is food for the army, the country and Brexit to boot. That’s the thing with buffets (actually affectedly pronounced buff-its… ha, got you there. For a moment you felt so intellectually superior, migoodness he cannot pronounce it, only kidding, not that much of a peasant, I can say boo-fay with the best of them).

Anyway, it is laid. Like an egg, they lay buffets and therefore there is a scramble for it like these fat cats haven’t eaten in weeks and since the table stretches to the horizon and there are live stations to add to the grand generosity on display, people do what is de rigueur. They pile up their plates with bits of this and slices of that and the stack gets higher and there is no which way they will get through it all but wasting food is a symbol of affluence and the more you leave, the more you have arrived in the rarefied atmosphere of the golden-heeled.

Now, you can write about it and get away with it but if you are the indiscreet sort who thunders in verbally because this leftover cascade of half tried food offends your sensibilities and mostly because you are an idiot trying to reform the world and this voice within suddenly goes in amplify mode and you hear yourself tell this semi stranger hey, there is food on your plate, a lot of it still there, would you like to finish it. There is this frigid jell in the room and the silence slaps about the walls like a frenzied squash ball and the lady looks at you with molten loathing but now that you have opened your big mouth you might as well go for broke.

If you weren’t that hungry, why did you take it? The loathing changes into red hot rage and the others sneer as I rabbit on about it is unbelievable, isn’t it, that you’d take three chicken legs when you weren’t going to eat that, and look, under the unmade bed of rice are three jumbo tempura prawns albeit one with teeth bites, peekaboo.

And now that I have everyone’s undivided attention and half of them are wishing they could throttle me, I say just think of it in philosophical terms, there in a sun-kissed sea, mama and papa prawn are frolicking as prawns are wont to do with their little one among 15,000, when this horrible grey slimy net comes swooping from a trawler and captures them and whisks them away to a factory and before you know it they are being shelled and de-veined by assembly lined workers wearing plastic gloves and swearing under their breath as they toil that this was not their height of ambition to be cleaning prawns but bills have to be paid right, so here we go and now the prawns are in the fish market and then bought for this party at a massive mark-up price and when you do not eat them, the whole ecological-social equation is shattered.

What if everyone left three Jumbo prawns in their plates, think of the repercussions not just to the prawn farmers and fishermen but the cleaners and packers because the word would go out that prawns are not eaten but used as decorations and the prices would crash and these three prawns on your plate could have been playing hide and seek with Nemo and the little princess, there you see her, standing there besides…

And someone says, are you sure you are a journalist, you are a bit odd. Bit odd, says another, come on, this guy is fully nuts. You see, that’s the hassle when you get to my age, you don’t want to make new friends and do that Dale Carnegie thing of influencing people and you don’t care what they think of you. But at the same time you get this burgeoning desire to support uneaten prawns and chicken drumsticks and half a steak because if you do not fight for them, who will?

There see, I have a point especially when half the leavers either slurp or slop, gurgle or mash or make the most outrageous and squishy noises.

Now, I don’t expect anyone to hold a pinkie in the air while having tea or scoop soup silently front to back which is an affectation but when I see Mum and Dad eating badly, then the kids with them are going to carry on the tradition. They snatch at the main plates, they chew with their mouths like an ad for Jaws, they tear the bread like tigers on the prowl, they drip stuff down the spoon, that is it, we snatch, we grab, we do not even care who is looking.

Come to think of it, maybe the prawns are better off on that plate.